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4 Sentenced to Death in Rape Case That Riveted India Many Doubt Death Sentences Will Stem India Sexual Attacks
(about 11 hours later)
NEW DELHI — Four men convicted of a brutal gang rape and murder were sentenced Friday to die by hanging, a decision met with satisfaction on the part of the victim’s parents and triumphant cheers from the crowd outside the courthouse, where some held up makeshift nooses and pictures of hanging bodies. NEW DELHI — There was no mistaking the whoop of joy that rose outside Saket District Court on Friday, when word got out that four men convicted in last December’s horrific gang rape and murder had been sentenced to death by hanging. People burst into applause. They hugged whoever was beside them. They pumped the air with their fists.
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 on the roadside. “We are the winners now,” said a woman holding a placard. Sweat had dried into white rivulets on her face, but she had the look of a woman who had, finally, gotten what she wanted. And it was true: A wave of protests after the December rape have set remarkable changes in motion in India, a country where for decades vicious sexual harassment has been dismissed indulgently, called “eve-teasing.”
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 some of India’s most ardent women’s rights advocates hung back from Friday’s celebration, skeptical that four hangings would do anything to stem violence against women, a problem whose proportions are gradually coming into focus.
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.” News of the decision was met with a wave of jubilation on the street outside. “I think a lot of people were hugging each other because they thought this evil is localized, and it will be wiped out, and that is not the case,” said Karuna Nundy, a litigator who has argued before India’s Supreme Court. “The sad truth is that it is not a deterrent.”
“This is the beginning of freedom for Indian women today,” said Raman Deep Kaur, 38, a cosmetologist. “Today we are free, because these men are going to be killed.” From the moment it broke, the story of the 23-year-old woman dubbed “Nirbhaya,” or “fearless,” awoke real rage in the population.
It is far from clear, however, that the four men will be executed in the near future — or at all. The order must be confirmed by India’s High Court, and the condemned may appeal the ruling to the High Court, Supreme Court and the president, a process that can drag on for many years. Hoping for a ride home from a movie theater last December, she and a male companion boarded a private bus, not realizing that the six men aboard had been cruising Delhi in search of a victim. After knocking her friend unconscious, they took her to the back of the bus and raped her, then penetrated her with a metal rod, inflicting grave internal injuries. An hour later, they dumped them out on the road, bleeding and naked. She died two weeks later of her injuries.
Though there are 477 people on death row in India, only three have been executed in the last nine years. Young men and women, mobilized through social media, joined protests that spread across India, demanding tougher laws and more effective policing.
Sadashiv Gupta, a defense lawyer for one of the men, Pawan Gupta, said he had reassured his client that the ruling would very likely be commuted to life imprisonment. “As a woman, and mother, I understand how protesters feel,” Sonia Gandhi, India’s most powerful female politician and the president of the governing Congress Party, said at the time. “Today we pledge that the victim will get justice.”
“I met with my client and I told him, ‘You are going to get the death penalty, take it in stride and don’t panic,' ” Mr. Gupta said. “I think he shall not be hanged.” After intensive public discussion of the case, some changes followed with extraordinary speed. Reports of rape have skyrocketed; in the first eight months of this year, Delhi’s police force registered 1,121 cases, more than double the number from the same period in 2011 and the highest number since 2000. The number of reported molestations has increased six-fold in the same period.
During the trial, defense lawyers 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 Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence movement: “God gives life and he alone can take it, not man-made courts.” They also invoked mitigating circumstances, like the young age and poverty of the defendants, or the fact that they had been drinking, undercutting the notion that the crime was premeditated. The government created a fast-track court for rape cases and introduced new laws, criminalizing acts like voyeurism and stalking and making especially brutal rapes into a capital crime. Scholars have delved into the social changes that may be contributing to the problem, as new arrivals in India’s huge cities find themselves unemployed and hopeless, stuck in “the space below the working class,” as the writer Rajrishi Singhal recently put it in an editorial in The Hindu.
But Judge Yogesh Khanna clearly rejected those arguments, saying this crime embodied “the rarest of the rare,” and invoked the possibility of a larger wave of violence against women. But many were thinking of something more basic — punishing the six men (one, a juvenile, got a three-year sentence in August and the driver was found dead in his cell in March) who attacked the woman in the bus that December night. It was those people who found their way to Saket courthouse on Friday. Many came like pilgrims, hoping to find closure in a case that had haunted them.
