This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.
On 16th December 2012
at around 8:30 p.m., a 23-year-old medical student
was on her way home from a movie with a male friend
The couple boarded a private bus, which claimed to be going their way.
Her friend was badly beaten and she was dragged to the back...
where she was gang-raped by six men,
as the bus drove round and round the highways.
According to the latest government figures,
a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes.
But most rapes are unreported.
This rape led to unprecedented protests erupting across India.
The silence has been broken.
We want justice! We want justice!
This is our country too. You can't force yourself on us.
Justice! We want justice! We want...
We want justice! We want justice!
India's Daughter The story of Jyoti Singh
Jyoti would open my eyes as I slept.
She'd call out, "Mummy, Mummy!"
She'd hold my finger as we walked.
She'd ask, "Why has the moon come out?"
What answer could I give her?
Jyoti means "light".
We were given a gift of light and happiness when she was born.
In many homes, they celebrate when a boy is born,
but when a girl is born, people don't rejoice as much.
We gave out sweets and everyone said, "You're celebrating as if it's a boy."
So we said we're equally happy having a boy or a girl.
From childhood, she wanted to become a doctor.
My brother is a judge. So I said, "You also become a judge."
She said, "Papa, isn't there anything above a judge?"
I said, "Not that I know of. You tell me."
She said, "No one is above a doctor."
We told her we don't have the money. How will we make her a doctor?
She said, "Papa, whatever money you've saved for my wedding,"
"use that to educate me."
We realised that, without our children, what will we do?
What would life be worth?
In 2006, Jyoti's mother asked me
to tutor her daughter.
Jyoti's family is traditional. But their thinking is modern.
We sold our ancestral land to pay her fees.
My brothers didn't like this one bit.
The first thing they said was, "Why are you selling it for a girl?"
Jyoti used to say that the first and biggest problem in India is mentality.
The differences between a girl and a boy are created in people's minds from birth.
In society, if we hear the same things about boys and girls,
obviously a certain view is created.
You can't clap with one hand. It takes two hands to clap.
A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night.
A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.
The moment she came out from her house,
with a boy who was neither her husband nor her brother,
she left her morality and reputation of a doctor as well as a girl, in the house,
and she came out just like a woman.
Jyoti studied at medical college in Dehradun.
Her family was very poor.
Her father worked as a labourer at the airport.
She had to work part-time to pay for hostel expenses.
Her English was really good.
So she worked night shifts in an international call centre.
She worked from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m.
I asked her, "How can you manage all this?"
She said, "I have to. And I can!"
She would sleep just 3 or 4 hours a night.
And she had dreams. Many dreams. Big dreams.
She wanted to help the poor.
She wanted to build a hospital in her ancestral village
where there were no medical facilities.
She always used to say, "A girl can do anything."
Boy and girl are not equal.
Housework and housekeeping is for girls,
not roaming in discos and bars at night...
...doing wrong things, wearing the wrong clothes.
About 20% of girls are good.
A female is just like a flower.
It gives a good-looking...
...very softness performance, pleasant.
But on the other hand, a man is just like a thorn.
Strong, tough enough.
That flower always needs protection.
If you put that flower in a gutter, it is spoilt.
If you put that flower in a temple, it will be worshipped.
Ram Singh, my brother.
He'd break all the limits.
He was capable of anything.
Vinay was always fighting.
There is nothing good about him.
He worked as a helper in a gym and used to fight a lot.
Once he beat up a guy so badly that he had internal injuries.
He used to take injections to increase his power.
Once he took a double dose and couldn't be controlled.
Pawan had a fruit stall. And he also liked to fight.
He used to hang out in the bus, chat and roam around with us.
Akshay Thakur also used to help on the bus.
He'd clean, wake my brother, make tea, bring milk.
He has a wife and baby. He cries and asks, "What will happen?"
The juvenile is 17.
His case is separate in the Juvenile Justice Board.
He also helped on the bus. He used to clean.
He was very sharp at tricking people onto the bus.
Me and my brother lived in the Ravidas Colony in R.K. Puram.
Our house number is 49.
Pawan and Vinay also lived there.
On the day of the incident on December 16th,
the juvenile came for the first time since he left the job on the bus.
