Gang Rape and Murder on a Delhi Bus - Ten Years On, Has Anything Changed?

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What has changed in the ten years since one of the world's most evil crimes ever committed against a woman?

Fear persists 10 years after Delhi gang rape and murder

Abhaya Srivastava, Aishwarya Kumar and Laurence Thomann; 

Agence France Press

Tue, December 13, 2022 at 11:39 PM·5 min read

Ten years ago the brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus horrified the world and shone a spotlight on high rates of sexual violence in India.

Jyoti Singh, 23, and a male friend boarded a bus on the evening of December 16, 2012.

Savagely attacked, tortured with an iron rod and dumped at the roadside, Singh survived long enough to identify her attackers, earning herself the nickname "Nirbhaya" -- "fearless".

But the student died from her injuries in a Singapore hospital 13 days later.

It sparked huge protests that forced authorities to promise to do more to protect women. In 2020 four of the six attackers -- one died in jail, another was a juvenile -- were hanged.

The juvenile, who was arguably the worst torturer, doing things I refuse to even describe here, served 3 years and was given a sewing machine and a shop to run. He should have died with his demonic friends for the incredible pain he caused and the horror he committed.

But a decade after the assault many women are still scared to travel at night in India's capital, a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people.

AFP talks to the victim's mother, the chief police investigator at the time, an activist, and a young woman commuter.

- The mother -

"Obviously the pain doesn't go," Singh's mother Asha Devi told AFP.

"She was in so much pain during the 12 to 13 days that she was alive," she said in her modest two-bedroom Delhi home.

"How can anybody do this to another human being? Because my daughter struggled to even breathe."

Since the attack Devi has become a prominent campaigner on women's safety, counselling survivors' families, helping their legal battles and protesting for justice.

The 57-year-old, who with her husband has set up a fund for rape survivors, sits next to a glass cabinet full of mementos of their daughter and awards for their efforts.

"My daughter's suffering gave me the strength to fight this battle," she said.

The case led to tougher punishments for rapists, more CCTV cameras and street lights, and safety marshals on some buses.

There are now also centres for rape survivors for legal and medical help.

But Devi said that sexual assaults remain all too common and that "nothing has changed" when it comes to seeking justice.

"If any incident happens, either the parents are blamed or the girl. No one questions the boy or talks about his mistake. 'Why was the girl out at night?' they ask.

"There are still so many cases, such horrific cases," Devi said. "I don't think anyone is afraid of the law."

And, apparently, there is no fear of God in India!

India registered 31,677 rape cases last year, an average of 86 a day, according to the latest official criminal statistics -- a near-13 percent increase on 2020.

Who knows how many thousands of cases were not registered. Police in many areas are still reluctant to register an FIR in rape cases.

In a patriarchal society, daughters are often considered a burden thanks to the persistence of the dowry tradition. In rural areas, where 70 percent of Indians live, the problem is deeper.

Girls who wear jeans, use mobile phones or go out with boyfriends are often seen as sexually permissive. Life for lower-caste girls and women is particularly dangerous.

The excuse often used by Jyoti's rapists and murderers was that she was out after dark and accompanied by her boyfriend, therefore she deserved to be raped and beaten. She was 23 years old.

"The change has to come first in society and families so that daughters are considered as daughters and not a burden," Devi said.

- The cop -

The chief police investigator in the case -- herself a woman -- interviewed Singh in her hospital bed.

"She understood that she had been hurt and that she would have a limited time to survive," said Chhaya Sharma, now 50.

"Don't spare them," Singh, whose attackers had left 13 bite marks on her body, told her.

"The way she was interacting with me was very confident, despite the pain and trauma she was going through," Sharma said. "She was very determined about the fact that she wanted these persons caught."

The policewoman, who has gone on to become joint commissioner of police for Delhi's eastern district, hugged her mother and promised her she would get justice for her daughter.

Often, rapists and victims are known to each other. In this case, "you're looking for a needle in the haystack".

"Out of 370 buses, we had to find the correct bus," Sharma told AFP. "We were walking a very tight rope and a very thin line."

Sharma said that when the attackers were arrested, they showed no remorse.

Of course, they felt justified in their actions, as I explained above.

"I felt that they did it without even feeling anything. That was the sickest part."

The case was a watershed moment, she said, insisting Delhi should not be seen as a "rape capital".

But sexual violence has remained a major issue, she said, and women still need to take precautions.

Sharma's own daughter is now studying in college, and she "knows what she has to do" to try to protect herself from danger.

- The activist -

Hopes were high in 2012 that women's safety would improve, said Yogita Bhayana, an activist with the People Against Rapes in India (PARI) organisation.

"I really thought this might be the last case, that Nirbhaya might be the last case," Bhayana told AFP.

"But unfortunately this did not happen and we kept getting cases and things were very slow, (legal) procedures were very slow. Even till today, every single day our helpline gets five or six similar cases," she said.

- The passenger -

Lashita is a 19-year-old student who declined to give her full name. About to get the metro home after dark from central Delhi, she said does not feel safe on the train and uses the women-only carriage.

"Groping is the new 'good afternoon' in the metro," she told AFP. Women have to be careful "because men are not going to stop", she added.

