The Delhi student’s death sparked protest across the country, but
campaigners, including Singh’s parents, say not enough has been done to
keep women safe
Jyoti Singh stood by the side of the road, wrapped up from
the chill of a Delhi winter evening, looking out for the headlights of a bus.
It was about 9.30pm and she was on her way home from watching Life of Pi at the
cinema in the Citywalk mall with a young male friend, Awindra Pandey.
The date was 16 December 2012. She was 23 years old, a young
woman making her way in the world, working nights in an IBM call centre to put
herself through medical college to achieve her dream of becoming a
physiotherapist. She had less than two weeks left to live.
A white bus was approaching, one of the many private
vehicles plying the streets of the city. The conductor was calling their
destination – Dwarka – so they handed over their money and stepped on board.
There were five other passengers, all young men. The doors closed behind them.
And the trap was sprung.
What happened to Jyoti Singh over the best part of an hour
physically sickens everyone who has been obliged to listen to the details. The
men took it in turns to rape her and then they used an iron bar on her. They
beat Awindra and threw the couple out, half-naked, into the night. The police
found them by the side of the road at about 11pm. It was clear that Jyoti had
suffered catastrophic injuries.
We know all this because Jyoti did not die there at the
roadside. She clung on, because she was determined to tell the police enough to
catch the men who had violated her.
“I want to survive,” she wrote on a piece of paper she
handed to her doctors.
It is five years later. A bus pulls up to the Munirka stop
where Jyoti and Awindra waited that night.
The doors open, 10 rupees change hands and the bus noses
back into the traffic. The darkness outside is full of the smoke from wood
fires that hangs in the cold air. There are neon signs and the lights of cars
and lorries and the cacophony of horns. These are the last sights and sounds
Jyoti would have heard before the men closed in on her.
Tonight, the bus is almost empty, just as it was when the
doors shut behind Jyoti and Awindra.
There was a huge
public outcry to change the system… but hardly any change that has taken place
“The conductor closed the doors of the bus. He closed the
lights of the bus and came towards my friend and started abusing and beating
him,” Jyoti told the police as she lay in her hospital bed.
“They held his hands and held me and took me to the back of
the bus. They tore my clothes and raped me in turns. They hit me with an iron
rod and bit me on my entire body with their teeth.
“They took all belongings, my mobile phone, purse, credit
card, debit card, watches etc. Six people raped me in turns for nearly one hour
in a moving bus. The driver of the bus kept changing so that he could also rape
me.”
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Tonight, the handful of people who have got on the bus have
now departed. The driver turns off most of the lights. Alone, in the
semi-darkness, there is that sense of vulnerability familiar to any young women
brave enough to travel at night in a city where, even five years after the promises
that lessons would be learned, many feel that beneath the surface, little has
changed.
But on the surface, in the bright light of day, life for
young Indian women growing up in 2017 looks very different to the way it was
for their mothers and a world away from that of their grandmothers.
They wear jeans and T-shirts, hang out in coffee shops,
obsess over their mobile phones and mingle with boys just like their western
counterparts do and in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years
ago.
“Gender sensitisation” is the new phrase: trying to change
deeply ingrained attitudes about male and female roles. Taxi drivers get
lessons in why they cannot leer at their passengers. Two years ago, the
country’s first all-woman police station opened in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi.
There is even a campaign for compulsory gender sensitisation programmes in all
of India’s schools to try to catch them young.
There is a lively feminist movement, hotly debating issues
such as the continuing stigma attached to menstruation – by women as well as
men. There have been milestone victories, including the supreme court’s
decision to rule as unconstitutional the “triple talaq” practice, which allows
a man to divorce his wife by saying “divorce” three times.
Yet it is an uphill battle: many men brought up seeing their
mothers doing all the household chores expect the same of their wives.
Daughters, especially those in poorer families, are widely expected to perform
the household chores while the boys are not. It is worse in the rural areas,
where traditional attitudes prevail and there are still widely held beliefs
that girls who go out to bars and drink with boys are not decent Indian girls
but westernised and sexually permissive.
