Shiney’s case actually began in Chandrapur

The Shiney Ahuja case has strewn out the dilemmas that all decent Mumbaikars try to dull with eager toil in corporate concentration camps, and with the analgesic leisure offered by India’s party paradise.

The dilemma is whether to accept the idea that Mumbai, despite its shiny self-image, is a dark hole of terror and subjugation for people who do not have power or its bedfellow, money.

There is also the question of whether to tolerate the media’s insatiable appetite for the titbits of shame, treachery and pathos that the case is producing daily. Indeed, many TV channels seem to have assigned special correspondents to the case; I can almost hear the anchors say, “Let us now go to our Chief Unsavoury Matters Editor….”

Let’s face it: people love to see the rich and the famous squirm. Take the Sheetal Mafatlal case. The media accorded unlimited footage, not because people were fascinated by the intricacies of gemology and the arcane fine print of customs rules, but because they relished the idea that even the rich could be shoved into the lockup if they ravished the law.

In India, the laws for dealing with those accused of rape have been spurred by a reaction set off by a shameful episode in which we failed to deliver justice to a
rape victim.

Take the 1972 case in which the Supreme Court exonerated two policemen charged with raping Mathura, a 16-year-old tribal girl inside the Desai Ganj police station in Chandrapur, in our very own Maharashtra. Earlier, another court had observed that the act of the policemen couldn’t be declared as rape because the victim was “habituated to sexual intercourse.” The apex court issued an acquittal on the grounds that the teenager had raised no alarm and that there were no marks of injury on her body.

The tsunami of outrage that followed was both justifiable and commendable. The laws changed. Today, in the words of the judiciary, the victim’s statement is considered to be the ‘gospel truth’.

Here, I quote a DNA report from 2006: “A woman is raped every half-an-hour in India, while one is killed every 75 minutes.” Given the despicable record, nobody should grudge the protection that is granted to the victims.

But in the same breath, let’s remember we have an equally appalling record on a related front: delivery of fair and swift justice. So, let’s not try Shiney Ahuja ourselves. Let the media not play detectives and pretend to be fair by offering unsavoury nuggets about both the parties. Instead, it must push for fast-track courts to try all rape cases.

Not that India is alien to fast-track trials. In 2005, a Jaipur autowallah was sentenced to jail term within 36 hours of being charged with molesting a foreign tourist. Then, an Orissa IPS officer’s son, accused of raping a German tourist in Alwar, was similarly tried by a fast-track court.

Now, with the Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan agreeing to try the Shiney Ahuja case in a fast-track court too, one can only wish that it be institutionalised in the future for all cases pertaining to rape charges. Predators in a liberated megapolis like Mumbai need to be crippled not merely by draconian laws, but by expedient delivery of justice.