It is ridiculously astonishing that our justice system works immediately against a cartoonist's satirical portrayal of corruption in the country, takes action ever faster against mere a comment on social networking site about a dead political leader but when it comes to heinous crimes like rape ( which is a crime of greater magnitude for anybody who is not insane), it fails to punish the culprit in number of cases. Now when the whole country is outraged over the Delhi gang rape case, a mother of another rape victim explained in a news channel interview about how the system failed to deliver justice to her daughter.

Following are the excerpts from the interview:

Interviewer: Tell us what were the troubles you went through to get the conviction?

Mother of rape victim: My daughter wanted to die. She asked me to throw acid on her and end her life. I said if you die, I will die too and my other daughter would've followed. She lived only for my sake. I worked for four years to get the conviction. I put in all the money, gold and everything into this. I just wanted justice for my daughter. I was unlucky and justice was not done.

Interviewer: Did you get any help from the system?

Mother of rape victim: In the beginning, police helped a lot. I thank them. They caught the accused in a very short span of time. Doctors were helpful; they said they were with us. Later, I don't know if the accused approached them or what happened. I know that the evidence was tampered with. I saw the medical report on my first day in court. I'm educated and I saw the MLC. When I saw it, I said to myself that the things that I can see here why are they not in the reports?

This shocking testimony of the rape victim's mother is bound to make us think that in terms of punishing the criminals who commits crimes like rape, how impotent our justice system has been. On a related note another shocking truth is our national capital Delhi is justifying it’s infamous tag as being the rape capital of India as there have been more rapes committed there than any other city of the country. In fact the number of rapes those were reported from Delhi (572) is more than the combined total of all other major cities like Mumbai (221), Kolkata (46), Chennai (76), Bangalore (97), and Hyderabad (59). It is worth mentioning that north-east India has the lowest number of rape cases with Sikkim being at the bottom of the list with only 16 cases.

(With inputs)

(AW-Jyotishman)