Akshay was hanging out at our place. He had just washed the bus.
My brother came around 5 or 6 p.m.
And he said, "Let's cook. I've brought alcohol."
So he drank. A lot. Heavy drinking.
My brother and Akshay drank a whole bottle.
We met Vinay and Pawan with my brother. And went out to party.
They said, "We've got money. Let's go to G.B. Road and have some fun."
G.B. Road, that's where "wrong" things are done.
She had just finished her final exams and had come home.
She was very happy.
She was relaxed because her course was finished.
It was December 16th, just a normal Sunday.
I got up, had tea and put clothes in the washing machine.
She told her mother to help me while she cooked food.
She had 6 months of internship.
After that, all our sorrows would end.
Happiness was a few steps ahead.
She said, "Mum, Dad, now you don't have to worry any more."
"Your little girl is a doctor. Now everything will be fine."
It seems that God didn't like this. He ended everything there.
Her friend Awnindra called.
She said, "Mummy, I'll go see a film."
She said, "On Monday, I start my internship, so I won't have free time."
As she left, she said, "Bye, Mummy. I'll be back in 2 or 3 hours."
Jyoti's friend wanted to see an action film,
but Jyoti chose "Life of Pi".
The girl was with some unknown boy who took her on a date.
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.
If very important, if very necessary,
she should go outside,
but she should go with their family members,
like uncle, father, mother,
grandfather, grandmother.
Etc, etc.
She should not go, in night hours,
with her boyfriend.
Whenever there's a crime, the girl is blamed, "She should not go out."
"She shouldn't roam around so late or wear such clothes."
It's the boys who should be accused and asked why they do this.
They shouldn't do this.
They left our Indian culture.
They were under the imagination of the film culture,
in which they can do anything.
I haven't slept with anyone. Just once in the village.
We had gone for a wedding.
That was my first time. After that, it never happened again.
About 5 years ago.
People in the village believe that kissing from the mouth is bad.
The girl I met in the village said that we won't kiss.
We did it quickly and then left.
She should not be put on the streets just like food.
The 'lady', on the other hand, you can say the 'girl' or 'woman',
are more precious than a gem, than a diamond.
It is up to you how you want to keep that diamond in your hand.
If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out.
You can't stop it.
What was Jyoti's crime?
That she went out at night?
You are talking about man and woman as friends.
Sorry, that doesn't have any place in our society.
A woman means I immediately put the sex in his eyes.
We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.
The 15 or 20 minutes of the incident, I was driving the bus.
They switched off the lights.
My brother was the main guy.
They hit the boy and he just hid between the seats.
The girl was screaming, "Help me! Help me!"
My brother said, "Don't stop the bus. Keep driving!"
They hit her and dragged her to the back. Then they went in turns.
First the juvenile and Ram Singh.
After that, Akshay and the rest went.
Someone put his hand inside her and pulled out something long.
It was her intestines.
He said, "She's dead. Throw her out quickly."
First, they tried the back door, but it didn't open.
So they dragged her to the front.
They threw her out.
My drunk state wore off completely. I couldn't even control the steering.
I only drove the bus.
It's lies that my brother or Akshay took the steering. Only I drove.
People say this happened, that happened,
that the driver was changed.
Show me how we changed drivers,
and I'll accept I also went to the back and killed her.
It was Akshay Thakur and the juvenile's fault.
They brought alcohol in the bus.
We weren't here. We were in the village.
We've no idea what did or didn't happen.
It's the fault of those four.
Vinay, Pawan, Akshay and the juvenile...
Only the juvenile knows. Nobody was there.
Every Sunday, he was with Ram Singh.
We went straight home.
They were saying, "Where's their stuff?" It was in the front. The mobile, the watch.
Pawan put the shoes on, Akshay put the jacket on.
They wore the stuff. They had no fear.
And on the way, the juvenile said, "Sir, I threw it away."
"What I pulled out of her body, I threw it away."
"I wrapped it in cloth and threw it out."
We reached home in about 10 minutes.
We agreed no one would say anything,
and if the police got involved, no one would name names.
There was a lot of blood. Blood on the seats, blood on the floor.
Akshay and the juvenile both cleaned the bus.
Vinay had a lot of blood on his hands. He washed them at my house.
