Shall we compose a saptapadi for rapists? ?My beloved, having violated your body, your soul and spat on your rights, I now welcome this opportunity to shorten my jail term by entering into holy matrimony with you. I promise to abuse and dishonour you, to shower you with contempt and constant reminders of the act of violence that brought us together.?
If you invited some of India’s judges to witness a marriage that began with these blasphemous vows, it is probable that they would condemn such a perversion of an institution considered sacred. It’s strange how things change in a courtroom setting.
Two years ago, a ward boy called Bhura raped a nurse in Delhi’s Shanti Mukund Hospital, so savagely that she lost an eye when she tried to fight back. This week, he offered to marry his victim in order ?to wash off her stigma and re-establish her in society?. The judge, Justice J.M. Malik, was scathing about Bhura’s proposal, observing that it had been made in order to avoid punishment and that the assailant had showed no remorse. He sentenced Bhura to life imprisonment.
But he also admitted the proposal and asked the nurse and her family to respond to it. Women’s groups in Delhi attacked him for admitting the marriage proposal in the first place, and they were right to do so.
Imagine that the case being tried concerned theft or murder rather than rape. Imagine that the thief offered to make amends by paying off the people he had robbed in return for a lighter sentence. Imagine a murderer offering to make things better by adopting the children of a family where he had killed the parents. Imagine what the response of any judge would be in these cases. Would they even admit these offers? Or would they castigate the criminal even more severely for having the temerity to try and plea-bargain his way out of such a situation?
Why should the response to rape be any different? Would Justice Malik have endorsed Bhura’s offer of marriage if the rapist had shown genuine signs of remorse? Did most of the people sitting in that courtroom accept Bhura’s contention ? that the violence he committed had somehow marked his victim for life as someone who needed to be ?re-established??
It should be an offence, punishable under the law, for a rapist to offer such contemptuous, barbaric magnanimity. We have no trouble understanding why it is repugnant for some clans to insist that the rape of one of ?their? women requires them to go and rape a woman who ?belongs to? the offending clan. We have great difficulty understanding that when a rapist has the temerity to propose marriage to his victim, what’s being butchered on the altar is the woman’s life.
How many years do we have to wait before a judge says no? No to the idea that rape can, by its nature, taint the victim in a way that robbery does not. No to the idea that you can make your victim an offer you think she can’t refuse. No to the underlying belief that you may not get away with murder, but if you arrive at the courts with a mangalsutra in your hands, you might just get away with rape.
