Shakti mills case: Advocate contends no means no'

Mumbai: No means no — If a rapist does not understand rejection from a woman, we have to consider harsher punishment for him, argued the advocate general in the Shakti Mills rape case. He further said that even prostitutes who were always being exploited had the right to say no to their customers.

Since Thursday, advocate Kumbhakoni started his arguments in favour of the death sentence given to the three accused in the Shakti Mills gang rape case before Justice B.P. Dharmadhikari and Justice Revati Mohite-Dere.

Advocate Kumbhakoni reiterated that rape was an offence more grave than murder and a comparison between the two offences was completely wrong. He also told the court that the petitioner’s contention that the life of a victim was destroyed after murder was acceptable however the lives of rape victims were destroyed, too.

On Friday, amicus curiae (friend of the court) Abad Ponda argued that in India, the offence of rape was considered an offence against society but in America, they treated it as an offence against the victim only.

Mr Ponda also gave statistics from 1951 to 2012 pointing out the increasing cases of rape in the country. He said that in 2012, the rate was alarming which is why the government had to give stringent punishment to repeat offenders.

In April 2014, a sessions court held five persons guilty of raping a woman photo-journalist at the Shakti Mills compound in central Mumbai.

Of the five, Vijay Jadh-av, Kasim Bengali and Salim Ansari were sentenced to death under the then newly-introduced section 376 (E) of the IPC as they were convicted in a previous case of gang-rape. The three challenged the constitutional validity of section 376 (E) that sentences a repeat rape offender to death.