I went to sleep.
The rape was extremely brutal.
And it's something very unusual to find that
you not only rape the girl,
but you put an iron rod and take out her entrails.
I mean, this is something I can't understand.
What kind of human beings are these who do something like that?
I can't say why this incident - this accident - happened.
Mainly to teach them a lesson.
The idea of the gang rape is to send a message -
you are not to breach this boundary.
This is a boundary between us and you to do with power.
He would like to create a damage.
He will put his hand... Insert, hit!
It is just like that kind of action.
Beat him. Putting his hand forcefully inside.
The main mental set-up is, "It's our right."
"We are just in enjoyment mode,"
"and everybody has a right to enjoyment."
"Big people, you know, somebody who has money, do it by payment."
"We have the courage, so we do it by our courage."
That's what they feel.
My brother has done such things before,
but this time his intention was not to rape or fight.
He had the right to explain to them.
He asked the boy why he was out with a girl so late at night.
The boy said, "It's none of your business," and slapped him.
There was fighting, beating. Those who raped, raped.
They thought that if they do "wrong things" with them,
then they won't tell anyone.
Out of shame. They'd learn a lesson.
Before this event,
there was still a very, very strong culture of shame around rape,
that to be raped was deeply shaming,
that to be raped was worse than to be dead, in fact.
And so you would get politicians saying the most extraordinary things
about rape victims, that it was better that a rape victim had died
because had she lived, she would just be a walking corpse.
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.
On December 16th, it was very cold. I was patrolling in this area.
I heard a voice from the left screaming, "Help! Help!"
I saw a boy and girl lying on the ground, naked. Both were here.
I went to Hotel 37 and got a bed sheet and a bottle of water.
I tore the bed sheet into two
and gave the girl and the boy a piece each.
About 30-35 men gathered, but no one helped.
I even said, "Please help," but no one stepped forward.
After some time,
a PCR van arrived and they were taken to the hospital.
She looked like a cow looks after giving birth to a calf.
She would always let us know if she was running late.
Her phone was not connecting.
Then the call came from Safdarjung hospital.
The doctor asked, "Who are you?" I said, "The father."
He asked, "Do you know what's happened?"
I said, "No, just that there's been an accident."
He said "No, she has been raped."
At around 11:30 p.m., she was brought to the gynae casualty room
by the police constables.
She was bleeding very much from her vagina.
So...
Definitely she was scared.
'She was conscious but she was not sobbing out of her pain,'
'she was describing everything in clear detail.'
'She was slapped on her face, she was kicked on her abdomen'
'and she had multiple injuries over her body,'
'over her private parts.'
There were multiple bite marks over her face, over her lips,
over her limbs.
The surgeon said, "I've been practising for 20 years,"
"and we have not come across a case like this."
"The system by which the human body functions is all gone."
He said, "We do not know which parts to join."
They said, "She will not survive more than 2 to 3 days."
"Given what's happened, it's hard to believe she's survived."
"We do not understand how she is alive."
She saw me and started to cry.
I told her not to worry, everything would be alright.
I said, "Whatever happens, we are with you."
When I fully examined her, and came to know the history,
the only thing I had in my mind was why did this happen to her?
Why did she have to bear all this?
This discussion remained in my mind for months and months
and I still don't know why they did this to her?
A young woman was gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi last night.
Not only was she raped, she was brutally beaten
and thrown off the bus.
It was the kind of brazen attack that explains why Delhi,
our national capital, has been called India's rape capital.
The accused started the argument with the boy when they asked him
inside the bus what he was doing with a girl at that time of the night.
Since the couple retaliated
and, especially the girl, fought back very hard,
the men got even more angry and they thought they must teach her a lesson.
We were able to arrest the first accused.
We were able to identify the bus within a span time of 24 hours.
We checked all the hotels along the route and on one of the hotels,
there was one particular camera which was facing to the road.
The CCTV footage of that camera,
we noticed that there was a bus which had crossed that area twice
which was unusual for a bus which was going on a highway
and on closer examination of that bus,
we came to note that this bus is a school bus.
These were the clues because of which we were able to
narrow down our search to 50-60 such buses.
We got information that near the temple at Ravidas camp, R.K. Puram,
the bus in which this incident took place was parked.
