Delhi rapist says victim shouldn't have fought back
In
2012 an Indian student was violently raped on a moving bus in Delhi and died of
horrific internal injuries. Leslee Udwin spoke to one of the rapists on death
row while spending two years making a film about the case. She came away shocked
by India's treatment of women - but inspired by those seeking change.
The
horrifying details of the rape had led me to expect deranged monsters.
Psychopaths. The truth was far more chilling. These were ordinary, apparently
normal and certainly unremarkable men.
On
16 December 2012, the 23-year-old woman had been to see a film, the Life of Pi,
with a male friend. At 8.30pm they boarded an off-duty bus, with six men on
board, five adults and a juvenile. The men beat the friend and each raped the
woman in turn, before assaulting her viciously with an iron instrument.
Mukesh
Singh, the driver of the bus, described to me every detail of what happened
during and after the incident. While prosecutors say the men took turns to drive
the bus, and all took part in the rape, Singh says he stayed at the wheel
throughout.
Along
with three of the other attackers, Singh is now appealing against his death
sentence. In 16 hours of interviews, Singh showed no remorse and kept expressing
bewilderment that such a fuss was being made about this rape, when everyone was
at it.
"A
decent girl won't roam around at nine o'clock at night. A girl is far more
responsible for rape than a boy," he said.
Mukesh
Singh is one of five convicted of the crime - his brother Ram died in prison
before the trial
"Housework
and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing
wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20% of girls are good."
People
"had a right to teach them a lesson" he suggested - and he said the woman should
have put up with it.
"When
being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the
rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after 'doing her', and only hit the boy,"
he said.
Chillingly,
he went on: "The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls.
Now when they rape, they won't leave the girl like we did. They will kill her.
Before, they would rape and say, 'Leave her, she won't tell anyone.' Now when
they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl.
Death."
I
had the long and shocking list of injuries the young woman had sustained, read
out to him. I tried, really hard, to search for a glimmer of regret. There was
none.
It
would be easier to process this heinous crime if the perpetrators were monsters,
and just the rotten apples in the barrel, aberrant in nature. Perhaps then,
those of us who believe that capital punishment serves a purpose, and I am not
among them, could wring their hands in relief when they hang.
For
me the truth couldn't be further from this - and perhaps their hanging will even
mask the real problem, which is that these men are not the disease, they are the
symptoms.
My
encounter with Singh and four other rapists left me feeling like my soul had
been dipped in tar, and there were no cleaning agents in the world that could
remove the indelible stain.
One
of the men I interviewed, Gaurav, had raped a five-year-old girl. I spent three
hours filming his interview as he recounted in explicit detail how he had
muffled her screams with his big hand.
He
was sitting throughout the interview and had a half-smile playing on his lips
throughout - his nervousness in the presence of a camera, perhaps. At one point
I asked him to tell me how tall she was. He stood up, and with his eerie
half-smile indicated a height around his knees.
When
I asked him how he could cross the line from imagining what he wanted to do, to
actually doing it - given her height, her eyes, her screams - he looked at me as
though I was crazy for even asking the question and said: "She was beggar girl.
Her life was of no value."
These
offences against women and girls are a part of the story, but the full story
starts with a girl not being as welcome as a boy, from birth. When sweets are
distributed at the birth of a boy, not of a girl. When the boy child is
nourished more than the girl, when a girl's movements are restricted and her
freedoms and choices are curtailed, when she is sent as a domestic slave to her
husband's home… If a girl is accorded no value, if a girl is worth less than a
boy, then it stands to reason there will be men who believe they can do what
they like with them.
I
spoke to two lawyers who had defended the murderers of the 23-year-old student
at their trial, and what they said was extremely revealing.
"In
our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6:30 or
7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with any unknown person," said one of the lawyers,
ML Sharma.
"You
are talking about man and woman as friends. Sorry, that doesn't have any place
in our society. We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for
a woman."
The
other lawyer, AP Singh, had said in a previous televised interview: "If my
daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and
allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most
certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of
my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight."
He
did not disown that comment when I put it to him. "This is my stand," he said.
"I still today stand on that reply."
Gender-inequality
is the primary tumour and rape, trafficking, child marriage, female foeticide,
honour killings and so on, are the metastases. And in India the problem is not
lack of laws - after all, India is a democracy and a civilised, rapidly
developing country. The problem is implementation of them.
Article
14 of the Indian Constitution confers absolute equal rights on women. The giving
of dowry is a legal offence, but many families maintain the custom nonetheless.
Until and unless the mindset changes, the cancer will thrive and continue to
spread.
But
what compelled me to leave my family and go to Delhi to make this film was not
the rape itself, nor the horror of it. It was what followed.
Starting
on the day after the rape, and for over a month, ordinary men and women came out
on to the streets of India's cities in unprecedented numbers to protest. They
braved a freezing December and a ferocious government crackdown of water
cannons, baton charges, and teargas shells. Their courage and determination to
be heard was extraordinarily inspiring.
There
was something momentous about their presence and perseverance - reminiscent to
me of the crowds that had thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo - a gathering of civil
society that demanded a conversation that was long overdue.
It
occurred to me that, for all its appalling record of violence against women and
relentless rapes, here was India leading the world by example. I couldn't recall
another country, in my lifetime, standing up with such tenacity for women, for
me. And I knew at once that I simply had to use whatever talents and skills I
had, to amplify their cries of "enough is enough!" which were reverberating
across the whole world.
As
is often the case with extremely challenging endeavours where the human stakes
are high, the main struggle for me was the emotional and psychological toll the
work imposed.
When
you look into the blackest recesses of the human heart, you cannot but be
depressed and deeply disappointed. I woke one morning on the shoot, wet from
head to toe, bathed in sweat and fear and my heart knocking against my ribcage.
This was a panic attack. I phoned home thinking my husband would answer, but my
13-year-old daughter, Maya, did.
She
immediately sensed I was in trouble. And when I told her, in tears, that I was
coming home because this was too big for me, the mountain was just too high to
scale, she said: "Mummy, you can't come home because I and my generation of
girls is relying on you."
What
carried me through, apart from Maya, was what had inspired me in the first
place: the new-thinkers, especially among the youth, in India who want change
and are clamouring for it. And I am absolutely optimistic that we are now on the
cusp of change.
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