India hangs 4 over Delhi rape
2012 attack brought women’s plight to fore
DELHI: India executed four men yesterday for the gang-rape and murder of a woman on a Delhi bus in 2012 that sparked huge nationwide protests and international revulsion.
The four were hanged before dawn at Tihar Jail in the capital, the head of the prison, Sandeep Goel, said, in India’s first execution since 2015.
“All four convicts [were] hanged at 5.30am,” Mr Goel said.
The brutal attack on Jyoti Singh sparked weeks of demonstrations and shone a spotlight on the alarming rates of sexual violence and the plight of women in India where around 95 rapes are reported daily.
The execution sparked small celebrations outside the prison early yesterday. “We are satisfied that my daughter finally got justice after seven years,” the victim’s mother Asha Devi told reporters. “The beasts have been hanged.”
Singh, 23, was returning home with a male friend on the evening of December 16, 2012 when they boarded a Delhi bus, thinking it would take them home. Five men and a 17-year-old boy had other, darker ideas. They knocked the friend unconscious and dragged Singh to the back of the bus and raped and tortured her with a metal rod. The physiotherapy student and the friend were then dumped on the road. Singh died 13 days later in a Singapore hospital from massive internal injuries.
“A decent girl won’t roam about at 9pm,” one of the perpetrators told a BBC documentary that was banned in India.
Nearly 34,000 rapes were reported in India in 2018, according to official data. This is considered the tip of the iceberg, with many more victims too scared to come forward.
But Singh’s ordeal struck a chord. “It was like the bursting of a dam,” said Kavita Krishnan, an activist who took part in the huge protests. “Women said they do not want to trade their freedom for safety ... There was a social awakening of society.”
The uproar over the case led to tougher punishments for rapists including the death penalty for repeat offenders. Singh, nicknamed “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), survived long enough to identify her attackers and all six were arrested. Four were convicted in 2013. A fifth, the suspected ringleader, was found dead in jail in a suspected suicide, while the 17-year-old spent three years in a juvenile centre.
But for Krishnan, the executions mask the continued failure to provide justice and improve safety for women in the world’s biggest democracy. Almost 150,000 rape cases are awaiting trial in India’s dysfunctional criminal justice system. The government is “trying to fix the public gaze on the gallows to divert attention away from what it has failed to do,” Krishnan said.