I went there with my team and found the bus
and the accused Ram Singh was in the bus.
The moment we spotted the bus, he jumped down and started running.
We arrested him and he admitted his offence.
Four out of the six men were staying in the Ravidas camp.
Pawan and Vinay, Mukesh and Ram Singh.
For the first time in this case, we had used dental forensics.
The bite marks on the body of the victims matched with the...
..dental impression of one of the accused
which was a very clinching piece of evidence.
They matched Akshay's and my brother's.
They were all doing wrong things.
All should be punished. I was there and I am also punished.
The whole idea was, the case was so brutal, the conviction,
if it is earlier,
it is much better, it gives a good message to the society.
When most of us heard about the case
very soon after it happened on December 17th,
the very next day,
and almost immediately the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University,
there is a very powerful student union there
and strong movement there.
So student organisations and the union from there
immediately came out on the streets to protest on the same day.
Happening to a young woman who represented
a symbol of new aspiration sent shock waves through the society.
In the last 15-20 years,
the economy has changed a lot in India
and it's created opportunities for young women
and single women to come and work
and it's raised expectations
across a range of classes of young, single women
of how they should be allowed to live their lives.
There are many gang rapes that take place in India
and they've been taking place over the years but somehow this caught
the imagination of people.
For one thing, it happened in the capital city.
It happened in an evening hour, which was not a late hour, eight o'clock,
a young girl and boy returning home from a movie.
I mean, it was the most normal kind of behaviour.
We will raise our voice and take our freedom!
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
- Tell our comrades we will fight! - We will fight! We will fight!
Give justice to Manorama Devi!
Give justice to Nilofer and Asiya!
Give justice to Soni Sori!
Almost all of the resources of this district, I'll say a strength of...
..more than 2,000 persons.
They were commanded by this special investigation team
and everything was put into this case.
There was a juvenile in conflict with law
who was subsequently arrested on 21st.
We woke up in the morning.
The police came here.
They said, "Your son has been caught, he has done such and such."
He'd been gone for three years.
I thought he had died somewhere.
When the police came, I found out he was still alive.
There was another accused, Akshay, who had fled to Bihar.
So he was arrested from Bihar on 21st of December.
The police told us to surrender him or the family will be destroyed.
I surrendered him to the police station.
I am sure my husband would not do such a thing.
Bad times will pass.
Wake up! Wake up!
We won't tolerate rape!
Long live woman's freedom! Your freedom, my freedom!
As per the criminal procedure code of India...
In such cases like murder,
rape and all these heinous cases,
the time we normally get for us to file a charge sheet
is 90 days
but we are supposed to file a charge sheet within the first 90 days,
but in this case,
we had filed a charge sheet in 17 days.
Immediately almost from day one,
it had stopped being about this case alone.
It had become about rape culture and about women's generalised anger
against being told that they could do something to actually remain safe.
It's a very safe city.
Absolutely safe city. Very safe city.
As safe as any other capital of a developing or developed country.
And safe in general sense and even safe for women.
It's always difficult to tell why one particular case and why...
You know, it's like a dam bursting.
It doesn't happen out of one case alone,
I think it's an accumulated anger that bursts out.
I think our pain united all of us
and I think there wasn't one single woman, you know,
on that day who didn't actually feel the pain that girl had gone through
so that I think is what brought us out on the streets.
It was gut-wrenching pain.
I painted a bunch of placards just saying,
"Women, take back your city."
Nothing, you know, not inciting violence or anything
and we're walking down to India Gate
and we get accosted by a truck full of policemen saying,
"You can't go here, it's not allowed."
They just decided that we're not going to let these women
question us any more, it's not their place to do that.
So we decided to challenge them.
We said, you know, we've got civil rights, you know,
you can't just stop us from going anywhere,
that's one of the freedoms that is granted to us constitutionally.
And then things got ugly.
They started pulling and dragging and shoving us
into a van saying, "We're putting you in lockdown now."
My husband tells me I'm stupid because I go and protest, you know,
without bothering about the consequences
but that day was a slap in my face.
I really thought that if you're an educated woman
and if you're courageous and you're outspoken,
you know, really what can the police do?
It was a completely peaceful protest and then within 20 minutes,
it turned into a warzone.
