Rape is a ‘mistake’ boys make, says Mulayam
So warped, twisted and regressive are the statements about women and rape that Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and his leader in Maharashtra, Abu Azmi, have made, that no amount of justification can undo the damage done. That they made these comments is shocking enough; that they are standing by those remarks is outrageous. Furtive efforts to fend off the barrage of criticism that has hit the Samajwadi Party leaders will not change the fact that Mr Yadav and Mr Azmi have been exposed for what they are — anti-women and feudal. On Thursday, Mr Yadav put up possibly the most disingenuous justification for scrapping the recently-introduced death penalty for serial rapists when he argued that the punishment is too harsh for such “mistakes” that “boys” are sure to make. For Mr Yadav, it seems, rape is some prank pulled by mischievous teens. He needs to be told that rape is not quite the equivalent of a boy tugging at a girl's hair in class; it is a heinous crime that devastates the victim and must attract harsh punishment in any civilised society. Also, Mr Yadav's efforts to queer the pitch by claiming that women often make false rape allegations against men with whom they develop differences, must be nipped in the bud. While there may have been some cases wherein the law has been abused (this is true for just about any legal provision), the fact of the matter is that the numbers pale in comparison to the innumerable instances of rape and violence against women that go unreported because of the social taboo that the victims face. By suggesting that men are victimised by women in rape cases, Mr Yadav has taken the appalling practice of victim-shaming to new lows and perpetuated the vicious cycle of patriarchy.
As for Mr Azmi, the Samajwadi Party's leader in Maharashtra, he is following closely in the footsteps of his boss. On Friday, he claimed incredulously that in rape cases, both the man (perpetrator) and the woman (victim) must be hanged. His logic behind this assertion makes no sense as he talks of rapes that happen both “with and without consent”. But overall, he seems to be toeing Mr Yadav's repulsive argument that women use rape allegations to penalise men. And that's not all. In keeping with his party's much touted ‘secular’ values, Mr Azmi has also added a doze of religion into the mix, referring to how Islamic laws do recommend the death penalty for rapists. He needs to be told that the sharia'h does not apply to criminal laws in Indian courts. Both Mr Yadav and Mr Azmi have a shameful record of sexism. While Mr Yadav had opposed the amendments to the anti-rape laws, Mr Azmi had last year chastised young women for travelling after sundown without male members of their family in accompaniment.