That mindset was at work on the night of Jyoti’s last bus
ride. The men who fell upon her had no respect for her as a person: to them,
she was simply an object to do with as they wanted.
“I heard these people saying, ‘Catch them, tear their
clothes, hit them, take her bag’ and using abusive language,” Jyoti told the
police. “Ram Singh, Thakkur, Raju, Mukesh, Pawan, Vinay etc were their names.
We were all the time in total darkness…
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“Half of the time I was unconscious, but whenever I came to
consciousness they beat me up. My friend tried to save me but these people beat
him every time he came forward to save me. They also beat him with an iron rod
and hit him in the head.
“They removed all the clothes of my friend and they thought
we had both died. They threw us out of the moving bus. We were both naked on
the side of the road and many passersby actually saw us and informed the police
control room.”
Outside the hospital, the city was ablaze with anger. The
initial reports of the rape and the sheer savagery had brought women out on to
the streets. The police responded by beating them. The anger grew and spread.
Eventually, on 26 December, the then prime minister,
Manmohan Singh, and his cabinet took the extraordinary decision to fly Jyoti to
a transplant specialist hospital in Singapore. Cynics suggested the real reason
was that no one wanted her to die in an Indian hospital that would become the
focal point for more violent protests.
Her family went with her to Singapore, but her strength was
gone. On the evening of 28 December, the doctors told them there was nothing
more to be done. They sat with her as her heartbeat faded. At 4.45am on 29
December, it finally stopped and Jyoti Singh’s fight was over.
Jyoti’s parents, Asha Devi and Badrinath Singh, had
sacrificed everything to give their children the chance of a better life. They
lived in a small house down a blind alley in the Mahavir Enclave II area in the
south-west of the city, a poor area of slum dwellings. They had sold their
little plot of farmland in their home state of Uttar Pradesh to pay for their
three children – Jyoti and her younger brothers Gaurav and Saurabh – to study
and make something of themselves. Asha was 46, Badrinath 53. He was working
double shifts as a baggage handler at the airport to pay the bills.
The day of the attack, 16 December 2012, was a Sunday. Jyoti
had made tea for the family and gone off to meet Awindra. When she failed to
return, the family started calling her phone but each time it was switched off.
At 11.15pm, the police called to say that there had been an accident. Badrinath
went to the hospital and called the others to join him at 2am. Even then, the
surgeons had little hope: the iron bar had torn out most of her intestines.
A thick blanket of smog covers the city. The family moved to
a new two-bed apartment in Dwarka in 2013. The area is not far from their old
home, but smarter and on the up; earlier this year, the government chose it as
a new diplomatic area for foreign embassies.
The couple were given the flat by the government as part of
a compensation package – it’s an improvement on their previous home but still
one of the cheapest types of housing in the city. They greet visitors in one of
the bedrooms. There is a single bed placed on one side of the room and on the
other, four plastic chairs and a small tea table.
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A large poster on one wall shows the burning flame of a
candle against a black background, the symbol for the women’s welfare trust
they have formed in the name of their daughter – the Nirbhaya Jyoti Trust.
Nirbhaya – the Hindi word for fearless – is the name by
which Jyoti came to be known because Indian law initially prevented the
publication of her identity. The authorities, anxious to avoid the creation of
a martyr, were quick to threaten publications with section 228a of the Indian
penal code and the possibility of two years in jail for identifying a rape
victim. However, the code also contains a clause permitting the next of kin to
give written consent and after Jyoti’s family consented to her name being
published, it started to be used more often. They continue to refuse to give
permission for her photograph to be used.
A glass cabinet on another wall displays the mementoes and
certificates they have been given for their tireless campaigning. It includes a
photograph of Asha with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Asha fiddles with her mobile phone. She is angry still,
angry that the men who were convicted of the rape and murder of her daughter
have still not hanged, angry that the youngest member of the gang, who was
tried separately as a juvenile, was released from prison after serving his
three-year sentence, angry that nothing has really changed.
“I disclosed the name of my daughter, Jyoti Singh. She was a
victim. She did not commit any crime. Why should we suppress her details? They,
who gang-raped and murdered her, should hide their names for committing that
brutal act,” she says.
