Ten years following ‘Nirbhaya’ gang rape and murder, fear remains with Indian women
Ten years ago, the murder of Jyoti Singh, the victim of an incredibly brutal gang rape on a Delhi bus, horrified the world and illustrated the sexual violence suffered by tens of thousands of women each year in India.
The physiotherapy student and her friend Awindra Pratap Pandey were returning from the cinema on the evening of December 16, 2012, when they boarded a bus believing it would take them to their destination.
But the bus driver and his five accomplices, including a 17-year-old teenager, embarked them for the horror. Awindra was savagely beaten, and Jyoti raped by the six assailants and tortured with extreme cruelty.
Then the attackers got rid of the two bloodied victims, thrown from the bus on the side of the road, in the capital of 20 million inhabitants.
Jyoti, nicknamed “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”) by the Indian press, succumbed to internal injuries caused by an iron bar, following 13 days of ordeal, in a Singapore hospital where she had just been transferred. She was 23 years old.
It took six days for the police to find and arrest the perpetrators of the crime and nearly eight years for the courts to try them and sentence them to death.
In 2020, four of the six attackers ended up hanged. The fifth had died in prison a month following the attack, and the last was a minor.
AFP spoke to Jyoti’s mother, the police commissioner in charge at the time of the investigation and a feminist activist.
– The mother –
“Obviously the pain doesn’t go away,” said Asha Devi, Jyoti’s mother, who together with her husband set up a fund for rape victims.
“She suffered so much during the last 12-13 days of her life (…) My daughter’s suffering gave me the strength to lead this fight”, adds the 57-year-old woman, who has become a security activist. women.
The so-called “Nirbahya” case had an impact on the legislation, which was toughened up for rapists. The protection of women improved, with more video surveillance, public lighting and the presence of “marshalls” on buses. But according to Ms. Devi, sexual assaults remain far too common.
Above all, “nothing has changed” when a woman is seeking justice, she believes.
“If an incident occurs, we accuse either the parents or the girl. No one questions the boy or brings up his wrongs. We want to know what the girl was doing outside at night,” protests Ms. Devi. “Change must first come from society and families”, deeply patriarchal in India, she pleads.
“There are still so many cases (of rape), such despicable cases (…) I think that the law does not scare anyone”, she regrets.
The latest official figures prove him right. In 2021, 31,677 rapes were reported in India, a 13% increase from the previous year.
– The police commissioner –
The police commissioner who led the investigation, Chhaya Sharma, remembers Jyoti Singh as “a brilliant and very brave young woman”.
“She knew she was badly hurt, that her days might be numbered,” Ms Sharma said.
The 50-year-old policewoman remains marked by “the very determined way in which she communicated (…), despite the pain and the trauma” and by “her determination to have her attackers arrested”.
She remembers having promised Jyoti, suffering on her hospital bed, as well as her mother, “to do him justice”. However, “the case was difficult”.
“Usually, the rapist and the victim know each other (…) but in this case, (the attackers’ quest) was like looking for a needle in a haystack”, says Ms. Sharma, recalling that the victims did not know their attackers.
“There are 370 buses in circulation at night in Delhi,” she said.
Therefore, “the most crucial thing was to find the bus, the crime scene, because the attackers were linked to the bus,” she continues. “Fortunately, we found him exactly 18 hours following the incident.”
Awindra, victim and “eyewitness”, provided valuable details allowing the police to “identify the bus”, and later, he was able to recognize the attackers.
Police tracked them down and arrested “all six within five days of” the assault.
As for the assailants, “we had trouble making them crack at the start”, she adds, “I found them extremely cold”, the older ones “find nothing reprehensible” in their actions.
A decade later, many women dread traveling at night in Delhi.
The commissioner admits that guaranteeing the safety of women remains “a major subject” in Delhi, nicknamed “the capital of rape” (but “unfairly”, according to her).
– An activist –
According to Yogita Bhayana, a feminist activist with People Against Rape in India (PARI), following the national outcry over the case, hopes that women’s safety would now be guaranteed were high.
“Unfortunately that didn’t happen,” she laments, “every day our helpline receives five or six similar or even more brutal cases, so I really can’t say things have turned out better. improved.”