Justice League

In a country where 90 rapes are reported every day and extrajudicial killings rarely shock people, what’s the message in society celebrating the gunning down of the Hyderabad rape suspects?

- Puneet Nicholas Yadav

The Supreme Court acquitted a rape convict in March this year, ruling that the charge against him was fabricated. Ganga Prasad Mahto had been sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment by a local court in Bihar’s Samastipur district in 1998, and the Patna High Court had upheld the verdict in January 2014. On December 15, 1997, a woman in Samastipur had accused Mahto of barging into her house the previous night and raping her at gunpoint.

While acquitting Mahto, the Supreme Court bench of Justices A.M. Sapre and Dinesh Maheshwari pointed out that the police had not even bothered to have the rape complainant medically examined, and that the subordinate courts had not taken into account sev­eral similar false complaints made by the woman against other men in the past. After spending 20 years branded as a rapist, including nearly a decade in jail against his sentence of seven years, Mahto is now an innocent man.

Now, consider an alternative reality. The woman accuses Mahto of rape and he is arrested. There is a public outcry for justice; the country’s lawmakers join in and some demand that the rapist should be lynched. The police take him to the woman’s house to “reconstruct the crime scene”. He “attempts to escape, forcing the police to open fire”. Mahto is shot dead. The crime is avenged. The cops celebrate and the public is euphoric. There is no further need to investigate whether he was guilty, or if his alleged attempt to escape was driven by fear of being framed for a crime he did not commit.