The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Monday, December 4, passed a bill that would let courts award death penalty to anyone found guilty of raping a girl aged 12 or even younger.
The bill — called the Dand Vidhi (Madhya Pradesh Sanshodhan) Vidheyak, 2017 — will now be sent to the Central government and the President for approval.
Once it gets their nods, it will become the law in the BJP-ruled state. And the nods may not be all that difficult to come by, because the Central government is run by the BJP-led NDA, and President Ram Nath Kovind was also the BJP candidate to the post.
If the bill indeed becomes a law, it would mean extremely strict punishment for people found guilty of raping girls aged 12 or younger.
The bill proposes a minimum of 14 years of rigorous imprisonment for any person found guilty of raping a girl aged 12 or less. The maximum punishment is death.
The minimum punishment in cases where girls aged up to 12 years are gang-raped goes up to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment.
The bill also calls for strict punishment for people found guilty of disrobing or molesting girls or sexually exploiting them in the name of marriage.
The nature of the punishment is incremental as the number of offences increases.
Many believe that the strict punishments were mulled after National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) records revealed that the most number of rapes in the country were reported from Madhya Pradesh.
What is almost certain is that the bill was mooted after the gang-rape of a 19-year-old girl — the daughter of police personnel, no less — in a busy area of Bhopal on October 31.
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was quoted by ANI as saying after the passage of the bill in the state Assembly: "People who rape 12-year-old girls are not human; they are demons. They do not have the right to live.
He added that the new bill makes even repeated stalking a non-bailable offence, with offenders facing strict punishment.
forbesno1 on December 4th, 2017 at 21:08 UTC »
Hi. Indian Law Student here. So this Bill should be pretty big news, but when I've tried to verify it by Google searching for the Act mentioned, I have not been able to find anything.
It must be noted that India already has an Act that gives the death penalty in case of rape of minors, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), one of the legislations part of the package passed by Central Parliament in 2013 on sexual offences after Nirbhaya. This is very well known package of laws. There would be no need for this Act.
Further, in the article, it says that the law will be sent to the Central Government to recieve the President's approval. That's just not how it works. State Bills go to the governor of the State in question for his assent so as to become law. There is an intricate constitutional mechanism for a governor to refer a matter to a President for his consideration, but that's in extreme cases of constitutional crisis, which this is not, and which the article doesn't reference. Only Bills passed by the Central Parliament need the assent of the President to become law, which this is not.
Finally, I've never heard of this news source, and would not hold.it credible. Based off of these facts, I'm going to call this "fake news" for now, until I can find or be shown corroboration from a credible source on this. Maybe other sources haven't picked it up yet, but something as big as this... that'd be weird if they didn't. Even the MP government website had no news of this, which is weirder.
CuthbertsRevenge on December 4th, 2017 at 16:33 UTC »
"I've won an award!! ...oh no..."
veggiesama on December 4th, 2017 at 13:48 UTC »
What's up with that CGI in the article? I'm not sure whether I'm bothered more that someone got paid to make a detailed model of a girl crying on the floor, or the fact that the floor-window is somehow showing the sky.