As much was evident from the muted response to the pleas for dealing harshly with the crime at a meeting of chief secretaries and directors-general of police which was called to discuss the outrage. A majority of the officials did not favour capital punishment except for those from Tamil Nadu, whose chief minister, Jayalalithaa, had earlier favoured the death penalty, and West Bengal.

The Congress, too, finally decided in favour of sentencing rapists for life without any parole in its report to the Justice J.S. Verma commission, which is considering how to stiffen the laws relating to rape. The party also rejected the idea of chemical castration which was earlier suggested.

The reason why the death penalty is generally disfavoured is, first, that it is against the prevailing international trend, which shows that 84 percent of the 188 countries which have a written constitution have abolished capital punishment. India is not among them, but the fact that it is moving in that direction can be seen from the Supreme Court’s preference for sentencing a person to death only in the “rarest of rare” cases.

The second reason is that experience has shown that not only does the death penalty fails to bring down the incidents of rape, it can lead to the criminal killing the victim to eliminate the possibility of her giving evidence.

The problem with chemical castration is that the hormonal injections have to be given at regular intervals in order to reduce the criminal’s libido, but this may not be possible in a large and densely populated country like India where it is easy to run away and hide. Besides, rape is not a crime only of sexual passion, but even more so of cruelty, sadism, misogyny, male chauvinism and so on. So, a chemically castrated person can still attack a woman for any of these reasons.

Had this sensitive issue been discussed only in terms of statistics or international norms, then it would have easier to arrive at a consensus. However, parties like the BJP and leaders like Jayalalithaa tend to use the highly emotional subject for partisan purposes. As a fascistic party, the BJP has always favoured the death penalty for rapists and Islamic terrorists to boost its credentials as a masculine outfit in contrast to bleeding heart liberals who place human rights above stern punishment and point to Western norms.

The reason why the BJP was insisting on a special session of parliament was that it wanted to exploit the prevailing emotionally-charged atmosphere to corner the Congress, the Left and others who are hesitant about the death penalty. Considering that the BJP’s politics has always been driven by emotion – whether religion as during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, or xenophobia, as at the height of the terrorist outrages – it is hardly surprising that it wanted to cash in on the ghastly incident to score politically.

As a prospective member of the NDA, as her presence at Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony showed, Jayalalithaa, too, has chosen to echo the BJP’s views. But, perhaps the most outrageous of such political ploys was Raj Thackeray’s identification of the rapists as Biharis in order to bolster his campaign against the migrants from Bihar in Mumbai. Since his political fight against his cousin, Uddhav Thackeray is likely to intensity in the aftermath of Balasaheb’s death, the gang rape has given him an opportunity to rouse ill-feelings against the Biharis in Mumbai.

The Congress deserves a mild round of applause for keeping its head in the midst of such crassness. Its call for jailing a rapist till death is the best solution to a crime of agonizing brutality. Its sobriety is all more laudable when a putative Gandhian like Anna Hazare strung up an effigy of a “rapist” in his home town of Ralegan Siddhi to display his preference for public executions, a form of punishment which hasn’t been practised in the civilized world for seven decades – the last public execution having taken place in America in 1936.

After Ajmal Kasab’s hanging, too, the crusader against corruption had said that the execution should have taken place at the crossroads – chaurahe pe. Since the self-proclaimed “Gandhian” likes to flog drunkards at Ralegan Siddhi and urges his followers to slap the officials accused of corruption, his penchant for seeing a criminal twitching and turning at the end of a rope is understandable. But, what he does not seem to realize is that such scenes can have a brutalizing effect on spectators, especially children who can take to torturing kittens and puppies and even other children. (IPA Service)