“I cannot have peaceful sleep at night. I cannot explain how
difficult it is to accept that those who gang-raped and murdered my daughter so
brutally are still alive. I fight with myself every day. The question comes
every time to mind: what was Jyoti’s fault? What did she do? I have no answer.
We are still waiting for justice.”
Her eyes fill with tears. No one can really appreciate their
pain, she says.
“I lost my daughter. I know she will never come back again.
But the work I am doing in her memory will save a lot of daughters from brutal
rapes in India. I will continue to raise my voice against rapes while I am
alive, whether I have people on my side or not.”
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The trust is trying to work with rape victims in Delhi. “I
feel good when I voice protest against rapes. It gives me a sense of
satisfaction,” says Asha.
But she doesn’t feel good about what has happened since
2012.
“[At first] there was a huge public outcry to change the
system as far as the issue of women safety was concerned. But there has hardly
been any change that has taken place.
“Five years have gone. These five years have been really
difficult for us. We suffered a lot. Our emotional pain was enormous. Everyday
girls are being raped and targeted for sexual assault, be it in Delhi or other
states across the country.”
She does not understand why the men whose death sentences
were upheld by the supreme court on 5 May this year have still not been
executed.
“What is the benefit of the law if it takes so long to
punish perpetrators in connection with such heinous crimes. Justice delayed is
justice denied. We all know that,” she says.
“We are always ready to point fingers at girls. We never ask
questions to our boys. If any rape takes place, we immediately raise questions
about the behaviour of the victim, like: why did she step out so late at night?
What was she doing so late outside? Why was she skimpily clad, etc.”
There are tears pouring down her face, tears of sadness and
rage.
“It has been five years now since we lost our daughter, but
still we are suffering that pain and dying a slow death every day. We are
waiting for the justice. There would be thousands of such parents like us
waiting for justice in our country.”
Better law, faster justice, stiffer penalties: that’s what
she wants. But more than anything, she wants attitudes to change.
Even as the angry protesters took to the streets five years
ago, other voices in Indian society, male voices in general, were taking to the
airwaves to claim that Jyoti was the author of her own misfortune.
“Can one hand clap? I don’t think so,” religious leader
Asaram Bapu told his followers.
Then the president’s son, Abhijit Mukherjee, weighed in,
attacking the women who were protesting.
“It is becoming fashionable to land up on the streets with
candle in hand. Such people are completely disconnected from reality. They go
to discotheques. I am very well versed with student activism and I can bet on
it that most of the protesters are not students. They are chasing two minutes
of fame.”
Asha says that if change is to come, it must come from the
top, from those who should be setting an example.
“In our families, when our daughters come home late after
work we ask them so many questions. But for boys it is absolutely normal. We
are absolutely fine if they come home late at night. This mindset has to be
changed.
“Parents actually create these male-female divides at home.
I believe it is the responsibility of all parents to give equal attention to
their children, irrespective of boys and girls, and give them proper education.
Then only we can fight out the crisis in our society.”
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She gets up, offers tea. She doesn’t want to talk about her
sons: they have their own lives and must move on, she says. Badrinath is
getting ready for work in the cargo section at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi
international airport. While Asha is animated, he seems subdued and depressed
about the lack of progress.
“The journey has been really painful for us. If you ask me
if there has been any change in the system, I would say no with a capital N,”
he says.
“I don’t see any significant change. When the incident had
taken place, the then government did take some steps to amend the law. But that
government completed its term and a new government came in as people voted for
a change.
“But the crime graph never stopped. It continued to grow day
by day. The situation has worsened to such an extent that nowadays girl
children are being raped in various parts of our country.”
Politicians don’t care, he says. “It is unfortunate that for
our government, rape is not a grave issue. They think these are trivial
matters,” he says.
“When we reach out to people and knock on their doors asking
when the death penalty would be executed, they try to convince us, saying that
all four perpetrators are dying a slow death behind bars. But who will
understand how my wife and I are dying a gradual death every day? And we have
no one to share that pain.”
