Because women’s rights are human rights

I have named such cultures "democidal" in at least two ways: these deal mortal blows to the spirit of women as peoples and citizens, and pave ways for explosive forms of public distrust in representational democracy. "Arresting" these is an uphill task, never fully addressed by demands for specific and sectoral changes of law, policy and administration; rather, we need to devise more sustainable forms of social action that aim to feminise sovereign power.

The growing demand for capital punishment ill-serves the very cause it seems to espouse, especially if it were extended to gruesome violence routinely afflicted in the prevalent societal rape cultures. Popularising justice as revenge obliterates citizen memory of a global consensus against capital punishment, and especially India's specific international human rights treaty obligations towards its "progressive elimination". Available studies worldwide show that capital punishment does not deter, in the median or long term, "crimes of passion" or, indeed, insurgency-based political crimes. And frenzied advocacy of capital punishment for rapists overlooks the fine balancing trick so superbly achieved by the Supreme Court via its test of the rarest of rare cases. This test already extends to heinous rape crimes resulting in the death of the victim.

A disturbing portent is the spectacle of leading 24x7 TV anchors who flay, to the point of ostracism, human rights-based opposition to capital punishment. Trashing in full public view abolitionist human rights activists as anti-women voices does not furnish the best moves ahead.

The loud talk about the convening of a special session of Parliament signifies no more than a ritual of symbolic politics and may, in the short run, pacify the protesters; yet, it is unlikely that the special session will escape disruption, especially triggered over the passage in the Lok Sabha of the constitutional amendment providing reservation for

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