They went out day after day protesting.
It just showed that they wanted change.
They believed the change would take place.
It was the first time that young people had gone out to protest
without a leader, without being called by any political party.
And the media was all over the young people's protest.
They, day by day, showed how they were protesting
and I think that the government was then forced into setting up
a committee to try and calm things down a bit.
The Verma report was a special judicial committee
charged by the government of India
with canvassing all opinion
about how the problem of rape could be dealt with,
and 80,000 responses were sifted through
by this group of ex-senior judges.
It was a landmark report and it was striking in its extreme liberalism.
It made a number of very important recommendations.
For instance, that things must happen much faster
in the Indian judicial system.
The definition of sexual assault needed to be broadened,
that the language of modesty and shame
needed to be removed from the Indian Penal Code.
This was not just about rape and an amendment to a criminal law.
We were very determined that we are not going to let down society.
Offences against women was a part of the story.
The full story needed to be told.
We felt that we would fail that fantastic civil society
which gathered around India Gate with candles,
if we did not tell them the true story.
The constitution provides for equality.
It hasn't happened because the men don't allow it to happen.
And they feel that that's their hold on women and also it's because of
the historical tradition of patriarchy
which has been over the years embedded into men and into women.
There are a whole range of indicators
that women are not well treated.
Short of rape, there are high incidents of acid attacks,
high incidents of domestic beatings.
There is, of course, the extraordinary question of
the sex ratio differential in India,
i.e. the notion that there are missing women,
demographically speaking,
which seems to reflect a number of things,
but possibly pre-birth sex selection and feticide.
In Maharashtra in Bombay,
once when they discovered that there were 10,000 foetuses
that had been destroyed, 9,999 were female foetuses.
The conversation to deal with inequality was overdue in India.
Everyone was there, out in the open, demanding justice,
demanding accountability.
And when you do demand accountability,
establishments do feel highly threatened.
They first thought that this is a movement which can be
dispersed by use of tear gas shells, or hose pipes,
but extraordinary were these protestors.
One week on since the protesters have come out onto the streets of Indian cities,
the prime minister has broken his silence.
I feel deeply sad at the turn of events
leading to clashes between protesters and police forces.
Anger at this crime is justified,
but violence will serve no purpose.
And the protests kept coming, kept escalating and escalating,
not just in Delhi, but also in Calcutta and Bangalore and Mumbai.
This was something that was actually quite qualitatively different.
I really couldn't recall an event like this in India before.
This was, in my view, a very important
and momentous expression of hope by civil society.
Her condition deteriorated.
She was very troubled. She was in great pain.
We could not talk.
This is what I remember...
We were by her side in her last moments, but were helpless to do anything.
This is what hurts me so deeply and it's something I'll always remember.
Late last night, an ambulance took off for Singapore with the girl.
She's at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital,
one of the best hospitals in the world for trauma management
and organ transplant.
We just... Our only wish today is that she recovers
and that she comes back to us.
But I knew she would not recover.
Because the doctor had said that she will not be okay.
For a father
who once upon a time let his baby girl sleep over him,
who held her in his arms and played with her,
who held her finger and taught her to walk,
to have to set fire to that daughter during cremation by his very hands.
This is very difficult.
The most difficult.
When I remember this moment...
...I'm unable to speak. Words just don't come out.
We never realised how much we were attached to her.
But since she's left us, we've no idea how to start life again, where to start from.
I know nothing about her.
Now the papers say she was a medical student,
So I'm getting to know.
Once she went to the market with her friends.
A 10- or 12-year-old boy tried to snatch her purse and run away.
But a policeman caught him and started beating him.
Jyoti stopped the policeman from beating him.
She said, "This child will learn nothing from this."
She asked the boy, "Why did you do this?"
He said, "I also want new clothes like you people, I want shoes."
"I want a hamburger."
Jyoti bought him everything he wanted.
And she said, "Promise me you won't do this again."
This country has huge problems.
Country which is so proud of itself today,
a country which claims to be fourth largest economy,
one of the most powerful countries in the world.
50% of India's population living almost below poverty line.
Living a life which is not worth living.
