The other day, Chief Justice of India, Justice Altamas Kabir, was participating in a function to mark International Women’s day, organised by the Calcutta High Court Legal Services Committee and the State Legal Services Authority. Anyone who has known the CJI for some time, in a capacity divorced from his professional life, will point to his refreshing, down-to-earth candour, which is probably what led him to make the reported statement that society should be taken by “the scruff of its neck” and made to realise that “this is not the way to treat your women”. He was discussing the December rape incident in Delhi which riveted the attention of the nation and led to efforts to amend the laws on rape and the degradation of women generally in this country.
Permanent solutions needed
Justice Kabir said it was one of such “sickening” events happening almost daily all over the country, and that on the very day the newspapers were full of the Delhi event, a 10-year-old tribal girl had been gang-raped and murdered, the news being “tucked away in the inside pages”. The CJI asked plaintively: “Did she get any compensation? Did anybody bother about her?”
The point here is: how do you go about cleansing Indian society of the scourge of treating women, as the CJI said, as “an object of desire”? Society certainly has to be taken by the scruff of its neck and shown what is right and what is wrong, the limiting factor, however, being that the “rule of law” has to be maintained. As the CJI said: “If we are to live in a democracy, which is governed by the rule of law, we have to go by the law”. The important message he had for judges and judicial officers was that they would have to uphold the rule of law and that, consequently, there should be no “knee-jerk reaction” and that “permanent solutions must be carved out”.
India looks to its youth
To shift the canvas from the specific to the general, how does the nation go about ridding ailments as basic as the diseased view of the woman’s place in our society, and corruption, generally? As far as the law’s interpretation is concerned, it is the job of the judiciary; its implementation is the job of the police; that of politicians is to frame the laws with only the best interests of the nation at heart and in the mind. But what is the public perception of the different arms of the Indian State at this juncture of the republic’s history? Are people happy with the state of affairs as regards the probity of the different actors referred to above?
Is there room for improvement in the standards employed by the judiciary, the police, the executive generally, and the politicians in performing their allotted functions? If there is, who is to judge what exactly is wrong and what needs to be done to improve the existing state of affairs? Returning to the CJI’s analogy, who is to take Indian society by the scruff of its neck and carve out a “permanent solution”? A tainted hand cannot always get the best result while performing such an important job.
Certainly, the work has to be begun by the existing institutions, but the leadership role has to be performed by a section of Indian society which still remains untouched by the ills and vices engendered by power and wheeling-dealing. It is the young on whom the mantle must fall to guide our society into the right channels.