Singapore court awards 30 years to a child rapist

Thirty years in jail for raping a child. This is indeed the kind of punishment that should be awarded to child rapists. Singapore shows the way. Read the story in Strait Times.

Contrast this with the punishment meted out to child molesters and rapists in India.

The Ruchika molestation case

The Ruchika suicide case signifies all that is wrong with the Indian system. And how it can be twisted by those in power, to harass simple law-abiding citizens.

SPS Rathore, a senior Haryana Police officer, used the system to play havoc with the lives of the Girhotra family, pressuring them to withdraw the charge of molestation the 14 year old Ruchika Girhotra had made against him. The result - the vivacious Ruchika, a promising tennis player, was forced to end her life, after her family was hounded for over three years following her complaint and her brother was tortured and false cases of auto theft slapped on him.

And what is the punishment that our judiciary system awards Rathore? Six months in jail and Rs 1000 as fine. That too after 19 years!

In fact, in this blog, all the reasons that led to Ruchika's sucide have been discussed in various posts.

First, a sullied police force - Haryana Police, one of the most corrupt in the country. Rathore as a senior police officer, molested the young girl after calling her to his office. It could have led to a rape, but for the arrival of her friend Aradhana, an eye witness to the case. After a complaint was filed against Rathore he went on to harass the family no end. Her friend, Aradhana, and her father have said that her school, Sacred Heart Convent, expelled her follwoing pressure from Rahore. The school has however denied bowing to any pressure. But the case still shows an education system that is most child unfriendly. The school should be like a child's second home. Ruchika had been molested. She did not have a mother. Her teachers should have stepped in, giving her the strength to cope with the trauma. But our education system does not put the child first, many of our top schools are money making rackets open to being exploited by the powerful. If all the teachers and the management of the school had decided that they would stand by the child, Ruchika could have been saved. Aradhana tells us that after the school expelled her, the once vivacious Ruchika went into a shell. The school failed her.

After Rathore had a string of auto theft cases slapped against Ruchika's brother, had him arrested and tortured, the family, which was well settled in Panchkula, was forced to shift to another city as the police, who is supposed to protect, had turned predators. One wonders why Ruchika's neighbours did not protest? Why couldn't they have demanded action against Rathore? And why the management of the Gymkhana club where Ruchika was molested by Rathore, did not throw Rathore out after the charge was made against him? The fact that two teenaged girls had penned a complaint against him, should have been reason enough. Young girls do not go around saying they have been molested, and the complaint should have been ground enough to remove Rathore from the helm of a gymkhana where young girls were coming to play. So the third failure was that of the civil society. Why don't we protest a wrong being done to our neighbour?

What do you call a police officer who tortures children? Is there a word for it? The departmental inquiry against him soon after the crime, which had found him guilty, was put into cold storage and ignored by the state's top politicians. Instead of seeing that the complaint was speedily looked into and the man punished, the political bosses promoted him. He went on to become the DGP of Haryana police. The political system failed the young girl.

It took the complainants nine years to lodge an FIR! And 19 years for the courts to pronounce Rathore guilty! And a sentence of six months of imprisonment and Rs 1000 as fine was awarded to the guilty man. An absolute failure of the judicial system. Our laws do not recognise that a child can be molested.

Thank God for the free press that we have. The only reason it is being given another look is because the television channels took it up, providing regular updates. The public was aghast. The pressure has built up. The case is being given another look. The critics call it trial by the media, but when institutions fail to deliver, it is the media that shows the society what has happened. Like a mirror, it shows the way things are.

A mentally-challenged rape victim copes with motherhood

The Supreme Court in its wisdom allowed a mentally challenged rape victim in Chandigarh to carry the foetus full term and she has given birth to a baby girl.

Meanwhile, it has been confirmed that the mother was raped by one of the security guards at Ashraya, a state run home for abadoned women, where the victim was living. The rapist, a married man and a father of two children, has been arrested.

Now what?

With the father behind bars and the mother mentally challegned, who is going to bring up the baby? What arrangements has the Supreme Court esnured so that the baby is brought up in a loving and caring atmosphere? What steps have been taken that the girl child would be safe from predators that prowl the state run home? Are the activists who pleaded against the High Court verdict that had called for the medical termination of the pregnancy spending time with the child? Or is this yet another case of misplaced human rights? Whose rights are we talking about?

