A critique of the Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill

(Tehelka
Mar 17 , 2007)

RIOT BILL

Will it be any use if executive responsibility still can’t be fixed?
Sankarshan Thakur

Illustrations: Anand Naorem

Perhaps a good test for any piece of legislation is how its targeted beneficiaries see it. The Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill, which returns to the Lok Sabha after being deliberated by a standing committee of Parliament, fails that test rather dramatically. Most civil society groups representing minorities and women stand opposed to the Bill in its current form and have been lobbying hard to scuttle it. Why on earth? Has this Bill not been drafted in order that they can be more secure? Is this not the government’s way of ensuring there isn’t a repeat of Gujarat 2002? Well, no, they think not. On the contrary, most citizens groups engaged on the ground in communally fractured areas believe the Bill will be counterproductive to its intended purposes. Worse, they believe it will strengthen the hands of the State and its agencies in a way that can potentially be used to harass victims of communal violence.

Considering the essential reasons for the Bill were provided by the Gujarat carnage, the concerns being voiced need to heard and addressed. There is, for instance, no provision in the draft Bill that makes the executive accountable for the outbreak of mass violence. Thousands get killed, more thousands are left injured and homeless, nobody gets punished. At least nobody among those whose job it is to protect the lives and property of citizens. Gujarat 2002 was as close as you can get in a democracy to state-sponsored mayhem and murder. And if a Bill intended to prevent a repeat does not ensure that the executive — political and police — is held responsible for acts of omission and commission, surely it is a bit lost on its purposes. Another significant hole in the Bill appears to be its failure to address crimes against women, which happened large-scale during the Gujarat frenzy. How do you tackle mass rape and molestation? Who’s responsible? Surely the answer cannot be ‘nobody’. And how are the responsible to be booked? Even under the existing rape law, ravaging by iron rods and knives does not qualify as rape and is, therefore, not punishable. Our rape law is antiquated and obtuse, this could have been an occasion for corrections. But even a standing committee of Parliament headed by a woman (Sushma Swaraj of the BJP) has not thought it fit to devote time and attention to it. On the face of it, the nation and those given responsible to maintain order are equipped with enough provisions of law to ensure there are enough deterrents to any manner of lawbreaking. The Bill in question was called for because there was a general sense a miscarriage like Gujarat could not be allowed to happen again; that being the case, the drafting committee should have done a better job ensuring they were going to enshrine genuine protections.