Now, because we run a home for juveniles
that happens to be where the Juvenile Justice Board,
the children's school was situated,
so one had an opportunity to know what exactly was behind this child.
This boy was like millions of Indian children who are street children,
toiling to survive.
Sometimes working in a dhaba, that is a small tea shop,
sometimes working on a bus.
And then whatever happened after that
in the company that this gang rape took place and he was party to it,
this boy in my opinion did not have any serious aberration.
This boy had suffered endless misery in life.
He was a child in need of care and protection,
where the family could not look after the child
and the child at the age of 11 drifted and ran away from home,
and was a typical profile of a child who had to be like this, in a way.
I am a labourer in farming. If we get work, we work.
Now in rain like this, what work will we get?
I have two daughters who are labourers and bring some food home.
Nothing has been cooked. We are surviving on tea since morning.
His brain is off.
He lost his mind and became mad.
The dishes haven't been washed. No point. There's nothing to eat.
He left home aged 11.
No one would employ a child as a labourer, so he started washing dishes at a hotel.
He used to make 300 to 400 rupees a month.
He said, "Mum, what can I do? I can't stay here."
"I need to feed your stomachs."
How could we know that the gangsters of Delhi
would get him and take him away from us?
A child is just a child.
What can a hungry person do? We are by birth poor and helpless.
We were labourers and saved what money we could to raise them.
I never used to go to school. I just used to roam around.
My heart wasn't in it.
My elder brother used to beat me when I was a child.
He is an electrician.
He would give me electric shocks
if he found me roaming around and to stop me doing wrong.
Beating and violence has become the story of every house.
They all actually came from very deprived conditions,
where their surroundings are not a very good place, and there's overcrowding.
That's a very common scene that women have been tortured and beaten,
or sexually abused by their male partners or husbands.
And they have seen prostitution also running in their area,
in the neighbourhood area also.
So it's not very new to them.
That's what actually makes them again and again surprised, "Why us?"
Oh, my son.
Oh, my Ram.
Ram Singh, one of the prime accused in the gruesome
December 16th gang rape of a 23-year-old girl allegedly
committed suicide in a special cell in Tihar Jail this morning.
The incident took place in jail number three at around 5:45 a.m.
To call them human is to give humanity a bad name.
If we call them monsters, even monsters have some limits.
These are totally the devil. They went beyond all limits of evil.
Even the devil himself couldn't commit such a terrible crime.
Nobody is a monster that he is excluded from society.
After all,
any society which has these rapists
has to take responsibility for them.
And this is the first thing which the feminist callers
who came before the Verma Committee said that,
"These are our people. These men are ours."
I would say as a psychiatrist that they are actually normal human beings
with anti-social traits in them,
which actually manifested very badly at that time.
They have been doing such crimes and easily getting away with that.
So that whenever they feel there is a chance they could trap a woman,
they do it.
There are people in jail who have done 200 rapes
and been only punished for about twelve.
They say they only remember 200, they might be doing more.
That's the state of affairs.
They say that's been happening and that it's a "man's right".
They don't think of the other person as a human being.
The negative cultural values about women are also very, very important
in this type of act.
If you come from a family where things like this are seen
by those who are growing up...
...they tend to look at it very differently.
They can say, "My sister was given less milk than I am."
"I'm given a whole glass of milk because"
"everybody in the family thinks I am the boy and I must get more energy."
"And my sister's just given a little bit of milk."
Or, "She eats last of all."
Now, these are society's practices
which somehow get embedded in the mind.
Many of our people grow up thinking that
a girl is less important than a boy is.
And because she's less important, you can do what you like with her.
The wording from the Juvenile Justice Board was delivered
a short while ago on the juvenile charged
with the gang rape of India's daughter.
This young boy who was 17 years and six months
at the time of the crime
has been given the maximum sentence allowed for a juvenile.
That is a person who is under 18 years.
He will serve just three years in a special home.
We are hurt and shocked
that the juvenile will be freed after committing such a huge crime.
We are like a bird whose wings have been cut.
We cannot fly. We live in fear and anxiety.
If the law thinks it is right to marry a girl
at the age of 12 or 13,
then a 15-16 year old boy who rapes or harms a girl, why can't he be punished?
- Hang the rapists! - Hang them! Hang them!
