With ‘lawmakers’ like Ministers Mahesh Sharma and Jayant Sinha, can lynching victims ever get justice?

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat law can be applied when a man, carrying out an occupation his family has done for over 40 years, is surrounded and killed by a lynch mob, and the priority of the police, who arrive on the scene, is to ensure the two cows he was taking home for dairy use are transported elsewhere? The lynching of Rakhbar Khan in Alwar on July 20, 2018 and the seemingly unconcerned response by Rajasthan's state police, brings yet another test of our criminal justice system, and yes, our very humanity.

Law touches the lives of people in very different ways. For some, the primary worry may be about the obligations imposed by law, others may worry about how it affects their rights. The rich may worry about taxes, the poor on whether they can have access to education and healthcare, or protection from exploitation and cruelty under the law.

A country's laws are not only inextricably bound with the vastly different lives of all its citizens, they must also be helping to deliver what is, in essence, justice for all. Who makes laws? How are they implemented? What are the inclusions and exclusions that get reinforced by the interpretation of a law in courts? All these are questions that underline the complex relationship between a society and its laws.

The recent remarks of the Supreme Court, asking for Parliament to consider a law against lynching in the wake of many horrifying incidents of mob violence leading to deaths in the first seven months of 2018 alone, have brought an urgency to the question of whether we have strong laws that can act as deterrents for the hate crimes we now see daily. The last time we had a national uproar for a new law, it was after the December 2012 Nirbhaya rape case. This time, the rate at which lynchings are making the headlines, even the due process that was followed in the passing of The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 seems a luxury.

After all, The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, which led to amendments in both, the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, and considerably expanded the scope of anti-rape laws that had existed earlier, came after many peaceful public demonstrations showing the mood of the nation. Based on the recommendations of the committee headed by Justice Verma that received more than 20,000 inputs from the public and the legal fraternity, it addressed offences like stalking, voyeurism and sexual harassment in much more detail, and brought sexual assault alongside rape.