Imagine a 23-year-old girl assaulted by six men, stripped and dumped by the roadside after being raped in a moving bus. The occurrence of every fresh event always makes the previous one appear pale in comparison. Rapes and physical assaults are now becoming no different from a necessary weather report without which our news bulletins sound incomplete. This blood-freezing tragedy has evoked a wide-spread anger and outrage in New Delhi. All are  unanimous in their demand. Punish criminals, punish them soon and punish them publicly. The heat of the event is not letting it fade away so fast, but how long? A few days more and the details will be forgotten with the same question staring all in the face. Why criminals are let off.

Why despite all protests and demands such tragedies strike us? What makes crime graph go so alarmingly high in our society? It's not rape only, but crimes of other nature and scale happen with an all-time-high rampancy. Somewhere in the name of restoring public order, state forces resort to naked terror. Somewhere civilians hold their fellow civilians to ransom. Somewhere stronger overpower weaker. What is violated everywhere is the law of justice. And what is required everywhere is to bring violators to justice. But that unfortunately doesn't happen on the ground.
Crime is an inevitability. How civilized a society, crimes do exist and will continue to be the part of a collective social behaviour. What is more worrying than the perpetration of the crime itself is the immunity criminals enjoy. Allowing such savages to be mob-lynched may throw the whole system out of control and make anarchy replace the law of the land, but when criminals go unpunished public anger becomes fiercer than ever. The punishment has got to be proportionate to the magnitude of the crime. Immediate punishment makes a criminal meet his nemesis. But more than that, it deters other potential criminals from executing their intent. Crimes are reported with an alarming frequencies, but punishments are unheard of. Murder and rape are not the ordinary acts of misdemeanor. Harsher the crime, stronger has to be the punishment. Mercy does have a role, but who deserves mercy more. The one who deliberately snatches from the other his or her right to live or the one who stands ravaged at the hands of a criminal. The dispensers of justice face this painful question whenever we come across crimes of such stark nature.

Lastupdate on : Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 IST