Inaction is worse than delayed action and busts holes in CM Yogi Adityanath’s claims of deterrent activity
Soon after the brutal Hathras gang rape, which was nothing but a manifestation of caste vengeance, Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had sought to overturn his State’s dismal reputation on crimes against women as a political power tool. He had publicly warned that “those harming mothers and daughters would get such punishment that it would set an example for the future”. Sadly, the only example that UP continues to set is in its series of rape-murders, political protectionism of the perpetrators, tardy and lax police investigation and a societal acceptance of excesses as unfortunate and unavoidable. It continues to legitimise the offenders by administrative inaction. What else explains the bestiality in Badaun within months of Hathras? What explains the lack of outrage over the death of an aanganwadi worker who went to a temple and where a mahant and his henchmen subjected her to indignity and torture like the 2012 Nirbhaya case, brutalising her with iron rods? What sense does it make to protect the honour of women by waging a war against inter-faith marriages when the authorities can’t guarantee their basic safety from men they would rather not touch, given their political stock and sensitivities? Predictably, there has been the tokenism of justice being dispensed by the suspension of an SHO and arrest of two of the three accused. But that doesn’t quite make up for the police lapse in registering a missing person’s complaint despite the woman’s family running from pillar to post to be heard. That predictability of punishing the police post facto is worse than a cover-up. And a similar laxity in the Badaun case shows why no lessons have been learnt from the rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Hathras. When nobody questions the police or even holds it to account for forcibly cremating the girl’s body, denying her parents and family that right and dignity, and ostensibly wishing away the taint on her upper caste rapists, then what does one expect? When the police, as an unabashed tool of State power, seemingly condones the crime by not following the rule of law and processes as it is mandated to do, when it abandons the victimised; there is legal sanction of a lopsided thinking that emboldens and encourages offenders.
So a Chief Minister, who has been thriving on casteist and communal politics just like his predecessors, only ends up mimicking an administrative drill routinised by successive regimes: A drill that privileges their casteist constituencies at the expense of others and mocks all claims of ushering in a rule of law. Hence the repetitive excesses on Dalits, women and minorities continue to spiral in UP, making it the worst State in the country for anybody vulnerable. As it is, the Centre had confirmed in the Lok Sabha in 2019 that UP accounted for 43 per cent of the total cases registered for harassment against minorities and Dalits. It also tops the rape chart and, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, reported the most cases of violence against women in 2019. The best that the UP Police has done, and continues to do, is to impose Section 144 to can every trouble, debate and dissent, like it did by stopping the Opposition leaders from reaching Hathras to meet the girl’s family and booking journalists who were on a fact-finding mission, accusing them of intending to foment unrest. UP’s non-action has many precedents, the most recent being the Unnao rape case in which a girl was gangraped in June 2017 but her rapist, BJP legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was convicted only in December 2019. Or, take the recent encounter killing of underworld don Vikas Dubey that snuffed out all information we could have had on the politico-criminal nexus in the State. Sadly, the UP Police, which at one time had been a professional force, now seems co-opted by the executive. Despite all the recommendations on police reforms and the Supreme Court’s directive to set up a police complaint authority at the State and district levels, compliance is a far cry.