For the rich, able to live in gated colonies and be
chauffeured everywhere, the issue seems far removed from their experiences.
They don’t have to negotiate the city’s dangerous streets alone at night.
“The saddest part is such incidents of rape only happen with
our daughters. These kinds of incidents don’t happen with big people or with
ministers’ daughters. Then they would understand the pain we commoners bear
when brutal gang-rape murders happen with our daughters or sisters. So, we know
where we live.”
The murder changed their lives, he says, but he still
believes that they can use it to change the lives of other young women for the
better.
“I know my daughter will never come back. But this fight is
not for us or our family. It is for many other Jyoti Singhs who are also like
my daughter and suffered similar mishaps in life. This fight is to ensure
safety for them.”
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Yet still the legal process grinds on. The supreme court is
due to hear a challenge to its May ruling on the death sentences on 12
December.
There are four men on death row: Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma,
Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta.
Ram Singh, the driver, never made it to trial. He was found
hanged from the grille in the ceiling in his prison cell, a remarkable feat
given that the ceiling was 8ft high and he had nothing to stand on to reach it.
His family suspect foul play.
“Let’s go and have some fun today,” he is said to have told
the others before they set out that night.
“Ram Singh was the first one to rape the girl,” the youngest
member of the gang told police. “The girl kept screaming and howling but, in
the moving bus, everybody raped her one by one. And they bit the girl on
different parts of her body.”
The Delhi Commission for Women has sent notices to Tihar
jail, where the men are being held, and to the deputy commissioner of police,
asking why the executions have not been carried out.
Delhi police set up all-female motorbike squad to tackle
crime against women
Read more
Swati Maliwal, the DCW chair, recalls the huge upsurge of
anger that spread out across the country in the days after the attack and the
brutality of the police’s response, hitting women with their lathis – wooden or
bamboo sticks often tipped with iron.
“Everybody was out on streets. I remember I was myself
lathi-charged. All of us were demanding a system that there should be no rape
in the capital,” she says.
Summoned to parliament to explain what the government was
doing to protect women, the then home minister promised to set up a special
task force intended to meet twice a month. In its first three years, it met
just 12 times.
And it was going round in circles. When she started
attending the meetings and asking questions, the task force was disbanded.
“It was in 2016. It was really shocking to me,” she says.
She was told the task force had completed its work and the
lieutenant governor of Delhi would set up a new one. She had to go to court to
get it to happen.
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Women struggle to get justice, she says. She had to threaten
the police commissioner with an arrest warrant if he did not hand over the
figures for crimes against women.
When she did get her hands on the figures, they showed that
between 2012 and 2014 there were 31,446 cases of crimes against women in the
capital and 150 convictions. No wonder women are scared to walk the street, she
says.
“A one-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped just five days
back. Then a seven-year-old girl was gang-raped two days back in the capital,”
she says. Both girls needed operations as a result of the attacks.
“I went and met the girl. It is really very difficult to
describe. And I really could not come back home that night. I was so upset. The
entire night I spent there with her.”
The government has to act, she says.
“We need a proper system to function, particularly in these
cases of child rapes. Should a one-and-a-half-year-old girl, for the next 15
years, tell everybody that she was raped and demand punishment for that person?
Is that the civilised society we want?
“So, we need to create a mechanism that in six months, at
least in the cases of child rapes, the death penalty should be given to the
rapists. And for this you need to create a mechanism. You need better numbers
of police resources.
“You need better police accountability, better forensics,
more courts. And you need a committee to really get the political will
together. The committee cannot be on the level of the bureaucracy.
“We have done such things before, but it never worked. We
are trying to wake up this completely apathetic system.” Despite everything,
there has been some progress. In January 2013, a three-member commission,
spearheaded by a former chief justice of India, published its review of laws
pertaining to sexual crimes. The committee, set up in response to the protests
and given just 30 days to complete its work, identified “failure of governance”
as the root cause for sexual crime. It criticised the government, the police
and even the public for their apathy and recommended dramatic changes,
including obliging the police to record all rape allegations. Parliament
obliged with new legislation that, among the introduction of several new sexual
offences including stalking, provided for compulsory jail sentences for officials
who failed to register rape complaints.
