Go to google.com or bing.com.
Begin typing the letters n-i-r-b-h-a-y-a j-u-v-e-n-i-l-e and the first match suggested by both search engines is: ‘nirbhaya juvenile name’.
Those conversant with search technology will tell you these auto-suggestions are algorithms based on what millions around the world are actually searching for in real time. In this case it indicates that they seek the identity of the teenager – he’s now 20 – who in 2012 along with 5 others on a cold December night in Delhi, gang-raped and brutalised the 23-year-old woman the media came to call Nirbhaya and threw her out of a moving bus to die.
What is likely to happen when he walks free on 20 December?
The overwhelming feeling is that a loophole in our legal system has allowed the perpetrator of a heinous crime to escape with a ‘rap on the knuckles’ while his partners in crime rot in jail with death penalties hanging over them (though later indefinitely stayed by the Supreme Court). One has committed suicide.
As if the sense of injustice over a sentence that seems horribly inadequate for a devious crime wasn’t enough, the Delhi government has recently announced a rehabilitation plan for the convict. It includes a one-time financial grant of Rs 10,000 along with a sewing machine, rental space for a tailoring shop and ancillary help to sustain his business for a period of six months.
Rehabilitation is an important part of the criminal justice system. And when it comes to juveniles, the law seeks to ensure that young people who run afoul of it may be guided by logic rather than politics, prejudice, and uninformed passion.
But for someone who virtually got away with murder and brutal rape due to a technicality — being a mere six months short of his 18th birthday, on December 16, 2012 — the focus must be on whether he will be a threat to the very society into which the state intends that he be reinstated.
He could quite simply take advantage of the law that has forbidden the media from reporting his name or disclose data on his looks and turn it around to repeat his crime. What leads us to believe that the juvenile has had a change in heart while in the correctional home?
In a recent report, the Quint quoted his counselor who claims the convict has shown “zero remorse” for his crime.
“There was no regret on his face when I first met him after he was arrested. Nor is there any today. I didn’t have to grill him to make him confess his crime. He told me in detail about his role in the crime. He told me that he convinced Nirbhaya and her friend to board the bus and later about how the crime was committed by all five of them. He also told me that before Nirbhaya boarded the bus, he had tried to convince another girl who was alone, but that failed when she hailed an auto,” he says in the report.
What has also added to the discomfiture are reports quoting the Intelligence Bureau (IB) which indicate that the convict has been radicalised while in detention.
It will thus take a massive leap of faith for a society, already feeling shortchanged by the legal system, to assume that the convict will not turn against it again given a second chance.
So a more compelling argument could be presented in favour of extending his detention. Not only would it run in line with principles of natural justice, it may present a better chance of reformation for the juvenile who is anyway scared of being released fearing public anger.
Though the present Juvenile Justice Act mandates not more than three years in a correction home, consider that had it not been for our Parliamentarians who are more busy bickering away session after session, the Juvenile Justice Bill by now would have been a reality. The Bill, currently stuck at Rajya Sabha, permits juveniles between the ages of 16-18 years to be treated as “adults” for heinous offences like rape, acid attacks and murder.
So any extension of the juvenile’s prison sentence won’t perhaps be an example of gross injustice or a mind-bendingly immoral act.
There are more reasons why the juvenile is better off staying in detention.
According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a division of the home ministry, arrests of juveniles in the age group 16-18 has escalated 60 per cent from 2003 to 2013, the highest among all three juvenile age groups. Juvenile arrests for rape increased 288 per cent over this period as compared to arrests for theft that were up 68 per cent, the data added.
It is a matter of record that organised crime networks use minors to exploit the legal loophole that exists. The The Juvenile Justice Board had in the past directed Special Juvenile Police wing of the Delhi Police to take stringent measures against adults exploiting and pushing children into criminal acts.
Releasing the juvenile would simply incentivise them.
Also, Union women and child welfare minister Maneka Gandhi has recently asked the law ministry to enact a law for mandatory registration of sex offenders who have served their punishment to allow surveillance by local police, system which is followed in many countries, including the US at both the federal and state levels.
If the move materialises, who will monitor it if the cops, incensed at the perceived injustice in watching Nirbhaya’s rapist walk away after just three light years, decide in a macho exhibition of vigilantism to ‘teach him a lesson?’ Can such an eventuality be conclusively ruled out?
Incidentally, till the writing of this report, a Twitter poll run by @firstpost on whether the convict should be released on 20 December has voted overwhelmingly in favour of one position: Keep him imprisoned for now.