[At one hearing, the head of the
Supreme Court asked a 23-year-old accused of raping a minor whether he would
marry his victim, who is now an adult.]
By Shalini Venugopal
Bhagat and Hari
Kumar
Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde, the
head of India’s Supreme Court, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a
minor whether he would marry his victim, who is now an adult.
The victim, who under Indian law
can’t be identified, has accused the man, a distant relative and a civil
servant with the Maharashtra State government, of repeatedly stalking and
raping her starting when she was 16.
The judge’s comments provoked new
demands that people in power, and particularly men, do more to improve how
women and girls are treated in India.
A spate
of shocking assaults in recent years has galvanized
women’s groups and other activists to change long-held attitudes
toward sexual violence.
Justice for victims is rare. Of the
tens of thousands of rape cases reported annually in India, only a handful
result in prosecutions, figures from the National Crime Records Bureau show.
Activists say the true scope of the problem is far worse, as many cases are
never reported because of the stigma.
On Monday, Justice Bobde was
hearing a petition filed by the accused man in the statutory rape case for
relief from a lower court’s jail order.
“Will you marry her?” Justice Bobde
asked, according to Indian media reports.
“You should have thought before
seducing and raping the young girl,” he added. “We are not forcing you to marry.
Let us know if you will.”
Activists said they were “appalled
and outraged.”
“Your proposal of marriage as an
amicable solution to settle the case of rape of a minor girl is worse than
atrocious and insensitive for it deeply erodes the right of victims to seek
justice,” the open letter published Tuesday said.
Justice Bobde has not responded.
Sex with minors is a crime in India
under the Protection of Children Against Sexual Offenses Act of 2012. Mandatory
sentences range from 10 years in jail up to life imprisonment, and bail is
rarely granted.
According to court documents, the
families reached an agreement that the man would marry the girl when she turned
18. The man later reneged on his promise and married someone else. In 2019,
when the family filed a case against the man, a district court granted him
anticipatory bail.
However, the Bombay High Court
quashed that order, writing a scathing critique of the lower court.
“Such an approach is a clear
indication that the learned judge utterly lacks competence,” the court wrote.
The accused man then approached the
Supreme Court. Justice Bobde and the other two members of the bench granted him
a four-week protection from arrest.
More than 4,000 women signed the
letter demanding the chief justice’s resignation, including Anuradha Banerji,
an activist with the women’s rights group Saheli.
“When the chief justice of India
makes these archaic and patriarchal comments it signals the deeper rot in both
the judicial system as well as in the society,” Ms. Banerji said. “Millions of
young girls are going to know that their values are in marriageability and not in
their personhood.”
The victim’s lawyer declined to
comment Friday.
In a separate case, according to
the letter and media reports, Justice Bobde appeared to condone rape in the
context of a consensual relationship.
“When two people are living as
husband and wife, however brutal the husband is, can the act of sexual
intercourse between them be called rape?” Justice Bobde asked while hearing a
petition filed by a man accused of rape by a woman who had been his live-in
partner.
The furor around the judge’s
comments comes a month after another judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice
Pushpa Ganedivala, had her promotion blocked after several of her judgments in
sexual assault cases came under criticism.
Her ruling in a child abuse case that groping a minor
without skin-to-skin contact could not be termed sexual assault under the child
protection law sparked outrage. She acquitted the man, whom a lower court had
convicted of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old. After India’s attorney general
said that it set a dangerous precedent, the Supreme Court stayed the judgment.
In two separate cases, Justice
Ganedivala acquitted two other men accused of raping minors, saying that the
victims’ testimonies were unreliable.
After her rulings, a Supreme Court
panel headed by Justice Bobde reversed its decision to make her a permanent
judge of the Bombay High Court.
Hari Kumar is a reporter in the New
Delhi bureau. He joined The Times in 1997. @HariNYT