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It may sound extraordinary in 2017 that the police needed to
be told to take rape seriously, but they did. There were regular reports of
rape victims being thrown out of stations, ignored and browbeaten for having
the temerity to bother the police.
So now it is easier for women to report rapes. The DCW has a
helpline that has taken 316,000 calls and the number of reports has increased
as women gain confidence that they may be taken seriously.
Yet still some women who report rape are being subjected to
the notorious “two-finger” test: two fingers inserted into the vagina, to
establish its elasticity and to assess whether the victim is “habituated” to
sex. This is despite the supreme court ruling in 2013 that someone who enjoyed
sex regularly could not be presumed to have consented in rape cases.
Only last month, a teenager was turned away from three
police stations in Bhopal when she tried to report a rape. She was only taken
seriously when her parents – both police officers – got involved.
Last month, too, Human Rights Watch published an 82-page
report citing the difficulties faced by women and girls in reporting sexual
assault.
There is so much further to go, says Maliwal.
“I am also a citizen of Delhi. I am a girl. Do I feel safe
when I walk at night? No I don’t and neither does any girl who is walking on
the streets in Delhi. That is what we have to change. Though we have achieved
so much, we have put in our effort, there is this complete apathy in the
system.”
Campaigner Yogita Bhayana has been helping Jyoti’s family
for the past five years. Like Maliwal, she was on the receiving end of police
violence for joining the 2012 protests. But for a while, she thought it might
be a turning point.
“We all saw the rage and were beaten up by the police. There
was some kind of silver lining that we were seeing at that time,” she says.
“We were hopeful that things might change for betterment.
So, we just took it like that. One year passed, two years passed, three years
passed… I think we get to hear more cases. Instead of being eradicated, the
incidents of rapes were increasing every day. The saddest part is that there is
nothing done on prevention.
“Nobody talks about it. Has anybody come forward and asked
what happened after Nirbhaya? Has the scenario of women safety improved in
Delhi? People are not bothered about it.”
She is scathing about what she regards as multiple
government failures.
“Everybody is in denial mode. They are just not ready to acknowledge
the problem. First of all, they have to acknowledge the issue and then address
it.
“If you look at the records, all these crimes are done
mostly by juveniles. There lies the problem. We have to address the problem
from there. I believe if you have the right value system early enough, we can
prevent crimes against women.”
Even the words used to refer to sexual harassment of women –
“eve-teasing”, so-called as a reference to Eve’s role in the biblical fall of
man, implying that the victim is responsible for provoking the harassment –
demonstrate the mountain to climb.
That’s the attitude the police take, says Bhayana. “If you
go to the police station or court with a complaint of eve-teasing, they will
just throw you out, saying it is a petty issue,” she says. “People are also not
sensitive enough to understand that eve-teasers are potential rapists. There is
a typical mindset issue here also. In most of the cases, people just don’t
understand the gravity of the issue.”
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Outside Jyoti’s parents’ apartment, the smog has worsened.
Asha stands on the balcony, looks out at the city and contemplates what has
changed in the past five years. The best thing is that women are starting to
report rapes to the police, she says.
“There is an awareness now. Earlier, women used to hide such
cases owing to social pressure and they never used to report to the local
administration. That area has undergone a significant change.”
The young are trying to tackle the issue, she says, but still
more needs to be done.
“It is true that the law was amended, but the approach still
remains the same. If we don’t change our mindset and the approach of our
system, we cannot reduce crime against women in India.”
They always treated their daughter and their sons the same,
says Badrinath. Only when everyone does the same will change come. But at least
people are starting to understand that change is possible.
“When we started the fight, we were alone. Now we have many
people by our side,” he says.
Back on the bus trundling through the night towards Dwarka,
a couple more passengers get on. Like every other passenger tonight, they are
men.
Five years after Jyoti Singh’s death shocked the nation and
the world, most young women feel it is still too dangerous to venture out alone
on to the streets of their city at night.
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