Read here how the 19-year-old mother, said to be mentally challenged is coping. It is sad, very very sad, what the State has done to her.

Earlier post- 
A disturbing judgment

Corruption and India

A scandal of this proportion and there has been no outcry from Delhites. Are we so dead as citizens that we cannot even protest and demand action against the employees who robbed us and the politicians who let the system come to this pass?
It shows the extent to which we fail as citizens and forgo our right for effective governance.
One would have thought a scandal of this proportion where over 22,000 ghost employees have been drawing salaries for God knows how many years, would have led to some protest, a demand that the men who cheated us be dismissed, but nothing has happened. Not a whimper from Delhi's residents and the many residents' associations and citizens groups and the NGOs that populate the Capital city. Apart from a newspaper report or two, the citizens seem unconcerned.
We have got so used to the filth and malaise around, that like sewer rats it has become a vital part of ourselves. We cannot imagine, it is completely beyond our psyche to visualise a corruption-free government department. By not protesting about this scandal, by not demanding that action be taken against the scoundrels, we open ourselves to more such loot. And where is our moral police, so quick to jump at women who go to bars, so quick to even bash them up, so quick to pull down artist's works, or demand ban on movies they feel corrupt human minds?
Where are they? Why don't they protest? Don't they think this corruption and filth spells doom for India? Or as sewer rats it has become our life?

And now this- MCD staffers get salary six times in two months!
Earlier posts - Ghost employees of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi
The most corrput Municipal Corporation of Delhi

Happy to post 15 months later that the Indian public is reacting to corruption and How!

Mera India Bridge the Gap workshop - Help build a healthy and a prosperous India

If you are between the ages of 18 and 35 years and reside in Delhi, here is an opportunity to attend a very special workshop --

Mera India, Bridge the Gap
invites you to a workshop
Transforming ideas into action
The building of a prosperous and a healthy India
On December 12, 2009 (Saturday)
9.30 am onwards to conclude with Lunch
(to be held in Delhi, you will be informed of the venue)

The workshop will inform how youth can work towards an India that is free of poverty and hunger, is healthy and informed and where women and men enjoy an equal status.

Please confirm your participation asap as there are a limited number of seats. There is no entry or participation fee. Participation certificates will be awarded.

The workshop follows the Mera India Bridge the Gap contest where the young participants had advocated for youth playing a more active role in nation building and meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

So if you are interested, do drop us a line at indiabridgethegap@gmail.com

We look forward to working together.

Bridge the Gap Team

Shocking scandal - over 22,000 bogus MCD staffers

It is finally out - the Municicpal Corporation of Delhi has 22,853 ghost employees! The Times of India in its report, has stated that the Indian taxpayer has been paying Rs 204 crore a year for these employees every year. And for how many years has this practice been in existence? You could easily say it has been for decades. As residents of Delhi, India's Capital city, we see piled up garbage even in posh localities like South Extension and Greater Kailash and prime office complexes like Nehru Place. The situation in other loclities is worse. On paper there are sweepers allocated for every street, every block. In reality, ghosts never sweep, they only pocket money. So streets remain unswept for months, corruption is rife in all its departments, and as residents we have seen that nothing moves without palm grease. The manner in which these babus control our lives and mess it up has to be experienced to be believed.
Who would you say is responsible for the state of things? The babus or the netas? That is the bureaucrats or the politicians?
And are we, as Delhites, as Indians, going to keep quiet after this information, thanks to the biometric system, is known to us? Or are we going to lend our voice to see that the ghosts are banished once and for all. And that some action is taken against those who let them in, fattened and nurtured them. The citizens must speak up, in fact YELL and demand action. For otherwise the powers that be might never hear us.

earlier post

And now, you have to read this story in Hindustan Times. Of the tricks the employees are now resorting to so that they do not have to use the biometric system.

An NGO files a public interest litigation, so now finally we may know the full truth.

An inspiring story - The youngest headmaster in the world

The story about Babar Ali, born to poor illiterate parents in West Bengal, is really heartening. See the what this 16-year-old has done. How he is using all that he has to change the lives of children who may never be able to go to school.


The story will make you happy and also bring tears to your eyes. It holds a lesson for all of us. Are we doing enough to change the condition of those less fortunate than us?

Thank god, we have people like Babar Ali in the world.

