NEW DELHI — One of the most striking elements of the Delhi gang-rape case is the similarity in the backgrounds of the victim and her killers.
The family of “J” — it is illegal under Indian law to name a rape victim — were, like those of her assailants, from close to the bottom of India’s still tenacious caste hierarchy. Her father, Mr Badri Nath, like the Singh brothers’ father, had in 1982 left his remote ancestral village for the capital in search of a better life. Three years later, his wife, who married when she was only 15, came to join him in Delhi.
Mr Badri Nath started out polishing pressure cookers, then, eventually, found work as a loader at Delhi’s airport. He worked two eight-hour shifts, each one earning 100 rupees (S$1.99). He left home at 1pm and got home at 6am. “I heard once that, to escape poverty, you need to work like a horse and live like a saint,” Mr Badri Nath said later. “That is what I have tried to do all my life.”
His first child was a boy who died after three days. “My wife was so sad that when we had another child, we did not care if it was a boy or a girl,” he said. The child was J, and she was followed over eight years by two boys.
All three children went to the local school, but it was J who stood out. “She just needed to look at something once and she remembered it,” said Mr Badri Nath. Her textbooks lined a wall in the small home. To give her space to study and sleep, the rest of the family ate and slept in the second bedroom, covering a bed with a plastic sheet to convert it into a dining table.
“The only thing that interested her was studies,” her father remembered.
She had wanted to be a doctor — ideally, a neurosurgeon — but opted instead for the more modest, and more affordable, ambition of physiotherapist, and found a college in the northern city of Dehradun, where she could qualify after a four-year course.
To raise the 40,000-rupee annual fee, her father sold part of his land in his village and mortgaged the rest. To cover living expenses — a similar sum — J found a job in a call centre in the city, where she met Mr Awindra Pandey, a 28-year-old information technology specialist. The two were “just friends”, J’s father said. He liked the young man, but there was no question of the pair marrying, as they came from different sides of what, in India, remains an unbridgeable gulf.
Mr Pandey’s family were from the upper castes, his father was a wealthy lawyer. But if there would never have been a match, there could at least be companionship. The couple had been seeing each other for over a year.
They had not seen each other for more than month, however, before the attack. It was J, back in Delhi to look for an internship as a physiotherapist, who called her friend to suggest a trip to the cinema. They went to Saket Mall, a shopping centre in Delhi, where they watched Life of Pi at a multiplex. They left at about 8.30pm and started looking for transport home.
Delhi’s public transport is grossly inadequate at the best of times. Unlicensed buses are allowed to run, after paying a small bribe to avoid a fine.
That night, there were no official Delhi Metropolitan Corporation buses to take J and Mr Pandey to Dwarka. The couple took an auto-rickshaw from the mall to another bus stop, at Munirka, where they hoped to find more options to get back to Dwarka.
The couple had been waiting only a few minutes when the bus driven by Mukesh Singh pulled up. The couple got in and one of the four men, Akshay Thakur, took 20 rupees as a fare from the couple. The bus moved off.
Within minutes, as the bus drove along Delhi’s outer ring road in the direction of the international airport, the atmosphere darkened.
“What are you doing out roaming around with a girl on her own?” Ram Singh asked Mr Pandey.
“None of your business,” the young man answered. The two men faced off. Ram threw a punch. Then events moved very fast. Ram and the others wrestled Mr Pandey to the floor. Blows rained down on the helpless man.
As Mukesh drove the bus through heavy traffic, Thakur and Ram had dragged the woman to its back seats, according to the men’s statements to police after their arrest. “They beat her and pressed a hand over her mouth and tore her clothes off,” the juvenile’s statement said. “Ram Singh first raped her, the girl kept shouting and, one by one, all of us (raped her).”
The vehicle passed through three police checkpoints, where officers from the city’s overstretched, badly paid and badly equipped force stood supposedly keeping an eye on traffic. As the bus headed back into the city, the attack continued.
At exactly 9.54pm, according to images recorded by cameras, the bus reached Mahipalpur. The men pushed the couple out through the front doors. An attempt appears to have been made to run them over, but Mr Pandey, though badly injured, was able to drag J out of the way.
For 40 minutes after their attackers had driven away, J and her friend lay on a narrow strip of wasteland beside a slip road of the highway. Lying in the gravel, bleeding heavily, they were nonetheless visible to the traffic streaming past. Vehicles slowed, almost stopped, and then accelerated away, Mr Pandey later remembered.
It is common knowledge that Delhi had a problem with sexual violence, and anecdotal evidence is backed up by statistics. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, registered rape cases in the country had increased by almost 900 per cent over the past 40 years, to 24,206 incidents in 2011. Delhi, with its population of 15 million, registered 572 cases of rape, compared with 239 in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, with its bigger population, in 2011. There were just 47 reported in Kolkata.
Only two months before the Delhi attack, a spate of rapes and gang rapes in Haryana prompted some debate in the media. Local politicians attributed the wave of attacks to women behaving immodestly.
But J’s case was exceptional. The attack was of almost unprecedented brutality. J was out with a friend watching a film. She was not in a village, nor was she working in a nightclub. She was thus seen as representative in a way that other victims, rightly or wrongly, had never been.
On Dec 25, having held on to consciousness for long enough to twice give a crucial statement to investigators, J, still in Safdarjung hospital in the south of Delhi, began to lose her grip on life.
Mr Badri Nath said: “During the evening, maybe 9pm, she saw me standing outside the intensive care unit. She asked me if I had eaten. I said ‘yes’. Then, she said, ‘Dad, go to sleep, you must be tired.’ I patted her head.
“She said, ‘You should get some sleep.’ She took my hand and kissed it. She never opened her eyes again.”
Four days later, J died in a hospital in Singapore, where she had been moved as no facilities for treatment that would give her a chance of life existed in India. Her body was brought back to India, cremated in Dwarka and then, as is traditional, her ashes were carried by her family to the banks of the Ganges, near the village that Mr Badri Nath had left 30 years before, and scattered on the river.
In Delhi itself, though a city full of temples, mosques and churches, scores gathered at an impromptu shrine set up at the bus stop where J had waited for a lift home 13 days before. “We are feeling very sad. We are feeling very angry. Now, we hope our lives will change,” said Ms Archana Balodi, a 24-year-old student. One poster read: “She is not dead, she has just gone to a place where there is no rape.”
Eight months later, at the conclusion of the trial of her killers, it is difficult to argue that J’s ordeal and death has made much difference in India, at least so far: The rapes and sexual assaults that are now highlighted daily by the Indian media act simply as a reminder of how widespread violence to women is in the country.
The fierce debate between conservatives who blamed westernisation against liberals blaming reactionary sexist and patriarchal attitudes has faded. A package of laws increasing punishments for sexual assault and redefining a range of offences may do some good, campaigners concede, if enforcement is simultaneously improved, but dozens of men accused of rape remain members of local and national parliamentary assemblies.
The special funding released by the government for measures to enhance the security of women has so far gone unspent. Few are confident that gender training for the underfunded police will have much effect.
Nor are the new “fast-track courts” — such as the one, only a few hundred metres from the mall where J and Pandey watched Life of Pi, where her attackers were tried — solving the problems of the criminal justice system.
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