Since the recent gruesome gang-rape of and brutal attack on a 23-year girl student in Delhi, a plethora of suggestions have been made by the various quarters to ensure safety and security to the womenfolk. Most of the demands are in favour of capital punishment to rapists, burning them live or hanging them to death. But who will ensure that no innocent person will be subjected to such a punishment?
However, President Pranab Mukherjee, while addressing the inauguration of the D Y Patil Knowledge City in Pune, said this incident has provided “an opportunity for all of us to resolve that henceforth, each and every one of us including the government, and authorities would strive to create a climate where the dignity, safety, security and honour of our mothers, sisters and daughters is protected” and that this should be “our new year commitment”. The question is how we should avail ourselves of this opportunity. How can a climate conducive to the safety and security of women be created?
The irony is that some of our legislators, both in Parliament and State Assemblies, have serious cases of crimes including rape and murder against them pending before courts of law. Then who will legislate laws to ensure such a climate? The fact remains that any committee or commission or legislature cannot devise laws comprehensive enough to cover all the problems and issues confronting the citizens in generals and the various communities in particular in all times and climes. Here comes the need of guidance from the Lord, who has created the world and of course all of us, and who has been sustaining it since its creation. It is not that He created human beings and left them in lurch to wander in darkness. Instead He sent the way of life we human beings have to follow and perfected this way in the form of revelation of the Qur’ān. History bears witness to the fact that whenever people followed this divine guidance and led a life in accordance with it, they lived in peace and prosperity; and whenever they deviated from this guidance, they had to reap its ill effects in various forms. The moral depravity that our society has been witnessing today in the form of ever rising cases of rape, molestation, bride-burning, female foeticide, live-in relationship, same-sex marriage, nudity and pornography et al is the natural corollary of man’s total dependence on man-made laws in utter disregard to the divine guidance.
In the given circumstances handing out stringent punishment to rapists is well but before this it is very much desirable that we create what President Mukherjee calls a climate conducive to ensure safety and security to women. This endeavour should include banning all sex outside marriage including live-in relationship, abolishing co-education; implementing sober dress code for students, especially girls, in colleges and universities; banning production, sale and consumption of alcohol and drugs; banning publication of obscene pictures of girls and women in newspapers and magazines as well as pornographic literature; making marriage easy by abolishing dowry, introducing in syllabi strong moral values and sense of accountability in the Day of Judgement. For, without putting an end to these causes of sexual crimes against women, stringent punishment will serve no purpose.