Inside a courtroom heavy with the gravity of an atrocious crime, the Punjab and Haryana High Court recently arrived at a decision — man bites cop — that has ignited in India a nationwide discourse on law, morality and India’s profound anthropological complex: the Indian family. The court sentenced to 30 years of prison a man who had raped and murdered a five-year-old girl, but it was his mother’s acquittal that reverberated in the public conscience.
The court’s observation was as stark as it was tragic: there is no provision in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to punish a mother for doing “‘appalling,” but “deeply embedded” thing she did—protecting her son—even if that son happens to be a monster.
The Raja Beta Syndrome: Protective Patriarchy
The word ‘Raja Beta’ (the prince of the house) is very popular in Indian households; especially referring to how sons are spoiled and universally pampered above all. But the High Court used this term to illustrate a darker fact. Taking into consideration the mentality and circumstances of mother, the bench of Justices Anoop Chitkara and Sukhvinder Kaur observed that for mothers, there is a “blind love” attached with their sons which rises above logic, morality or humanity.
In this instance, the mother Kamla Devi found that her son had done the impossible. And instead of handing him to the police or demanding justice for his innocent victim, she reportedly put protecting him first. The court remarked:
This observation aims at the very heart of a patriarchal mentality which views a male child as the continuation of family honour and future thereby, implies that the parents become an unintended abettor in post-offence scenario.
Why the Law Remained Silent
The legal nuance of the case is between moral guilt and legal responsibility. Similarly, an individual is not found guilty of “destruction of evidence” or “criminal conspiracy” on the basis that they are accused of having a ‘state of mind’ i.e. finally at one point participated in crime with clear intentions and was sure about his actions.
In the majority of those cases, the court holds that:
- Lack of Proof: The fact that there’s no body dumped in a trash dump or physical evidence that the mother was involved in disposing of it and destroying evidence may mean her silence and refusal to testify against her son is not a crime under trucking current laws.
- Protective Silence: The law may oblige every citizen to report a crime, but the attachment between parent and child is both a biological bond – as well as an emotional one capable of producing contradictory ‘impulses’ in witness testimony.
- Lack of a Specific Statute: There is no codified provision in the IPC pertaining to the criminalisation of ”failure to report (a crime) by a blood relative” that tramples over one’s natural instinct of protecting one’s flesh and blood.
The judges openly expressed their deep sense of frustration and capitulation that whilst what she did was, “appalling” and hers was a “condemnable act”, the hands of justice were tied by the law.
Laws must be for people’s convenience should not be a burden
The Cost of Conformity to Orthodox Conditioning
The judgment extended beyond the case files to critique the “orthodox conditioning” in force in the region. “The safeguarding of one’s own miscreant son should not be prefered to justice for a slaughtered child in a society ‘civilized’ indeed,” the court bemoaned.
And this conditioning results in a perilous cycle:
- Enabling Behavior: When sons are taught that they can do no wrong, it leads to a sense of entitlement and the level of criminality.
- No accountability: when the family shield themselves by covering up crime, the law does not serve as an effective deterrent.
- Victim Re-Traumatization: In the context of the judgement, this is certainly a double injustice for the victim’s family—hereinafter referred as ‘Laado’ (precious daughter) in the judgment—to see an enabler let off does add insult to injury caused on them by a faulty justice system.
Progress toward a responsible future
The judgment by the High Court should be a ringing alarm-bell for legislative change. When we know that Raja Betasyndrome is one of the primary causes of denial of justice, should we not amend the law and punish the enablers more severely?
The country’s legal community is now caught between whether India should have a “Duty to Report” law, which deals with cases of heinous crimes such as rape and murder irrespective of the relationship between the witness and accused. For now, the burden is on social reform and education to demolish the “precious son” narrative that legitimate such villainy behind very plain sightings.
While the person prison-bound in this case will pass the next three decades confined within it — or, as the court achingly noted, “duration commensurate with him being brought closer to the sunset of his virility” — the mother’s acquittal offers a ghostly echo of that chasm between what is “legal” and what is “just.”
