On 26 December 2001, a woman and her 13-yearold daughter were allegedly attacked and gang-raped by eight young men from Sovima village near Dimapur, the cultural capital of Nagaland. The accused youths first overpowered the driver of the auto rickshaw the mother and daughter were travelling in, and then took the victims to the old airfield at Sovima and raped them. Word of the incident spread like wildfire in the area, even as women came out on the streets to protest the rape. The police arrested all eight accused within two days but by then the situation had stirred the public to an unprecedented level of rage.
Angry protest marches and public meetings were held. At one such, in the second week of January, some speakers from non-governmental organisations demanded that the administration hand over the accused to the public so that they could be paraded naked through the city. Reacting to the public hostility, Horangse Sangtam, the Naga Council chairman, submitted a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner of Dimapur appealing that the severest legally possible punishment be given to the accused. Sangtam's memorandum also asked that authorities prevent lawyers from representing the defendants. In addition to this, several women activists severely criticised lawyers who represent accused rapists out of, what they believed to be, exclusively monetary persuasion. Tiala Sapu, president of the Naga Women Society, Dimapur, further alleged that lawyers openly lied in court to gain rapists their freedom, an opinion that drew the ire of many lawyers in the state. The Dimapur Bar Association resolved in an emergency general meeting to withdraw all legal advisors engaged with NG0s. Nonetheless, giving in to the pressure from public sentiment, the association decided not to represent the accused in this particular case.
This sequence of events raises compelling and uncomfortable questions about the relationship between progressive social campaigns and the principles of jurisprudence and justice. Liberal jurisprudence prescribes well-defined procedures to be followed in administering criminal law and justice. Among others, the accused is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty; the proof of guilt, besides being beyond reasonable doubt, must be judicially established through tangible, legally admissible evidence. Besides, the accused is not obliged to give self-incriminating evidence and has the right, irrespective of the nature of the crime, to legal representation. More importantly, punitive justice must be proportionate to the crime and can only be administered by the legally designated authority in accordance with prescribed procedure. These are well-established principles necessary to protect the individual from the juridical and enforcement agencies. They are just as necessary to protect the individual from the public and to insulate the processes of justice from the mechanics of society.
In the reported instance, the accused have not only been pronounced guilty outside the court, but that too even before the evidence has been submitted to, let alone examined by, the judiciary. They have been denied the right to legal representation through civic pressure, and in the process lawyers' rights to practise their profession freely have been impeded. In addition, the demand that they be handed over to the public is tantamount to equating popular justice with juridical justice and undermines the principles of proportionate punishment and the due process. In short, the modalities of justice seem to be shared between the duly constituted legal and judicial authorities and the public at large operating through non-official civic organisations. Leaving aside for the present the guilt or otherwise of those accused in this particular case, as a rule justice is bound to be miscarried if it is left to be decided by popular opinion. Through the prism of pure liberal jurisprudence it would appear that the established principles of dispensing justice are under threat from determined civic activism.