Namrata Goswami- Week 11

‘Open letter to CJI’ concerns the letters written by Professors Upendra Baxi, Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lokita Sarkar to the Chief Justice of India in request of the case to be reheard. The letters were written in context of the injustice inflicted by the court in the Tukaram v State of Maharashtra case. The very fact that the accused persons, namely Tukaram and Ganpat were aquitted from the charge of Rape, went against the salient features of ‘justice’ that a woman deserves, like any other male citizen of India.  In its decision to acquit the accused, the SC talked about how Mathura was a “woman of easy virtue” because of her physical relations with her lover- implying that she was not a standard woman of virtue. Attention was also brought to the fact how she showed no stiff resistance when Ganpat held her hand in the police station. Neither the fact that she was a minor not the thought that she, a minor girl, could have rationally done nothing to save herself from her prey, who happened to be a police officer was given its due consideration. No attention was paid to the bare facts that while Mathura was raped in the washrooms of the police station, the lights were turned off. The injustice hurled upon Mathura by the India legal system forced us to think about many other unprivileged girls who had been muted by taking away from them basic human rights, under the burden of patriarchy.