Four men were convicted yesterday of the “cold-blooded” murder of a woman who was raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi, a crime that shook India and forced the country to confront sexual violence in a society undergoing wrenching change.
The four – a bus cleaner, gym instructor, fruit seller and an unemployed man – face hanging, the maximum penalty for murder. The trial judge will hear prosecution and defence arguments on sentencing today, when he could deliver his ruling.
The minimum sentence the men could get is life imprisonment, two defence lawyers said.
“She has got justice today. We are very happy,” said the father of the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist who was attacked on December 16. “We are very confident that all of them will be hanged.”
Judge Yogesh Khanna said he had relied in part on the dying declaration of the victim in finding the men guilty.
As he read the verdict, the mother of the victim sat with tears in her eyes, just a few feet from the four men who stood flanked by policemen against a wall in the court.
The victim, who came from a lower-middle class family and worked in a call centre while she studied, cannot be named for legal reasons, but Indian media have dubbed her Nirbhaya, a Hindi word meaning fearless.
She became a symbol of the daily dangers women face in a country where a rape is reported on average every 21 minutes and acid attacks and incidents of molestation are common.
The case has resonated with thousands of urban Indians who took to the streets in fury after the attack. The victim’s path through education onto the first rungs of middle-class life seemed to epitomise the aspirations of millions of young women in a society where many men believe women should stay at home.
Bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Singh, gym instructor Vinay Sharma, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta, and unemployed Mukesh Singh lured the woman and a male friend onto the bus as the pair returned home from watching a movie at a shopping mall.
As the bus drove through the streets of the capital, the men repeatedly raped and tortured the victim with a metal bar before dumping her and her friend, naked and semi-conscious, on the road. She died in a Singapore hospital two weeks later of internal injuries.
In his 240-page judgment, Judge Khanna slammed the “inconsistent” defence. Three of the men said they were never on the bus, and another said he was driving and knew nothing of the crime, despite DNA evidence and bite marks on the women’s body that placed them at the scene.
Khanna said the attackers pulled the woman’s intestines from her body with metal rods and their bare hands. He accused the men of cold-bloodedly killing their “helpless victim”.
The verdict capped a seven-month trial, often held behind closed doors.