- The Gita
- BBC News – Delhi
Asha Devi celebrates with her neighbors following the execution of her daughter’s rapists on March 20, 2020 in Delhi.
A young Indian woman was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on a bus in the Indian capital, Delhi, and died days later of her injuries.
The girl remained lying on a hospital bed for days, struggling with death, and the press called her Nirbhaya, meaning the girl who does not know fear. Since rape victims cannot be named under Indian law, the name was stuck.
This happened ten years ago. So what’s her story?
The brutal assault on the girl made global headlines, led to weeks of protests and forced India to enact tough new laws to combat crimes once morest women.
The main accused (the bus driver) was found dead inside the prison a few months following the crime was committed. Four more were hanged in March 2020, while a minor convict was released following three years, the maximum sentence permitted under the law.
The crime changed the way Indians discussed violence once morest women and changed many lives, but none more so than that of Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother.
Devi, a quiet housewife who has spent her years taking care of her home and children.
Over the past decade, she has transformed into a women’s safety advocate and activist, fighting for justice first for her daughter and now for ‘all girls of India’.
Two years ago – on the eighth anniversary of her daughter’s assault, and a few months following the convicts were hanged, she vowed to “fight for justice for all rape victims”.
“This way I will be able to honor my daughter,” she said.
Despite the pain in the injured leg that requires daily visits to a physiotherapist, the 56-year-old woman has been leading a small group of people in a candlelight procession in Dwarka, Delhi every evening for the past five weeks.
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Asha Devi’s pain is often captured on television in India.
They are demanding justice for a 19-year-old girl who was gang-raped and murdered 10 years ago.
The Supreme Court of India recently issued a death sentence once morest three men who participated in this crime, and said that there is no conclusive evidence that these men are guilty.
A review petition was filed in the Supreme Court, but Asha Devi and others staged protests to ensure that “the Chawla rape case is not forgotten”.
“Sometimes 10 people come, other times 15, but we walk every day,” Asha Devi told me when I visited her home recently.
“We want the court order overturned. The alleged rapists should be sent back to prison.”
The day following the High Court order, Asha Devi went to meet the victim’s parents.
“I got justice and I don’t have to go out and do anything anymore, but I remember how I used to sit outside the courtroom and cry, sometimes by myself. I think this shouldn’t happen to anyone else. So I went and sat with her parents and cried with them.”
She also recently lent her support to an online petition demanding justice for Balqis Bannu following the Gujarat government prematurely released 11 men convicted of raping her and killing several members of her family.
A foundation, Asha Devi, has been set up to help survivors of rape and counsel victims of domestic violence, with ex-judges, lawyers, ex-police officials and volunteer activists.
Over the past few years, they have worked with dozens of families.
Her presence often prompts the police and authorities to act, but Asha Devi says that 10 years following her daughter’s death, nothing has changed on the ground.
In 2012, the year Nirbhaya was assaulted, India recorded 24,923 rape cases.
In 2021, the last year for which crime data is available, the number increased to 31,677.
“Laws are made on paper, promises are made, but there is weakness in implementation,” says Asha Devi.
“If this continues, we will lose faith in justice.”
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A banner held by the protesters reads: Execute the rapists.
Asha Devi’s activism stems from her own experience, her long battle with justice, and her struggles as a mother who lost her daughter.
Ten years later, the memories of that Sunday still bring tears to her eyes. “No one should see or live a day like December 16th,” she says.
Her daughter, then 23, had just completed her training as a physiotherapist; And I got two job interviews in two hospitals, and one of them was accepted for training.
“She had already received ID from the hospital and was due to start on Monday or Tuesday and she said to me, ‘Mom, your daughter is a doctor now.'” She was very pleased.
On Sunday followingnoon, when she left the house, she promised her mother that she would be back in two or three hours.
When Asha Devi saw her several hours later, she was lying in the hospital covered in blood.
Describing her daughter’s injury, she told a television channel, “It looked like she had been rescued from the beasts of the jungle. The doctor said he didn’t know what to do and what to fix.”
The young woman was gang-raped by the bus driver and five other men and her boyfriend was severely beaten.
They were thrown naked, soaked in their own blood, on the side of a road and left for dead, had it not been for some passers-by who found them and called the police, where they were taken to the hospital.
“What happened to her was so brutal that she didn’t survive the assault, she lived for 12 days. He called her Nirbhaya, she was really brave,” says Asha Devi.
Wiping away her tears, she says her “most regret” in her life is that while her daughter was alive, “she kept begging us for water, but we mightn’t give her a single spoonful of water.”
“I kept thinking, what was my daughter’s sin? Why did she have to die so painfully? I saw her in pain and I drew strength from her pain. I promised her I would fight for justice for her, all I wanted was for the men who did this to my daughter to be punished.”
As the trial begins, Asha Devi has not missed a single session.
She says, “I did not miss a single court session. I neglected my house and its affairs. My main concern was attending the court session as long as there was one.”
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Asha Devi says she has dedicated all her strength and determination to fight for justice for her daughter.
Despite the interest in the crime, it took more than seven years for the case to be concluded and the rapists to be executed.
Asha says she has dedicated all her energy and will to fight for justice for her daughter.
Asha grew up in a backward area in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and “had to drop out of school following the eighth grade because secondary school was too far from home”, and had to work hard to understand the language of the law and learn how to conduct press conferences.
But the intense suffering of the grieving mother, often caught on television, has moved many Indians and attracted lawyers, activists, celebrities and politicians of all persuasions to support her.
Protests took place across India to demand the execution of the rapists.
But once the death sentences were confirmed by the Supreme Court in September 2017, the convicts’ families and lawyers began last-minute attempts to stop the executions by submitting review petitions and writing to the authorities to ask for clemency.
Activists also point out that studies worldwide have shown that the death penalty does not reduce crime, in fact it leads to more killings as perpetrators try to remove evidence.
But Asha Devi, the biggest proponent of the death penalty, insists it is justified.
She told me, “There are people talking regarding the human rights of the accused, but what regarding the rights of the girl who died as a result of rape and brutal murder? Nothing will change unless people calculate the consequences and fear.”
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The families of the convicts tried to stop the execution of the death sentence by various means and methods, to no avail.
As the case was winding through the Indian judicial system, Asha Devi says people would sometimes say to her: “Your daughter is gone, give up, you’re banging your head once morest a stone.”
“But I got huge support from the community. It made me think that they don’t know my daughter and stand by her, so I have to.”
Asha Devi says she was afraid at times, but she kept her faith.
“I used to say to myself, if these guys don’t hang, then who gets hanged? What rare case will the death penalty be applied?”
The case went through many twists and turns before the convicts were executed at 5:30 am on March 20, 2020.
She told me, “I mightn’t save her, but when they executed, I felt at peace, because they paid the price for what they did to my daughter.”
Shruti Singh, a gender rights activist who had been working with Asha Devi for regarding a year at the time, described the night of the hanging: “We didn’t wait outside the prison where the executions took place, we went home to be with Nirbhaya.”
They sat in the room where her picture hung on the wall. Asha Devi told her daughter, “Now we can hold our heads up, we haven’t let you down my daughter.”
