Debate On Juvenile Law In Australia And India
By Pushkar Raj
22 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Illogic of solving a social problem with legal tools: excuses for moving towards a coercive state
There has been a debate recently on laws related to juvenile in both the countries- Australia and India, though for different reasons.
A fifteen year old shot dead a police officer in the largest city of Australia, Sydney, in October this year. The boy was allegedly radicalized. In the aftermath of the shooting the state speeded up its legal machinery to put children as young as fourteen under police control orders. The police control orders mean constant surveillance of a suspect if there are apprehensions that he/she would indulge in terror related activities.
In India too, the law related to juveniles is under scanner in light of a brutal rape and subsequent death of a young girl that took place three years back in Delhi. One of the culprits in, what is now known as, Nirbhaya case, was just under eighteen years of age. A demand has subsequently arisen from some quarters, mainly government, that juvenile age be lowered to sixteen years. This demand is misinformed, emotive and motivated. It is a ploy to add to already overwhelming powers of the state that it exercises over its citizens.
In Australia the terror related activities have increasingly grown and surfaced in recent past. By April 2015, 61 Australian were fighting in Syria and 21 had died doing so (Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 16 April, 2015). The state is aware of the menace and has taken several social measures under its ‘ deradicalization programme.’
However what is worrisome is the readiness with which authorities legalized stringent measures curtailing juvenile’s rights and liberties, netting the children as young as fourteen under draconian legal provisions that lead to life imprisonment. In one stroke, the state spread its net wider, extending its authoritarian reach to a segment of population that hitherto was considered children and dealt with as per the requirements of their unique situation of biological and psychological transition.
The government has ignored the reality that there are social reasons for radicalisation of the Muslims in Australia. They are a marginalized community. The Muslims are 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed than an average Australian; they own only 14% homes as compared with the national non-Muslim average that stands at 32% (Shahram Akkarzadeh, 2013, Journal of Minority Studies, Routledge). Poverty is the breeding ground for alienation from, and turning against the system.
The fact that the Australian foreign policy is more than a shadow of the US foreign policy in the Middle East also creates a distance between the Muslims and the system. This ideological vacuum is filled up by the Muslim extremists’ misleading religious propaganda to which the young of the community are the most susceptible.
In India also, as the government informed the parliament, the crime has increased amongst the juvenile by about 50 percent in the last decade (TOI, 16 December 2015).
However, one must note that this was also the decade of state’s support and promotion of subtle commercialization of primary education and gradually withdrawing from it. Consequently, it has deprived the poorest of the society from the quality basic education. Rajasthan government ‘effectively’ closed down 17000 government schools (TOI, 6 January 2015) in 2014, while Jammu and Kashmir government got rid of 3000 government schools in 2015 (Business Today 20 July 2015).
Therefore, it is not surprising that 52.9% of the juveniles that had a brush with the law in 2014 were either illiterate or educated up to the primary level. At the same time 55.6% of them came from households with an annual income below Rs 25,000 ((TOI, 16 December 2015). It translates to about $ 1.00 per day, considerably below the new global poverty line of $1.90 as set out by the World Bank using 2011 prices.
If the state were to be genuinely interested in the welfare of children it would invest into eliminating causes that breed juvenile radicalisation in Australia and juvenile crime in India. It will invest liberally in education and social support system that ensures a child’s healthy transition to the adulthood and proud citizenship.
Instead, the government has chosen to legislate tougher laws to extend its reach and control. For example, according to Civil Liberties Australia, a human rights organization, after 9/11, Australia had legislated 54 security legislations till 2012, an average of one for every two months. Similarly, Indian courts handed out death sentence to 5054 people between 2004-13, an average of 505 per year (Asian centre for human rights report). And now, clamor for death for juvenile!
The governments are always keen to resort to legal measures to fix up social problems. They derive three advantages out of it. First, It takes zero imagination and little effort. Second, it gives them chance to en-cash people’s emotions (on terrorism, rape) into votes. Thirdly, it makes them stronger proportionately weakening the citizen. A society composed of powerless citizenry is easier to be influenced, controlled and suppressed. What more a government of the day might ask for!
Pushkar Raj is an independent writer based in Melbourne (Australia). Earlier, he taught political science in Delhi University and was the national general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), India. He can be reached at [email protected]