Journey in magenta

There are so many things about India that bother me. And in this blog I keep ranting about them. There are also many things that I absolutely love about this land. One of them is the colour that one finds here. Nowhere else in the world have I seen colour in its undiluted beauty, the way one does here. Nowhere else have I seen women wear it the way they do here.

One of my earliest memories of the sheer abundance of colour, like there was no getting away from it were the boungainvillea bushes behind my school. The dusty rolling stretch with its little tufts of grass was used for races and march past practice, both which I dreaded in summer, but the purple pink bunches beckoned me and drove me into plucking the bracts and then blowing them in the summer wind.

The hotter it gets in India, the more vibrant are the hues -- the water melon, the gulmohar, the Rajasthani ghagras. They are there right in your face, no subtlety here, but its display is in pure unadultered form. I love the gorgeous silky skeins of the Gujarati embroidery and the tiny mirrors that sparkle in their midst. I absolutely adore the midnight blue and the emerald greens of the Kanjeevaram silks with the gorgeous orange or red borders...

The bougainvillea always takes me on a big colour journey. The bougainvillea bush in my neighbour's garden was bunched with the most vibrant shades of pomegrante red. Every morning I rushed to my window to admire it till the rains robbed it of its colour. Today it is just plain green.

The most gorgeous three hours I have ever spent in my life were at Bangaluru's Lalbagh one afternoon, feasting on the most ecstatic colours of the bougainvillea in shades I could have never imagined. From creamy white, to golden yellow, to a sunset rust, and of course, the magenta. In one bush, the magenta merged with white, in another the strawberry red flirted with cream, and the yellow decided to have orange tipped bracts. Then they went on a strange medley, three shades in one bush... an enterprising gardner had mixed and matched. I loved it all so much that I had to sit down on a bench to savour it till dusk fell and I was forced to leave the bounty of colour.

Today, while putting order to my cupbaord I came across a set of two French chiffon dupattas that belonged to my mother. They used to be musty white... I had loved the texture, reminded me of the bracts that I had blown in the wind. My mother let me stitch them up into a sari and get them dyed into magenta pink. I then designed a blouse...in green, magenta and white... And I wore the outfit with the flourish of a teenager... Now when I looked at it after so many years, I understood, my romance with the colour....and where it all began.....The colour took me on to this great mind journey that started in my childhood. And it had me making that computer drawing that you see....


I wish my readers would share the colours that they love and which inspire them....

Assauging Indian fears about higher education in Australia

Finally there seems to be some action on the Australian front. With external affairs minister S M Krishna’s visit to Australia, the Indian government has shown that it cares about the fate of its youngsters who landed on the Australian shores for higher education. Read about Krishna's interview to The Australian - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25906785-5013871,00.html

Krishna is the first senior minister to go to Australia following the spate of attacks on Indian students. The incidents drove the students to protest on the streets in a foreign country to highlight the rising incidents of violence against them. These incidents have been termed as racial by the Indian students who were attacked, but have been downplayed by the Australian authorities as 'opportunistic violence'.

One would have expected Australia to act fast following the violent attacks. Instead what happened, was strong criticism of the manner in which the Indians ‘behave’, playing loud music, talking loudly on the telephone, cooking with strong spices, keeping their rooms untidy, working late and travelling at night on trains ... as if these were reasons for them to be attacked with screwdrivers, have their eyes gouged and cars burnt. Surely, there is a “developed country” way to address such behaviours among the students! One that ensures that those who come to stay for a couple of years are sensitised on what is expected of them so that they do not offend their hosts. Now whose responsibility is it to ensure that? Of course, the Australian universities and educational institutes that line up in India and charge exorbitant fees.

As the media in India and Australia focussed on these attacks, the manner in which some private colleges had been duping the Indian students and promising permanent residency also came to light.

According to reports reaching here, some of these educational institutes have been found to be hole in the wall kind of places that have cheated the students, painting a rosy picture of the kind of training they would be given. But once the students land up there they find a paucity of qualified instructors and infrastructure. These institutes are worse, much worse, than many third rate institutions in India. At least here you and your family do not go bankrupt fianancing a third rate education.

