The father of a 23-year-old Indian woman who died last week after a brutal gang rape has endorsed the idea of naming new anti-rape legislation after his daughter. The victim's name has not been revealed, but in an interview with the Indian news channel IBN Live on Wednesday, her father said:
It would be a step in the right direction and heartening to name the law after my daughter. A law named after an individual, for whom the entire country came together, will obviously be much more effective. T his will also ensure that she will be immortalized forever.
After weeks of public protests, the proposal to honor the woman in the Indian legal code was raised on Tuesday by Shashi Tharoor, a former United Nations official who is now a government minister. Writing on Twitter, Mr. Tharoor suggested that continuing to conceal the victim's name was a disservice to her memory.
Wondering what interest is served by continuing anonymity of #DelhGangRape victim. Why not name&honour her as a real person w/own identity?
Unless her parents object,she should be honoured&the revised anti-rape law named after her. She was a human being w/a name,not just a symbol
As IBN Live reported, Mr. Tharoor's proposal was welcomed by some in India, and rejected by others, including members of his own party who criticized the minister for floating the idea in public.
Rashid Alvi, a spokesman for the governing Congress Party, raised a technical objection too. He told The Press Trust of India, “there is no such practice in our country where laws of Indian Penal Code are named after individuals, unlike in the U.S.†The practice of commemorating crime victims in legislation is common in the United States. The Amber Alert system, for instance, which is used to notify the public about abducted children, was named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old who was kidnapped and murdered in Texas in 1996.
In his d efense of the proposal on Twitter, Mr. Tharoor noted that concealing the dead woman's name had already helped false rumors about her identity spread online and could make it easier for the episode to be forgotten. He argued, too, that it was inappropriate for the woman to be remembered not by her name but by the Twitter hashtag “Delhi Rape Girl.â€
There's so much disinformation going around now. Purported pix of the victim on social media are apparently of a Kerala engineering student!
(1/2) @harshadkathale the idea was simple: her identity was not only reduced to #DelhiGangRape girl, but was being stolen by fake pix/names;
(2/2) @harshadkathale So I just wanted to restore her personhood, honour her as much more than a victim, &ensure her ordeal is not forgotten
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