Travelling late "really bothers my parents because they obviously have safety concerns in mind," she said.

"Maybe I am delusional enough to believe that nothing bad could happen to me, but it's a sad reality that everyone has to be careful."

The answer to my question at the top - not much!  Nothing will change until men start standing up for women and children against paedophiles, rapists, and murderers. I don't see anything like that happening, do you?

Can India's 'Save-a-Girl' Campaign Help Eliminate Rampant Rape?

'Nirbhaya' mom won't let the government forget, but changing entrenched attitudes is not easy

Indian youth hold candles during a protest against sexual violence in Delhi last month. Many women allege police dismiss rape allegations and refuse to register cases. (The Associated Press)

Nahlah Ayed
CBC Foreign Correspondent

Nahlah Ayed is a London-based correspondent for CBC News and its flagship program The National. She has been reporting regularly from abroad while also covering Canada's foreign policy. She spent seven years reporting from the Middle East and has often returned there to cover the wave of popular uprisings in the Arab world. Prior to joining CBC, Ayed was a parliamentary reporter for The Canadian Press.

It's a rare day of heavy rain in Delhi, and it's Jagjit Kaur's 34th birthday.

She's about to mark another anniversary sitting under the flimsy tarpaulin in front of her tent: It's been near three years since she made protesting a full time endeavour.

Kaur insists she was raped by a police official in her home village in Punjab — a rape she says no one will acknowledge.

So home, now, is a tent on Delhi's Janta Mantar street – the city's acknowledged protest zone.

Kaur was once on a hunger strike, she's written to a huge array of officials, been interviewed by many journalists. She's even had local reporters poke serious holes in her story, claiming she is a fake.

What she's never managed to do is file a police report, which is now required by law any time a woman alleges rape.

She is blunt about the downsides of speaking up.

Jagit Kaur lives in a tent in Delhi and insists she was raped by a police official
in her home village. But despite India's new rape laws,
police won't register her case. (Nahlah Ayed / CBC)

"If a woman comes out and fights for herself, she will not get justice in India," she says. "I don’t think any girl should come out and fight like this."

"She will have to pick up a gun to get revenge."

It’s a shocking conclusion to be sure. But even those who doubt her story point to her case as an example of the precariousness of the legal advances made here in India in the past two years as far as prosecuting rape is concerned.

Many women allege police will still dismiss their allegations and refuse to register cases. Other cases get thrown out of court because of lack of proof, or shoddy forensics.

Fast-track courts have been introduced to handle rape cases, but they have yet to mete out a final punishment. Not even in the case that started all this hoped-for change.

The convicted rapists in the December 2012 gang-rape on a Delhi bus — an incident that shocked the world — have been sentenced to death, and admittedly, relatively quickly by the normal standards.

But their case is still before the courts because of appeals.

"The laws have only changed on paper, nothing in terms of implementation," the mother of the 23-year victim in this case said in an interview.

"I now have doubts about whether we will get justice or not."

Nirbhaya's mother

Back when Jantar Mantar was teeming with angry women demanding change in the wake of that savage Delhi attack, the stay-at-home mother stayed out of view, grieving for the gifted girl she had just lost.

The 23-year-old, nicknamed Nirbhaya to comply with the continuing ban here on naming her (which also prevents her parents from being named), was a physiotherapy intern who spoke excellent English and had apparently worked at a call centre that handled mortgage questions, largely from Canadians.

Two years later, her mother still grieves but she has taken the podium, literally.

After months of silence following her daughter's brutal killing,
the woman known in India as Nirbhaya's mother is finally speaking out.
(Nahlah Ayed / CBC)

We caught up with her at a meeting organized by the trust she has set up to help women take their rape complaints from the shadows to the courts.

She was the first speaker at the gathering that brought together judges, doctors, lawyers, activists and others to discuss the loopholes that still allow suspected rapists to walk.

The justice minister was invited, but couldn't make it, his officials said.

"If a minister can't take five minutes, I wonder what will he do to help?" asked Nirbhaya’s mother.

'Save a girl'

With a new, majority government taking over last year, India seemed poised to begin wrestling with how women are treated here, and with the underlying inequity.

So protracted a problem, it featured prominently in the new prime minister's first Independence Day speech last year. Narendra Modi spoke of the urgent need to make toilets available for women everywhere. And of the need for parents to teach boys to respect women.

He spoke of India's shame at the rapes women are increasingly enduring — and reporting.

Modi kicked off this year by launching a campaign to address India's alarmingly skewed sex ratio — brought on by the continued abortion of female fetuses (which persist because the existing law against female feticide is poorly enforced).

British filmmaker Leslee Udwin's documentary film India's Daughter
will air Sunday on CBC. (Altaf Qadri/Associated Press)

Modi's slogan Beti bachao-Beti padhao — Save the girl, educate the girl — is a bold plan, easy to say but far harder to embed in the psyche of those raised to believe girls are of little value.

Rape "happens in schools, cabs, while playing outside the house, and if a girl comes back late from work, at nine, then it happens with her as well," said Nirbhaya's mother.