A number of criminal cases of murder, robbery, rape
are pending against approximately 250 members of parliament.
Sitting members of parliament.
But their cases are not being tried in fast-track courts.
Their cases are not being tried based on day-to-day hearings. Why?
If you want to give a message to society
against rape, against robbery, against murder,
then you should start from your own neck.
Public opinion should not become the reason for any kind of
conviction or even death sentence at times.
I don't think we belong to that
kind of social order or that
kind of country.
India is not that kind of country.
Many countries are like that - hang the person on the pole.
Kill the man straightaway. Cut his hand. Throw him away.
And that kind of thing doesn't happen in this country.
It's a democratic country
and a very liberal country from that point of view.
We have very rich traditions of tolerance also.
So probably from that point of view, the present demand for death
sentence in many cases is not in the spirit of India's history.
People say, when you hang, they put this on your neck.
The eyes pop out, the tongue sticks out, that's what they say.
They've made this such a big issue.
People have committed bigger crimes, and nothing has happened to them.
In Barabanki after the rape, her eyes were taken out.
Sometimes they put acid on girls.
There was another rape where they burnt her alive.
Wasn't that wrong? If ours is wrong, then that was wrong, too.
Hang them! Hang them! Hang them!
Hang the juvenile also! Hang them! Hang them!
Hang the rapists! Hang them! Hang them! Hang them!
Hang the juvenile also! Hang them! Hang them!
'At 2:30 this afternoon,'
'unemployed Mukesh Singh,'
'bus cleaner Akshay Thakur,'
'gym instructor Vinay Sharma'
'and fruit seller Pawan Gupta'
'were sentenced to death.'
'The court declared this to be the rarest of rare cases'
'that warranted the death penalty.'
'And stated that gruesome crimes against women have become rampant.'
'Defence lawyer AP Singh has reacted to the sentencing in a way'
'that has exposed the mentality that is perhaps the biggest hurdle'
'in the fight for giving women the respect they deserve.'
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.
This is my stand. I still today stand by that reply.
Am I not a daughter of this country? Don't I have the right to live?
Will there be no more rapes in Delhi?
Will you hang all rapists?
A woman is protected by her husband.
If he's dead, who will protect her and for whom will she live?
I also don't want to live.
Priyanshu, my son, is a child. He undertands nothing.
I will strangle him to death. What else can I do?
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.
We hoped he'd support us in old age, after all our pain to raise him.
Isn't this why everyone raises children?
If nothing else, at least he'd perform our last rites and burn our dead bodies.
Look at my fate, to have to see him burnt to ashes.
When I saw them,
they had no fear in their eyes, no shame.
No remorse at all for what they had done.
Those who commit heinous crimes have no remorse afterwards.
The law will punish them, and must do so, or they'll be fearless.
But if one monster is removed,
will the society change? No.
The people of this society and their mind-set need to change.
In India there is a huge conflict between extreme reactionary thoughts,
extreme conservative ideas, backward looking people in a huge humber,
and very forward looking people on the other side,
who want to bring about change. Huge numbers.
The youngsters particularly are all for change.
The only way you can change things is education
because education gives a girl self-importance, self-worth.
And it also teaches young men the value of the woman.
Her death has made a huge difference.
I think that first of all, it has really brought home
the issue of the problems of the way women are perceived,
young and independent women are perceived in Indian society.
It's opening up a debate in India that I think hasn't been held
publicly and widely about exactly what the relationship between men
and women should be.
These things will change. It's only a question of how hard we push.
And I think if the young people are going to push,
we're going to get it.
Our daughter's name is Jyoti Singh.
We have no problem in revealing her name.
In fact, we are happy to reveal it.
Jyoti has become a symbol.
In death, she has lit such a torch not only in this country,
but throughout the whole world.
But at the same time, she posed a question.
What is the meaning of a "woman"?
How is she looked upon by society today?
And I wish that whatever darkness there is in this world
should be dispelled by this light.
The last thing that she said to me,
she took my hands in hers and kissed them and said,
"Sorry, Mummy. I gave you so much trouble. I am sorry."
The sound of her breating stopped,
and the lines on the monitor flattened.
This incident was a storm which came and went.
And what was there before it,
and what will come after,
this is what we need to see.