In India, the ?two nations? theory is perhaps most starkly applicable to children. There is the poor child and the rich child, the rural child and the urban child, the female child and the male child, the ?good? child and the ?bad? child. To these, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 adds its own categories ? children in need of care and protection, and juveniles in conflict with the law. The act invokes a carefully divided world: ?children? who deserve ?care and protection?, and ?juveniles? who deserve something sterner, ?justice?. And, these children and juveniles could be up to 18 years old. So the range of offences, particularly sexual ones, that juveniles (as opposed to children) can commit immediately becomes rather disturbing. The transgressions of a poor and hungry five-year-old streetchild and of a seventeen-year-old boy from an elite school gone amok with his state-of-the-art mobile phone are bound to be hugely different, but are judged and ?corrected? within the same infrastructure of the state?s ?care?. In West Bengal, it seems that affluent children in the cities tend to commit rapes and murders, while rural children are convicted for pettier crimes. Also, there has been an alarming increase in the number of juvenile offenders committing rape in the cities.

Two things must be remembered here. First, most crimes committed by children in cities, suburbs as well as villages are instigated by adults, in whose hands even older children are radically disempowered. Networks of crime exploit both rich and poor children, and what the state is looking at here might be a rise in such webs of instigation and exploitation. Second, the West Bengal government is one of the worst offenders against humanity in the kind of hellish remand and observations ?homes? it maintains. The Liluah, Barasat and Dhrubashram homes, from which children flee every day, are perhaps the most inhuman institutions being run by the government with full knowledge of what they are doing to children. The squalor, brutality, overcrowding and mismanagement in these homes are truly some of the worst crimes that a state could commit against some of its most vulnerable subjects. No amount of statistics-keeping, sensitizing and legal reform can atone for what the government is being allowed to get away with in these infernal prison-houses, which the reformed Juvenile Justice Act calls ?places of safety? and ?homes?.