With his teenager’s wispy mustache and a mullet, 19 year-oldMuhammed may seem guilty of failing to keep up with current style, but you’dnever guess he’s a convicted murder.
“Three of us were out of our minds on smack,” he said of hiscrime of two years ago. “We saw a guy walking down the road who looked like hehad a little cash, so we tried to snatch his mobile and wallet. He fought back,so we stabbed him. We thought he’d be able to identify us to the police if weleft him alive.”
Poor, addicted to drugs, and living on the street, Muhammad(not his real name) exemplified a disturbing dark side of India’s so-calleddemographic dividend ” an increasingly youthful population economists predictwill help this country surpass China as the world’s manufacturing hub by 2020.
Although the economic boom is making more people rich,rising inequality, poor education and persistent unemployment have helpedprompt a spike in juvenile crime.
But Muhammed is lucky. Since he was 17 at the time of hiscrime, the maximum sentence he faced was a three-year stint in a so-calledobservation home. He served his time in a progressive pilot program thatfocuses on de-addiction and rehabilitation.
Such breaks may become even rarer, thanks to a furiouscampaign now underway to allow Indian courts to try young offenders as adults.
The rise in juvenile crimes have prompted a drive to givetrial judges the discretion to try juveniles as adults, or to define youthsover 16 years old as adults when it comes to serious crimes.
In what may prove to be a landmark case, the Supreme Courton Friday admitted a plea arguing that the mental age ” based on abone-ossification test ” rather than physical age of the juvenile suspect inthe gang rape case should be used to determine whether or not to try him as anadult.
That contravenes the United Nations Convention on the Rightsof the Child, which sets the age at 18.
India’s women and child development minister has spoken outagainst lowering the bar.
But newspapers, television channels and tough-talkingpoliticians continue to demand a crackdown on juvenile offenders even asexperts insist the juvenile system is already broken and brutal.
Activists say officials routinely violate laws aimed atprotecting children. Instead of obtaining written orders to send underageoffenders to observation homes, overworked police sometimes pretend not to knowchildren’s age in order to put them in jail.
Sociologists argue that reducing the threshold age to 16wouldn’t lower juvenile crime rates. They say it would deny thousands of youngoffenders a chance at rehabilitation instead ” and exacerbate age-oldprejudices and new fears resulting from rapid social change by targeting pooryouths.
“We’re a society based on hierarchies,” says sociologistKhushboo Jain, who spent three years doing field work with street children.“These young people [on the streets] are dynamic. They’ve taken control oftheir lives. But we don’t want people to come up. And if they do, we try to subjugatethem in any way possible.”
Bharti Ali of the Haq Center for Child Rights blames therise in juvenile crime rates on government policies he says are promptingcycles of poverty.
“Some 80 percent of the family budget is spent on healthcare,” he says. “The government education system has failed, so children runaway from the schools. There’s a lot of domestic violence, so children leavehome or they kill their fathers.”
He also points to the stark and growing contrast betweenrich and poor. “You have luxury malls on one side, and on the other side youhave a slum,” he says.