"So change the mindset behind it, and the judicial system and the police. It is only then something will happen, otherwise, it will merely remain a slogan."

It is, partly, that mindset, the deeply embedded attitudes that are presumably getting in the way of the necessary progress, legal and otherwise.

As I have mentioned before, these attitudes have been around for centuries, at least, and possibly millenia. 16th century traveler, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, noted in his diary that it was hard to find a girl over 7 years of age who was still a virgin, in India.

These are the attitudes that were highlighted in the BBC documentary the Indian government banned last week in a move many here found surprising, especially given Modi’s apparent openness on the subject.

India’s Daughter is the story of the gang rape and murder of a young woman that shocked the world and sparked riots and protests all over India. Grieving parents and one of the rapists tell the story of the night six men brutally assaulted 23 year old medical student, Jyoti Singh while driving around Delhi, India's Capital, in a bus.

The documentary will be aired in Canada on CBC tonight, Sunday, Mar 8, 2015.

In the documentary, one of Nirbhaya's rapists, blamed her for her own death, "because she fought back!" Now Nirbhaya's mom is fighting back. It will be interesting to see if she has any more success than her daughter did.

There are still reasons for optimism. That Nirbhaya’s mother chooses to fight now speaks to both stagnation, as well as progress: She has, after all, turned activist in search of legal solutions.

And, along with her husband, she visits the slums of Delhi, where rape is rampant and complaints are often ignored. She helps give the overlooked women there a voice. Perhaps get their cases registered.

Is it a fight they will win? Her husband is more optimistic than she is.


"Of course it will happen. If there is night, there is also morning," he says. "We will fight until we see some light."

Indian Government Reacts Angrily to BBC/NDTV Interview with Delhi Bus Rapist

The rape led to mass protests and vigils in Delhi

BBC
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh has promised an inquiry into how a TV crew gained permission to interview one of the Delhi gang rapists on death row.

He criticised the film in parliament, saying it should not be shown in India. A Delhi court has already blocked the film, made for the BBC and NDTV.

Film-maker Leslee Udwin said the jail and home ministry had given her permission to conduct the interview.

She spoke to one of four men sentenced to death over the 2012 rape and murder.

The killing of the 23-year-old student on a bus in Delhi caused shock and revulsion around the world.

Udwin interviewed one of the rapists for India's Daughter, a BBC Storyville documentary which was due to be broadcast on 8 March, International Women's Day. It is now being shown in the UK on Wednesday night.

Rapist Mukesh Singh, who along with the three others is facing the death penalty, expressed no remorse in the interview, and blamed the victim for fighting back.

'Atmosphere of tension'

Rajnath Singh told parliament that his government would "not allow any venture that seeks to benefit from this [the Delhi rape] for commercial gain".

He said the film-makers were asked not to release or screen it until it was approved by the Indian authorities.

Police in Delhi said they had gained an injunction against the film because the rapist's remarks were "creating an atmosphere of fear and tension".

In addition, media organisations were apparently barred from publishing quotes from the film, or broadcasting any clips.

Composite of Delhi Police hand out photos of Vinay Sharma , Pawan Gupta, Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur convicted for the notorious December 2012 gang rape and murder of a female student on a bus in the Indian capital, Delhi. Mukesh Singh (second from right) and his fellow rapists are appealing against their sentences

The BBC's South Asia correspondent Justin Rowlatt in Delhi says the issue is not just what the convict says, but also whether he should have been given a platform to express his views.

'Harrowing'
The film-makers have said any attempt to stop the film's broadcast would be a violation of the right to freedom of expression. They plan to challenge the ban in court.

Businesswoman Anu Agha, a member of the upper house, told parliament that "banning the documentary is not the answer".

"What the rapist said is the view of many men in India. Let us not pretend all is well," she said.

Javed Akhtar, a writer who is also a member of the upper house, said it was "good that this film was made [and that] it will reveal how many men think like [the] rapist".

While prosecutors say the men took turns to drive the bus, and all took part in the rape, he says he stayed at the wheel throughout. His brother Ram Singh was also convicted but died in prison before the trial.

A teenager found guilty of rape and murder in the case was sentenced to three years in a juvenile reform facility.

Udwin told an NDTV studio discussion on Tuesday that the film "tries to show the disease is not the rapists, the disease is in society". Indeed, the rapists are a symptom of the disease of rampant misogyny. Hindus, like Muslims, don't seem to believe in protecting women and girls, only in punishing them, especially if that punishment brings them perverted pleasure.

It's ironic that men who feel so superior to women will, as soon as they are caught, blame it all on the woman. It's been going on since Adam and Eve, "Lord, that woman that you gave me..."

A BBC spokesperson said: "This harrowing documentary, made with the full support and co-operation of the victim's parents, provides a revealing insight into a horrific crime that sent shock waves around the world and led to protests across India demanding changes in attitudes towards women.

"The film handles the issue responsibly and we are confident the programme fully complies with our editorial guidelines.

"Assassin Films, the production company that made India's Daughter, has assured the BBC that it fully complied with the filming permissions granted by Tihar Jail."

India's Daughter will be broadcast on Storyville on BBC Four on Wednesday 4 March at 22:00 GMT.