Sexual Offenses Bill to Be Altered to Pass Parliament

B Mathur/Reuters The Indian Parliament building.

NEW DELHIâ€" A bill aimed at toughening India’s laws on rape and sexual violence will be altered, India’s law minister said Monday, a move expected to garner wider political support in a divided Parliament.

The changes are expected to address several contentious issues, including lowering of the age of sexual consent from 18 to 16, and the definitions of new offenses like stalking and voyeurism, which critics say expose the law to misuse.

“I believe it should be possible to have a law that has a broader political consensus,” Ashwani Kumar, he law minister, said in a televised interview with NDTV. Mr. Kumar said he expects the revised bill to be presented before Parliament on Tuesday, and pass before a recess later this week.

The Indian Parliament is scheduled to go on a monthlong break in four days, and until now political parties have been sharply divided about the bill, which was crafted in response to a massive public outcry after a young woman was fatally gang raped in Delhi in December.

In meetings Monday morning attended by senior politicians from several parties, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party, an ally of the governing Indian National Congress, voiced their disagreement to parts of the bill.

“This will lead to the unnecessary harassment of people,” said Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party in an interview on television, referring to the sections that make stalking and voyerism illegal. “We will have to make different schools and different road! s, where men walk on one side and women on the other.”

Women’s rights activist Vrinda Grover said comments like these are indicative of a regressive mindset that is “extremely uncomfortable” when the law tries to “criminalize conduct that amounts to sexual violence.”

“How can any man in his right mind oppose a law to punish men who watch women bathing, or going to the toilet, or indulging in a sexual act” she said.

Demand for this bill comes from a broad range of activists, lawyers and citizens, many of whom took to the streets in December to demand justice for the 23-year-old victim of the fatal gang rape. The government, which promised swift changes in the legal system, is under immense public pressure, and no political party wants to be seen as obstructing the bill.

On Feb. 3, the government hurriedly passed an ordinance that made temporary changes to Indian laws ealing with crimes against women, which was widely criticized as an act of tokenism. The ordinance is set to expire on April 4.

The blueprint for these changes is a report, submitted in January by a three-person committee headed by former Chief Justice J.S. Verma, which garnered appreciation from politicians and activists for its scathing critique of the government’s performance on gender rights and its far-reaching recommendations for an overhaul of the legal and judicial system.

The government has since been criticized for taking a piecemeal approach to implementing the recommendations of the report.

Activists see the last-minute scramble to get the bill passed as a sign of the government’s attitude to issues of women’s rights.

“The government should have started discussions on the bill much ahead of time,” said Ms. Grover. When the gover! nment is ! determined to pass something, she said, they find a way of doing it, through a series of meetings and deals.

If the bill is not passed before Parliament goes on a break, she said, “the signal is loud and clear that our lives, our dignity, our very existence is not a priority for the government.”