[The 23-year-old, Jyoti Singh Pandey — dubbed “Nirbhaya,” or “fearless,” by Indian journalists — was a kind of avatar of aspirational India. Her father, who earns around $200 a month as an airport baggage handler, had sold family land to pay for her training as a physiologist. Sometimes, he called her “beta,” the Hindi word for “son.”]
By Ellen Barry
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The mother of Jyoti Singh
Pandey, who was raped and murdered in 2012,
leaving India’s Supreme
Court on Friday. Credit Rajat
Gupta/European Pressphoto
Agency
|
NEW
DELHI — India’s Supreme
Court upheld on Friday the death sentence for four men who were found guilty of
raping and disemboweling a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in 2012, a crime
that came to embody the menace lurking in India’s sprawling, chaotic cities.
The decision was unusual. While Indian trial
courts aggressively impose death sentences, 95 percent of them have been
overturned or commuted by higher courts in recent years, a recent study showed,
typically in consideration of “mitigating circumstances” like slipshod
investigations or the potential of the accused to be rehabilitated.
The “Delhi gang rape,” as it came to be
known, riveted the public from the start, setting off street protests and
months of play-by-play coverage.
The 23-year-old, Jyoti Singh Pandey — dubbed
“Nirbhaya,” or “fearless,” by Indian journalists — was a kind of avatar of
aspirational India. Her father, who earns around $200 a month as an airport
baggage handler, had sold family land to pay for her training as a
physiologist. Sometimes, he called her “beta,” the Hindi word for “son.”
Returning home from a movie at a crowded mall
with a male friend, she boarded a private bus to discover that it was already
occupied by a group of young men, working-class migrants who had been drinking.
While the bus circled the city, the men
attacked the pair, took Ms. Pandey to the back of the bus and raped her, at one
point penetrating her with a metal rod and perforating her colon. The two were
dumped on the roadside, naked and bleeding, and remained there for nearly two
hours before police officers arrived and took them to a hospital. Her attackers
were identified, in some cases, by bite marks that covered her body. She died
two weeks later of her injuries.
Her story ignited public fury. At court
hearings, activists would stand with heavy nooses looped around their necks,
chanting: “Hang the rapists! Hang the rapists!” Flamboyant celebrity lawyers,
who agreed to defend the accused, were frequently immobilized by a scrum of
cameramen.
A crucial factor in the court’s decision to
uphold the death penalty was the demand of India’s “collective conscience,”
said Justice Dipak Misra in the court’s ruling on Friday, which cited a “
‘tsunami’ of shock in the mind of the collective.”
He wrote: “It is absolutely obvious that the
accused persons had found an object for enjoyment in her. It sounds like a
story from a different world, where humanity has been treated with irreverence.”
After the decision was announced, the
courtroom broke out in applause. “They should be castrated first!” one lawyer
called out. Ms. Pandey’s mother wept with relief, embracing the people who
surrounded her, while her father, Badri Nath Singh, seemed to exhale.
“It is most important for us that these men
should be hanged,” he said. “What my heart was saying is that this kind of
crime has never happened in the past, and it will never happen in the future.
It never entered into my mind that they would not be hanged. It will instill
fear in the hearts of rapists.”
Legal experts noted that public outrage over
rapes is selective, and they questioned whether it should be factored into
legal judgments.
“It’s not as though every time there is a
rape there is a convulsion in India society,” said Vrinda Grover, a Supreme
Court lawyer. “I wish there were.”
Just a day earlier, Mumbai’s High Court had
finally upheld the convictions of 11 men in the 2002 gang rape of Bilkis Bano,
a Muslim who was assaulted by a group of Hindu men during religious riots in
the western state of Gujarat. But that case, which has crept through the legal
system for 15 years, has never generated public outrage.
Ms. Grover, who opposes the death penalty,
said she did not believe the execution of the four men — a fruit vendor, a bus
attendant, a gym handyman and an unemployed man — would serve as a deterrent to
future rapists.
“It’s very easy to demonize a few people and
hang them,” she said. “This is almost like a societal orgasm, that we are all
good and we have eliminated from our midst all the bad men.”
Follow Ellen Barry on Twitter @EllenBarryNYT. Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.
