The Supreme Court on Wednesday passed an order to try one of the accused, Shubham Sangra, in the Kathua case, who had claimed to be a juvenile, as an adult. The Supreme Court set aside the order of the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Kathua and the Jammu and Kashmir High Court that had held that one of the accused in the case was a juvenile. The order was passed by Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Ajay Rastogi.
“It is held that the respondent accused was not a juvenile at the time of the commission of the offence and should be tried the way other co-accused were tried in accordance with law”, Justice Pardiwala read out the operative portion of the order.
Pronouncing the verdict, Justice Pardiwala stated that a medical expert’s estimate regarding the age of the accused is not a statutory substitute for proof and is only an opinion.
In the order, however, the Supreme Court identified the perpetrators of the heinous crime as “Hindus” and the victim as a “Muslim girl”.
“This litigation originates from the most unfortunate Kathua rape case. The Kathua rape case involved the abduction, gang rape and murder of an eight year-old Muslim girl by name ‘X’ by six Hindu men and the respondent herein (claiming to be a juvenile) in January, 2018 in the Rasana village near Kathua in Jammu & Kashmir”, the court said in the second para of the order passed on 16th November 2022.
While the court has chosen to identify the victim of the brutal crime as a “Muslim girl” and the perpetrators as “Hindus”, in 2018, the prosecutors who were assigned to the case were Sikhs so that communal division can be checked.
The Indian Express had reported in 2018 that the J&K Police want the Crime Branch case to be represented by Bhupinder Singh and Harminder Singh. The newspaper further quoted its sources saying “the police want to have prosecuting officers from their own ranks but from a neutral faith to avoid further communal division”. Eventually, the two had formed a part of the prosecution team along with Santok Singh Basra and one Mr Chopra.
While the police had reportedly wanted the inclusion of the Sikh lawyers to ensure that the communal divide was not depended, the Hindu-Muslim angle was reintroduced in the case as the court branded the victim as a Muslim and the perpetrators as Hindus.
When the case had come to light, of the brutal rape and murder of a minor girl from Kathua, the case was given a communal twist by several individuals who had chosen to focus on the fact that the heinous crime took place inside a temple rather than the barbaric crime itself. When the case was being used to tarnish the Hindu community, a debate had come to the fore, with several people condemning the communal colour given to the case.
The prevalent objection to the communal colour was that this was a heinous crime and should be viewed as such instead of trying to use it to show the Hindu community as a whole down.
Many individuals have questioned the need to mention the religion of the victim and the perpetrator in a brutal case of rape and murder such as that of the Kathua case. “It is not often that the court mentions the religion of the accused and the victim unless there is a clear communal angle, like in the case of Delhi Riots, for example. In most cases, the court merely states the facts of the case”, said one lawyer.
“Even if the chargesheet says that there could be a possible motive of the crime could be community level discord, the order may mention the theories mentioned in the chargesheet, but there is no reason to identify the religion in this manner”, he added.
The Kathua case of gang rape and murder
The case relates to the brutal gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua village in 2019. In June 2019, a Special Court at Pathankot sentenced three men to life imprisonment in the case. The Court also sentenced three police officers to 5 years imprisonment for causing the destruction of evidence. The trial of Shubham Sangra was shifted to the Juvenile Justice Board. Shubham Sangra was the nephew of the main accused Sanji Ram.
