“My pain became my driving force”

From a grieving mother to a hardened crusader for justice after her daughter’s brutal rape and killing—this is the story of the transformation of Asha Devi Pandey, the mother of Nirbhaya

ON DECEMBER 29, 2012, as thousands of women with black tape across their mouths prayed in the national capital for the recovery of a 23-yearold physiotherapy graduate who had been gangraped and mutilated 13 days ago, two people already knew it was over. One was the victim, Nirbhaya, herself. The other was her mother, Asha Devi Pandey. “She knew she was dying,” says Asha Devi. She has spoken about that night a thousand times since, but this is one moment she shares sparingly, when she saw death in her daughter’s eyes.

“When the police first called, I thought she’d recover, that it was an accident. But then I saw her at the hospital. An animal would have shown her more mercy—her scalp had been torn near the neck by the force with which they pulled her hair, her cheeks had bite marks, her lips had only blood, her thighs were swollen from the number of times they beat her with an iron rod,” says Asha Devi. It has been seven years, but she remembers every last detail on her daughter’s face from that time, every word she managed to speak. “When I saw her on the hospital bed, begging for a drop of water I could not give her, the world ceased to exist for me.” Nirbhaya died on December 29 at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

But even as one world ended for her mother, another opened up. After her daughter’s death, intense public scrutiny became part of Asha Devi’s life. The first time she tucked a lapel mike into the pleats of her sari, the first time a camera flashed in her face, the first time someone asked her if she missed her daughter, she thought it would be her last. “I did not know it would continue this long,” she says. Today, she is