A lower court in Kerala has awarded the death sentence to a 28-year-old migrant worker from Bihar for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl belonging to another Bihari migrant family. The case has shaken the collective conscience of the society. Pronouncing the verdict, special court judge K Soman noted that it was a “rarest of the rare” case and that the court would be “failing in its duty” if the maximum punishment was not imposed on Asafaq Alam. The court had heard that Alam had abducted the girl, forced liquor down her throat and raped her repeatedly before murdering her.
The investigation and the trial were significant for several reasons. For one, the state police caught the suspect within six hours of the crime on July 28. And it took just 110 days to complete the trial and sentencing. The whole process was an example of the effective intervention by the state and the judiciary. After signing the verdict, the judge broke the nib of the pen as is the custom, for a pen used for taking a person’s life away should never be used again. While there’s a wider debate on whether the death penalty would be a deterrent against such heinous crimes against children, there is no doubt that the society as a whole needs to be more vigilant to ensure that our children are protected from predators.
Equally significant is the fact that the convict was involved in similar crimes in Delhi and was arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. He skipped bail to Kerala and committed a similar crime. This case is a pointer to the fact that those involved in POCSO cases need to be dealt with more stringently by the system as crimes against children have been rising across the country.
The National Crime Records Bureau says that 1,49,404 cases of crimes against children were registered in 2021, of which 53,874 were under the POCSO Act. Such crimes have been increasing in Kerala too—as many as 4,586 POCSO cases were registered in 2022 alone; the majority of them are still stuck in the courts. There are hundreds of victims out there who are still waiting for justice. Can we endure such crimes again? The answer is a Nelson Mandela quote the judge used in his 197-page verdict: “The true character of a society is revealed how it treats its children.”