This blog is part of a series on crimes against women, and current legal and administrative safeguards.

Rape.

That one horrendous word has filled our consciousness and blanked out every other discourse in India, at the moment.

It is not a good time to start writing a blog on it.

Yet, it must be done.

It must be done because the discourse is angry and bitter and the predominant cry is to lynch and do to death the perpetrators of such horrendous crimes.

Which again, is for good reason.

Yet, solutions for problems are rarely found in anger alone. They require application of mind, consideration of all implications and they must be pursued, even if those pursuing it are reviled as theoreticians, or mocked for not joining the lynch mob.

Recently, a 27-year-old woman was raped on a lonely stretch of highway, near the city of Hyderabad. She spoke to her sister just before the incident happened, her voice filled with fear. We are told that the information was relayed to the police, but they did not act promptly on it. Her body, charred, was found in the vicinity. Four suspects were picked up. India rose in anger. An MP said in Parliament that rapists must be lynched. That sentiment was echoed over social media, where supporters of such summary punishments did not hesitate to point out the alleged silence of those who had protested earlier on issues of quelling of democracy.

Last week, the four suspects were shot dead in an alleged encounter by the police. They were taken to the spot of the crime by the police, in an attempt to piece together evidence of what took place that day. The police say that the four suspects attempted to escape and the former snatched weapons from them. The police retaliated in self-defence and shot dead the suspects. Social and conventional media has largely celebrated this event. The relatives of the rape victims have expressed their grim satisfaction. The mother of another victim, where those convicted await their sentence on death row (their mercy petition has been rejected today and they will be hanged later this week), says that she is satisfied with the happenings.

A minority of voices suspect whether the police encounters were staged. They say this on the basis of evidence of similar staged encounters having happened in the past. The Police Commissioner who heads the Cyberabad police, has allegedly been involved in similar incidents, when suspects have seemingly turned violent when taken back to the scene of the crime, and were shot dead. The patterns in these explanations are disturbingly similar to be ignored. The National Human Rights Commission has also expressed its misgivings.

Yet, the debate, particularly on social media, is angry and divided. Some justify such treatment of suspects, on the ground that the wheels of justice move slowly and therefore, summary punishments, including killing of suspects, serves the ends of justice that society demands. Others fear larger implications; that suspects may be picked up by the police simply because anger will otherwise pile up on the latter, and the police may in turn do them to death, so as to blunt angry public opinion.

It is very difficult not to appreciate the viewpoints on all sides of the problem, even if one may not agree with some of them. The justification for rapid and severe punishment for heinous crimes is a simple one. So also is the one that however heinous the crime, proper judicial process must be adopted. In the absence of such a judicial process, the dangers that summary justice may spill over into all manners of dispute settlement, increases manifold.

Whatever the merits of the different approaches to criminal justice, we have a huge problem on hand in India; namely, the near complete breakdown of a criminal justice system that can bring culprits to book, but also prevent such horrendous crimes in the future.

So, here I am, at the beginning of a journey to learn about crimes in general, and rape crimes in particular. If I am joined in this journey by everybody who is outraged by what is happening in India, that would be well and good. The crime statistics of the country is a good place to start to understand the dimensions of the crime of rape.

The ‘Crime In India’ Statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau, of the Ministry of Home Affairs, is a detailed compendium of statistics relating to all categories of crimes that happen in India. A recent publication pertains to the year 2017. This publication bunches together a category of cases as ‘Crimes against Women’, which, it goes without saying, includes various categories of rape.

There were nearly 3.6 lakh crimes against women in 2017, up from 3.39 lakh crimes in 2016 and 3.29 lakh crimes in 2015. That amounted to a crime rate of 58.3 crimes for every one lakh population of women. Digging deeper, the maximum numbers of crimes against women in 2017 was in Uttar Pradesh (56,011) followed by Maharashtra (31,979), West Bengal (30,992), and Madhya Pradesh (29,788). As many as 8 states and Union Territories accounted for slightly over 80 per cent of all crimes against women. Apart from the states earlier mentioned, these were:  Rajasthan, Assam, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar, Karnataka, Delhi, and Haryana.

16 states and Union Territories contributed just over 2 per cent of all crimes against women. These were Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Tripura, Meghalaya, Chandigarh, Goa, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Sikkim, Puducherry, the Andamans, Nagaland, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Lakshadweep. For ease of study, I have taken only the remaining 20 states and Union Territories for further analysis. I call these the ‘vulnerable’ states and Union Territories.

Two important features are to be noted with respect to the ‘vulnerable’ states and Union Territories, the first being the rate of increase of crimes against women over the three years under review. While the all-India figure of increase in crimes against women has been 9.3% in 2017 over the base year of 2015, this was much higher in Uttar Pradesh (56%), Chhattisgarh (38%), Madhya Pradesh (23%), Haryana (20%), Odisha (17%), Telangana, Kerala, (13%), Andhra Pradesh (12%), and Karnataka (10%).

In four ‘vulnerable’ states, the number of crimes against women have grown marginally, or declined slightly. These are Bihar (6%), Gujarat (5%), Maharashtra (2.5%), and Assam (-1.2%). In the remaining ‘vulnerable’ states, the number of crimes have declined over the base year of 2015. These are West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir (which is treated as a state for the purpose of analysis) (both -7%), Rajasthan (-8%), Tamil Nadu (-9%), Jharkhand (-10%), Punjab (-13.5%), and Delhi (-24%).

What do these reductions or increases mean? Is this a good trend or is there more to it than meets the eye? These points will be analysed in the next blog.

The views expressed are of the author and do not represent an institutional stand.