Madhya Pradesh Assembly has passed a bill with a provision awarding death sentence to those guilty of raping girls aged 12 or below
The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a bill with a provision awarding death sentence to those guilty of raping girls aged 12 or below in the state.
The bill will now be sent to the Centre which will then forward it to the President for his approval. The bill, called Dand Vidhi (Madhya Pradesh Sanshodhan) Vidheyak, 2017, will be formally ratified as law after President Ram Nath Kovind's assent.
The moves comes in the wake of a spurt in rape incidents recently. Madhya Pradesh has the highest number of rape cases registered among all states last year and even the year before that.
The state, which has the fifth highest population in the country, accounted for 4,882 rape cases out of 38,947 cases recorded across the country in 2016, as per the National Crime Record Bureau's report, released last week.
The last year's report showed that the state reported highest number of rape cases (4,391 out of 38,947 cases) in the country in 2015.
The state cabinet chaired by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had last week approved the bill recommending capital punishment for rape of girls aged 12 years or below.
The bill proposes death penalty or a minimum term of 14-year rigorous imprisonment or life imprisonment till death for raping girls aged 12 or below. For gang rape of girls aged 12 or less, minimum punishment has been increased to 20 years rigorous imprisonment.
Speaking in the Assembly on the issue, Chouhan said those who rape minor girls do not have the right to live.
“Jo log 12 saal ki masoom bachhi ka balatkaar karte hain wo manushya nahi pishach hain unhe jeene ka adhikaar nahi (The people who rape 12-year-old girls are not humans but devils. They don’t have the right to live),” Chouhan said.
The bill also has the provision for harsher punishment to those guilty of molesting, stalking and harassing women.
Repeated stalking will be a non-bailable offence and offenders will be punished, Chouhan said in the Assembly.
The Madhya Pradesh government had recently come in for criticism over recent incidents of rape in the state.
A 19-year-old UPSC aspirant was allegedly raped when she was returning home from a coaching institute on October 31 here.
After public outrage, some police officers were suspended and transferred for the delay in registering an FIR.
The NCRB data for 2015 showed that the state reported highest number of rape cases (4,391 out of 38,947 cases) in the country.
According to the NCRB data for 2014, the state reported 5,076 rape cases, which was 14 per cent of the total rape incidents reported in the country.
In 2013, 4,335 rape cases were reported in the state as against 3,425 in 2012.
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