“In these times when crimes against women are on the rise, the court cannot turn a blind eye to this gruesome act,” he said, according to reporters in the courtroom. Kiran Khullar arrived in a wheelchair, accompanied by her daughter, 17. “I have come here as a mother,” she said. “I came here only to see these men get the death penalty.”
At this, one of the defendants, Vinay Sharma, broke down in tears and cried loudly. A 62-year-old grandmother, Arun Puri, had scribbled the words “Hang them! Hang them!” on her dupatta, a traditional scarf. Asked whether she felt sorry for the defendants’ parents, she did not flinch. “If these men were my children,” she said, “I would have strangled them to death myself.”
A. P. Singh, who defended two of the men, called the decision “completely unfair” and said it had been made under intense political pressure at a moment when Indian leaders are looking ahead to parliamentary elections next spring. Rosy John, 62, a homemaker watching the furor outside the courtroom, said her only objection to the death sentence was that it was too humane a punishment.
“I will contest this case until the last moments of my life,” he said. “After death, they will get freedom,” she said. “They should be tortured and given shocks their whole life.”
Defense arguments were 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 lawyers, forcing one to rush from the crowd. In fact, it is unlikely the four men will be executed swiftly. The order must be confirmed by India’s High Court, and all four defendants may appeal to the High Court, the Supreme Court and the president for clemency. Some 477 people are presently on death row, inching through a process that often drags on for five or six years. Three people have been executed since 2004, and there were no executions for eight years before that.
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. Sadashiv Gupta, who defended one of the men, a fruit seller named Pawan Gupta, said he had assured his client that the sentence was likely to be commuted to life in prison, as most are.
“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.” “I told him, ‘You are going to get the death penalty, take it in stride and don’t panic,’ ” said Mr. Gupta, sweating in his stiff white collar outside the courthouse. “I think he shall not be hanged.”
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. Polls show that Indians remain ambivalent about using the death penalty, with 40 percent saying it should be abolished, according to a survey by CNN, IBN and The Hindu, a respected daily newspaper.
The writer Nilanjana S. 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. For many months already, advocates for women have questioned whether death sentences in the December case would distract people from the more difficult question of why Indian girls and women are so vulnerable to sexual violence.
“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 opinion article 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. “A base but very human part of me would like them to suffer as much as they made that woman suffer,” wrote Nilanjana S. Roy in The Hindu, noting that most rapists are not strangers. She went 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.”“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 New 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. Ms. Nundy, the Supreme Court litigator, said the real challenge lies in shaking up the criminal justice system, which is desperately short of judges and mired in outdated thinking about violence against women. Upon receiving a report of rape, she said, police investigators still routinely use a “two-finger test” to determine whether the victim has a prior sexual history; if the answer is yes, she said, the likelihood of a conviction plummets.
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. “Rape is not just something that is localized — you find these people, you wipe them out, you’re done,” she said.
“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. Still, there were some people whose satisfaction on Friday could not be punctured. Among them was Gaurav Singh, 20, the younger brother of the victim in the December gang rape.
“The punishment should be for the crimes they committed,” she said. “They should not all be beaten with one stick to satisfy the public.” She was the firstborn and the star of the family, which had left a village of thatched-roof huts for the dizzying sprawl of Delhi, 600 miles away. To pay for her tuition, her father had sold most of his land in the village, borrowed money from family members and worked 16-hour shifts handling luggage at the airport. She had promised to return the favor by paying for her younger brothers’ schooling once she became a physiotherapist.
Gaurav, who plans to become a pilot, pondered the question of mercy on Friday night.
“They never gave my sister a chance,” he said in a telephone interview.
He noted that she had managed to make her own wishes known, telling a court official, who visited her in a hospital before she died, that her assailants should be “burned alive.” He said the family would wait for the day they are hanged, and, in the meantime, “keep the fight going that my sister has ignited.”
“We know she can’t come back,” he said. “But there is a satisfaction that these men will be eliminated. We get some peace from that.”

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.