By The Editor: Siddharth Sehgal

Since past few weeks and days our country has been moved to its core by atrocities committed on our daughters and sisters. The encounter of four accused who raped and killed that lady veterinarian in Hyderabad does not change the ugly truth about our society and that ugly truth resurfaced again in the death of a girl in Unnao, when she was burned alive in broad daylight by her perpetrators. Where are we heading as a society? Every day hundreds of women face sexual assaults in our country and we wake up every morning as if everything is normal.

I wholeheartedly support the encounter that Hyderabad Police did on Dec 6 that ended in death of four accused. I know this is a denial of the due process but the due process is the root cause of the problem. It’s because of the due process cases drag on for years and many a times, accused go scot free in absence of evidence or due to loopholes in legal process. It’s because of a sick justice system someone at the top might have thought of the extrajudicial killing option. When justice does not do its work the street justice will replace it. We will see how many days, months or years it will take to bring justice to rapists and murderers of the girl in Unnao.

This also tells a very telling fact about our society, we are not a society for women, we see it all around us, and we do not educate our men to respect men, in our false sense of bravado we think women are some property waiting to be conquered or usurped. This mentality cannot be killed in an encounter and given our history it’s very difficult to inculcate this message in our populace. Power is the only language that people understand and we have to match the punishment with the intensity of crime. Justice is nothing but a moral and just revenge.

There is no pride in the fact that we are supporting the ways outside the law to fight crimes but what can we do when our own legal system is not competent or trustworthy enough to serve justice. You can’t reason with monsters, they don’t understand right from wrong and have no spec of humanity in them. I guess sometimes it’s okay to let law, the natural law to take its course.