When a woman is the victim of rape in this country that is usually just the beginning of her tribulations. It’s not enough that she has been violated in the worst possible way. She must, it seems, then prove her innocence. The victim has to prove her innocence? Apparently. Because, you see, if the lady has had any kind of sexual experience other than in matrimony she is, at the very least, presumed to be in pari delicto.  

Thankfully, there seems to be an awakening in some quarters. In December, the Supreme Court said “the rapist is on trial, not the accused”. That was in the context of the Punjab & Haryana High Court acquitting a rapist because - get this - the victim had already lost her virginity and on a doctor’s evidence that she was accustomed to sexual intercourse. The Supreme Court said that this could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be a ground for acquittal.

But that it should even be considered as a ground is surely a sign of a truly deep-rooted malaise. Logic is, of course, abandoned, even defenestrated. Saying this is like saying that because you’ve once lost something, or forgot to lock the door, it’s open hunting season on your house for all burglars who must, therefore, be acquitted. That rape is probably the most heinous of all crimes against the human body because it is a violation of mind, body and spirit, because it kills a human being while leaving them alive, because, because, because … this never seems to enter the minds of people who make statements like this. And, of course, they’re all men.

Not that a mere pronouncement from the Supreme Court is going to do much, even if it’s a beginning. Check this out, from today’s Times of India:

That Bijal was forced into subjugation is clear, even though in the initial stages of the investigation, before Bijal committed suicide, senior police officials too had aired their doubts on the victim’s character and the “nature of this rape”.

What manner of beast burns a woman with cigarette butts, whips her, beats her, rapes her and then asks about her character? Consider this, about the 18-year-old who was gang-raped in a college in Goa:

Local prejudice is playing a part. ??The scary part is that the locals are justifying the rape, saying she has loose morals. After all, she smokes,?? says Alberina Almeida, an advocate who heads a women?s organisation called Bailancho Saad …

Excuse me? What have character or morals got to do with anything? By this logic, it must be all right to rape a prostitute because she is, after all, a whore (even if one says commercial sex worker nowadays) and therefore, by definition according to these rape-theorists, is significantly short-changed in the character and moral department.

But no. In this eminently civilized world, we even have rape by jury: A Pakistani panchayat ordered four men, including one of the jurists, to rape an 18-year- old girl. Why? Because, believe it or not, her brother had an affair with a woman of a “higher tribe”.

To the judges of the Supreme Court one can only say thank you for trying to reverse the most horrendous social wrong. But we have a long way to go still: it’s one thing for these pronouncements ex cathedra. It’s quite another for the ordinary citizen to understand that the real crime is in refusing to see your fellow citizen as a human being. And it wasn’t all that long ago, either, that a judge of the Supreme Court itself, dealing with a rape case, wrote this astounding passage:

A philanderer of 22, appellant Phul Singh, overpowered by sex stress in excess, hoisted himself into his cousin?s house next door, and in broad daylight, overpowered the temptingly lonely prosecutrix of twenty- four, Pushpa, raped her in hurried heat and made an urgent exit having fulfilled his erotic sortie.

Sex stress? Hurried heat? Urgent exit? Temptingly lonely prosecutrix? Erotic sortie? What more need be said? And here the court reduced the sentence of four years (after upholding the conviction) because the man was ‘hypersexed’, wasn’t a recidivist, could be rehabilitated and, best of all, had a ‘wife and a farm to look after’ - and what does that tell us about the exact positioning of a wife in the general scheme of things?

Just how exactly one is to ‘rehabilitate’ a convicted rapist is not, of course, known. More permanent solutions leap to mind. But we are a civilized world and we don’t do that kind of thing.