Pardon this momentary lapse (updated)

Harp on all you want about our 8% annual GDP growth, but until we actively work towards preventing events such as these(1, 2), we may never make true progress. The first story garnered little interest in the mainstream media initially, but spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and eventually sparked a delayed response from the police.

The second story ended with the 8-year-old victim dying of excessive blood loss, while her attacker was spared the noose. The ToI report makes for a nauseating read:

...it had serious doubts about fastening the murder charge on the accused. "The death occurred not as a result of strangulation but because of excessive bleeding," the Bench said quoting the doctor’s report, which noted that at that age, a girl has two litres of blood in the body and as she had bled half-a-litre of blood, it was enough to cause death from shock.

"The death occurred, therefore, as a consequence of, and not because of, any specific act on the part of the accused," said Justice Sinha, writing the judgment.

And that is how a child rapist can escape the noose - by claiming the poor girl's blood loss was not his intention...only strangulation, which he ended up sucking at. And the last time I checked, the word "consequence" implies causation, so I'm not entirely sure what Justice Sinha - a Supreme Court Justice, no less - is trying to say here. And the next part, in a related report, is the final kick in the teeth for the deceased girl and her family:

The Bench said: "It cannot be said to be a rarest of rare case. The manner in which the girl was raped may be brutal but it could have been a momentary lapse on the part of Amrit Singh, seeing a lonely girl at a secluded place.

"He had no pre-meditation for commission of the offence. The offence may look heinous, but under no circumstances it can be said to be a rarest of rare case."

A momentary lapse. It may be the letter of the law, but surely there is no place for a "momentary lapse" when we are talking about an 8-year-old child being molested by a 30-year-old! That a Supreme Court Justice would even utter those words is shocking enough. If anything, the accused's propensity towards having such momentary lapses around minors should be enough to give him the death penalty.

One could argue that the death penalty may be too harsh, even for a child rapist, in which case it may be time to consider compulsory castration for offenders such as Amrit Singh. Cross-border terrorism and other, more perceivable threats may be of greater importance, but surely we cannot let our most helpless citizens - be they children, women, underprivileged groups, or all of the above - be exploited this way without some serious retribution.

Related: Another story of injustice, this time by the local panchayat in Murshidabad, near Calcutta. Who gives these kangaroo courts the right to separate families of victims? Not only was the poor woman raped, she was driven out of the village for her 'crime'. The local police have so far done nothing (via Narika's blog).

I recently had a discussion with a friend about the viability of the panchayat system in modern-day India, and an incident such as this just proves my point.