WUNRN
INDIA - 4 SENTENCED TO DEATH IN RAPE
CASE THAT RIVETED INDIA
By Ellen Barry - September 13, 2013
NEW DELHI - Four men convicted of a brutal gang rape were
sentenced Friday to die by hanging, a decision met with grim satisfaction from
the victim’s parents and triumphant cheers from the crowd outside the
courthouse, where some held up pictures of bodies in nooses.
The
four men – a fruit vendor, a bus attendant, a gym handyman and an unemployed
man – were found guilty on Tuesday of raping a young woman on a moving bus last
December, penetrating her with a metal rod and inflicting grave internal
injuries, then dumping her out on the roadside.
The country was riveted by the story of the woman, who died of her injuries
two weeks later, and tens of thousands of people flooded the streets to demand
tougher policing and prosecution of sex crimes.
But until the last minute it was unclear whether this
would lead to death sentences in a country where liberal and populist impulses
have strained against one another for decades, reserving the death sentences
for “the rarest of rare cases.”
The police had cordoned off the area and tied up a row
of horses beside the Saket courthouse on Friday, braced to control the crowd if
it erupted. India has executed only three people in the last nine years – two
for terrorism, and one for the rape and murder of a young girl.
“For us, justice means death,” said Mohan Singh, the
victim’s great-uncle, moments before the hearing began. “This family raised her
with a lot of love. She will never come back.”
During the trial, defense attorneys invoked the “rarest
of the rare” language laid out in a 1980 Supreme Court decision that overturned
a death sentence. One cited the words of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India’s
independence movement: “God gives life and he alone can take it, not manmade
courts.” They also invoked mitigating circumstances, such as young age and
poverty of the defendants, or the fact that they had been drinking,
undercutting the notion that the crime was premeditated.
But their arguments have been drowned out by cries for
execution – including from the victim herself, who before her death told a
court official that her attackers “should be burned alive.” Protesters have
congregated regularly outside the courthouse, chanting “Hang the rapists,” and
on Friday they turned their wrath on the defense attorneys, forcing one to rush
from the crowd.
Rosy John, 62, a housewife watching the furor outside
the courtroom this week, said her only objection to the death sentence was that
it was too humane a punishment.
“After death, they will get freedom,” she said. “They
should be tortured and given shocks their whole life. They have made so many
people suffer, including their own families.”
Polls show that Indians remain ambivalent about using
the death penalty, with 40 percent of respondents saying it should be
abolished, according to a survey by CNN, IBN and The Hindu, a respected daily
newspaper. Among the vocal opponents of using it in this case were a number of
women’s rights groups.
The writer Nilanjana Roy warned that executions would
circumvent the more difficult question of why Indian girls and women are so
vulnerable to sexual violence, most often at the hands of people they know.
“A base but very human part of me would like them to
suffer as much as they made that woman suffer,” she wrote in an editorial in
The Hindu, going on to envision the result if convicted rapists were hanged
consistently for a year: 10,000 neighbors, shopkeepers, tutors, grandfathers,
fathers and brothers.
“I wish I could believe that this sort of mass public
execution — if we agreed that this was the way forward — would do more than
slake our collective need for vengeance,” Ms. Roy wrote. “But I don’t believe
in fairy tales.”
Though there were six men on the bus when the woman was
attacked, two were not sentenced on Friday. One defendant, Ram Singh, who was
driving the bus at times during the assault, hanged himself with his bedsheet
in his Delhi prison cell in March. A second defendant, who has not been named
because he is a juvenile, was sentenced last month to three years in a
detention center — the heaviest sentence possible in India’s juvenile justice
system.
Four of the assailants had grown up in Ravidas camp, a
warren of narrow lanes and makeshift houses on a roadside in South Delhi.
Neighbors in the camp turned furiously on the defendants during the initial uproar
over the rape, saying they had brought shame and dishonor to the community,
and, nine months later, some are still livid.
“Only if they get strict punishment will men in the
country change,” said Amravati Singh, 35, saying she hoped the defendants never
saw Ravidas, or their families, again. But others said their feelings had
mellowed during the nine months that have elapsed. Leelavati, 40, said she had
known the men since they were children, and they were not as bad as they
appeared in the press.
“The punishment should be for the crimes they committed,” she said. “They should not all be beaten with one stick to satisfy the public.”