Tirath’s women and child development ministry. Tirath has to defend the
bar of 18 years for consensual sex set by the Protection of Children
from Sexual Offences Act 2012 that her ministry anchored barely a few
months back. And it is the collective responsibility of the UPA
government to overcome her resistance and ensure that its knee-jerk
ordinance in the wake of the Delhi gangrape does not lapse.
When the sexual offences Bill was passed, naysayers had maintained that
setting the age of consent at 16 would be in keeping with both the
existing rape law and the social reality of the day. This included the
National Commission of Protection of Child Rights, but they were all
overruled. It is this provision which has emerged as a roadblock in the
passage of the new rape law and the defence remains shaky.
Lowering the age of consent does not give the right message to
society is what Tirath said outside Parliament on Tuesday. That is the
line her ministry had taken when riding roughshod over dissenting
voices. It is also a classic example of how ministries work in silos
that the same cabinet which had passed the bill against child sexual
offences very recently is now intent on overturning one of its key
provisions. And so deep are the fissures that it is now up to an
empowered GoM to iron out the differences.
A government perpetually accused of being responsible for a
governance deficit may also need to introspect about the need to become
the social messenger, particularly when it was trying to replace an
existing legal provision – 16 years was the age of consent before the
child offences law and the rape ordinance – with one that reeks of
regression.
In 40 countries around the world, the legal age of consent for sex is
16 years. So also in 30 of the 51 states in the US. Why then did India,
in an increasingly flat world, want to walk the other way and is now
creating a storm in a teacup to defend it?
Abantika is an Assitant Editor based in Delhi