The Australian government, rattled by the negative publicity that the attacks have brought, had sponsored a trip for some Indian journalists to see that it is not as bad as the Indian media painted it to be. Australia was not racist; they wanted the journalists to check the situation out for themselves. But all we got to see was the Australian PM Rudd holding forth on how he and his family liked Indian food, the same strong curry smelling fare, that some of his countrymen held against Indian youngsters. Wonder what happened to all the other stories that the journalists were to have done?

Following Krishna’s visit, the Australian government has announced that it would review and revamp its educational sector and promised that the overseas students would be safe.

But just as this announcement came in, the Chinese government issued an advisory to its students in Australia, following a brutal attack on four Chinese students in Gold Coast. While Krishna expressed his satisfaction with the assurances given to him by the Australian authorities, Indian student representatives had their reservations. They wanted more than mere assurances.

However, Indian students should be very careful in their selection of the institute after the horror stories that have emerged of unscrupulous education agents in Down Under. Here is a story of how a flight school in Sydney, Aerospace Aviation duped its students.

The best way to check about the worthiness of an institute is to do an independent follow up with some Indian students who have studied there. If the school does not provide you with particulars of its alumni, you can be sure that it has something to hide.

An Indian mother is very glad that she did not send her 17 year old daughter there for the culinary arts. The representative of the institute who had come to India for the recruitment drive was a smooth talking Indian settled in Australia, who wanted an immediate commitment. The hardsell was what cautioned the mother. It also made her wonder why the institute, headquartered in Switzerland, didn’t set up shop in India? A lot many students would then enrol, and the fees too would come down substantially.

It seems such a shame that Indians have to head elsewhere to pursue courses which can easily be offered here. The Human Resource Development minister, Kapil Sibal, seems very sincere about his job. Let us hope he can change the scenario for the Indian students, so that they can get vocational training at an affordable price in India itself.


To all those students looking at education in Australia or/and permanent residency, I recommend Cristopher Mitchell's blog. It shows the problems you can face as Indians in that country. There is also an earlier post on the Indian government advisory to students.

For an understanding of why things are the way they are between the two countries click here ..

A disturbing judgement

A 19-year-old mentally challenged woman whose mental age is described as nine was raped by an attendant in a shelter home in Chandigarh. A few weeks later, when she developed what has been reported as "some complications" it was realised that she was carrying. And the authorites approached the High Court to have her pregnancy terminated. The High Court was in favour of terminating the pregnancy.

Then some activists on the woman's behalf approached the Supreme Court to have a stay on the High Court order. They wanted the woman to give birth to a child. The Court was told that the woman was an orphan, and as she had no blood relative she should be allowed to keep the baby. The woman too, it was said, wanted to have the baby. The Supreme Court has stated that the woman be allowed to carry the child full term.

As a woman I am horrified.

First, the woman who is bearing the child needs looking after herself as she has the mental age of a nine year old child. The State has been found to be deficient in its care of the woman. One of the attendants of the home where she was kept raped her.

Now the judges want the woman to carry full term, bring into the world a baby who would neither have a father, nor a mother who could look after it. Who would then take care of the baby? The State that has been found to be lacking?

Second, the pregnancy follows a rape. Now, I do not know of any woman who would want to carry a child of a man who has raped her. One must realise that her feelings for the foetus have yet to be developed. But her feelings for the rapist exist. And these would be unhappy and torturous. Usually if matters are in a woman's hand, she gets rid of such a foetus at the first opportunity.

It is said the woman wants the baby. In this case, the woman is not in a position to decide what is in her best interest. She does not know was bringing up a child entails.  The decision has to be made for the woman.

Third, are the persons who are so vociferously fighting for the woman to carry the child, prepared to help the mother look after it? Are they ready to assume the responsibility for the child till he or she attains adulthood? If not, then they have no business to advocate that she carry the child full term. Why saddle the woman, who is herself a child, with the task of looking after a baby?

The court is reported to have cast aside the objection to the prospect of the mentally challenged girl delivering the baby when she is not able to take care of herself. “The nature has its own methodology,” it said. Now what does that mean? That nature by some magic is going to take care of the baby? I found this statement reported in the media about what the judges said, very horrifying.
 --------------------------------------
 THREE YEARS LATER.........
Three years later the court pronounces its judgement on the rapist. It was found that the girl was gangraped. What makes it worse is that the people who the state had appointed to take care of abandoned and orphaned children had raped the girl in their care. And there were two women who allowed the men to exploit the girl. Horrifying!
The link to the article as it appeared in Indian Express