A matter of great angst

No wonder that the majority verdict of a three-member bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday acquitting all but one accused in the Mukhtaran Mai gang-rape case has come as a rude shock to most of the women and human rights alliances. Given her epic struggle to redefine the role of women in Pakistan's suffocating society, her appeal against the Multan Bench of Lahore High Court decision to acquit all accused, except one, was keenly awaited.
Also given that of late, the Supreme Court has exhibited extraordinary activism in alleviating the sufferings of the weaker sections of the people of Pakistan, there was an expectation that all of the Mai's tormentors would get their due. But that hasn't happened, spawning widespread disappointment. How grievously hurt the feelings of the women and human rights organisations are, can be gauged from some of the statements issued by them that indeed are rather bold in expression. The apex court has even been accused of retaining "a deeply embedded bias against women in particular and women rights issues in general."
Accepted, the women and human rights bodies are rightly agitated and their furious reaction is not without a cause, but is it the court alone that has to be accused of being insensitive to the plight of women in Pakistan? The sad truth is that not only the law that should help punish the rapists is inadequate and their prosecution is poorly managed, the overall social milieu is not helpful either. On the ground, the situation is very different from what one would like to see; barring a few cosmopolitan cases in the wider wilderness of rural Pakistan, it is the 'law of jungle' that prevails.
How difficult it is to convince a rape victim to file her complaint and how problematic it is to secure her family's approval to follow the case, the dissenting judge Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk said in the case in some detail. "It is quite normal that crimes of rape are not reported promptly," the judge said, observing that the case of Mai's rape was reported to police. Then, there is the social stigma that sticks to the rape victim, as "the rape victim relives the horror every time she narrates the incident."
But the real villains of the piece in cases of rape in our society are the "panchayat", "jirga" and such other social structures that literally throw a rape victim to the weird wisdom of some so-called elders of the village. Mukhtaran Mai was the victim of such a "panchayat". And if at all, the rape victim gets past these dreadful anachronistic barriers and seeks police help she invariably runs into a deep quagmire of conceit and corruption. Except for a very few cases, most of the rape FIRs abound in loopholes and at the end of the day, the guilty is set free.
Not only that the prosecution is often badly managed, the laws that deal with crime in Pakistan are mostly outdated. The Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), Evidence Act and many other basic acts are of the colonial vintage and fall short of properly covering the crimes of today. Pity, that our legislative houses have failed to update the legal corpus that deals with crime as it happens today. Of course, the case law does guide the courts, but to what extent if the stated law is either completely silent or contradictory.
Without in anyway minimising the angst and pain of the women and rights organisations over the release of what they believe are criminals in Mai's rape case, we would like to say that courts can do only as much as the prosecution has cut it out for them. The courts cannot initiate laws, they can only interpret them. The truth is that while Mukhtaran Mai enjoys the immense moral support of wider society, in Pakistan and abroad, her case was never properly investigated and prosecuted. What to say of the non-co-operative attitude of the local administration and the police, when even nine years on, there is an opinion in that area that she had no case. No wonder then a ruling party's MNA from that area has welcomed the release of five of her alleged rapists. Dealing with sex crime is a far more complex issue and much more has to be done to effectively deal with this curse.