- The trip
- BBC News – Delhi
Asha Devi celebrates with her neighbors after the execution of her daughter’s rapists on March 20, 2020 in Delhi.
A young Indian woman was gang-raped and brutally attacked on a bus in the Indian capital, Delhi, and died of her injuries a few days later.
The girl lay on a hospital bed for days, grappling with death, and the press called her Nirbhaya, i.e. the girl who knows no fear. As rape victims cannot be named according to the law Indiana, the name stuck.
This was ten years ago. So what is his story?
The brutal attack on the girl made headlines around the world, led to weeks of protests and forced India to enact tough new laws to combat crimes against women.
The main defendant (the bus driver) was found dead inside the prison a few months after the crime was committed. Four others were hanged in March 2020, while a juvenile convict was released after three years, the maximum sentence allowed by law.
The crime changed the way Indians discussed violence against women and changed many lives, but none more than that of Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother.
Devi, a quiet housewife who has spent her years taking care of the house and the children.
Over the past decade, she has developed into an advocate and activist for women’s safety, fighting for justice first for her daughter and now for ‘all the girls of India’.
Two years ago, on the eighth anniversary of her daughter’s assault, and a few months after the convicts were hanged, she vowed to “fight for justice for all rape victims.”
“This way I can honor my daughter,” she said.
Despite the pain in her injured leg requiring daily visits to a physiotherapist, the 56-year-old woman has led a small group of people in a candlelit procession every evening in Dwarka, Delhi, for the past five weeks.
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Asha Devi’s grief is often captured on television in India.
They are demanding justice for a 19-year-old girl who was raped and murdered 10 years ago.
The Supreme Court of India recently handed down a death sentence against three men who participated in this crime and said there is no conclusive evidence that these men are guilty.
A review petition has been filed with the Supreme Court, but Asha Devi and others staged protests to ensure “Chawla’s rape case is not forgotten”.
“Sometimes 10 people come, sometimes 15, but we walk every day,” Asha Devi told me when I visited her recently.
“We want the court order overturned. The alleged rapists should be sent back to prison.”
The day after the High Court order, Asha Devi went to meet the victim’s parents.
“I got justice and I don’t have to go out and do anything anymore, but I remember how I used to sit outside the courtroom and cry, sometimes alone. I think this shouldn’t happen to anyone else. So I went and sat with his parents and wept with them.”
She also recently lent her support to an online petition calling for justice for Balqis Bannu after the Gujarat government prematurely released 11 men convicted of raping her and killing several of her family members.
A foundation, Asha Devi, was set up to help rape victims and counsel victims of domestic violence, with former judges, lawyers, former police officers and volunteer activists.
In recent years they have worked with dozens of families.
Her presence often prompts the police and authorities to act, but Asha Devi says 10 years after her daughter’s death, nothing has changed on the ground.
In 2012, the year Nirbhaya was attacked, India recorded 24,923 cases of rape.
In 2021, the latest year for which crime data is available, the number rose to 31,677.
“Laws are made on paper, promises are made, but there is weakness in implementation,” says Asha Devi.
“If this continues, we will lose faith in justice.”
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A banner held by protesters reads: Execute the rapists.
Asha Devi’s activism comes from her own experience, her long battle with justice, and her struggles as a mother who has lost her daughter.
Ten years later, memories of that Sunday still bring tears to her eyes. “No one should see or experience a day like December 16th,” she says.
His daughter, then 23, had just completed her training as a physiotherapist; And I got two job interviews in two hospitals and one of them was accepted for training.
“He had already received his ID card from the hospital and was due to start on Monday or Tuesday and he said to me, ‘Mom, your daughter is a doctor now.'” She was very happy.
On Sunday afternoon, as she left the house, she promised her mother that she would be back within two or three hours.
When Asha Devi saw her several hours later, she was lying in the hospital covered in blood.
Describing her daughter’s injury, she told a TV channel, “She looked like she was being rescued from jungle beasts. The doctor said she didn’t know what to do and what to fix.”
The young woman was gang-raped by the bus driver and five other men, and her boyfriend was severely beaten.
They were thrown naked, soaked in their own blood, on the side of a road and left for dead, were it not for some passers-by who found them and called the police, who took them to hospital.
“What happened to her was so brutal that she didn’t survive the assault, she lived for 12 days. He called her Nirbhaya, she was really brave,” says Asha Devi.
Wiping away her tears, she says her “most regret” in her life is that while her daughter was alive, she “kept asking us for water, but we couldn’t give her a single spoonful of water.”
“I kept thinking, what was my daughter’s sin? Why did she have to die so painfully? I watched her suffer and drew strength from her pain. I promised her I would fight for justice for her, all I wanted was to the men who did this to my daughter to be punished”.
At the beginning of the process, Asha Devi didn’t miss a single session.
She says, “I have not missed a single court hearing. I have neglected my home and its business. My main concern was attending the court hearing while there was one.”
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Asha Devi claims that she has devoted all her strength and determination to fight for justice for her daughter.
Despite the interest in the crime, it took more than seven years to wrap up the case and execute the rapists.
Asha says she has devoted all her energy and will to fighting for justice for her daughter.
Asha grew up in a backwater in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and “had to drop out of school after eighth grade because secondary school was too far from home”, and had to work hard to understand the language of the law and learn how to conduct press conferences.
But the grieving mother’s intense suffering, often captured on television, moved many Indians and attracted lawyers, activists, celebrities and politicians of all persuasions to support her.
Protests were held across India calling for the rapists to be carried out.
But once the death sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court in September 2017, the families and lawyers of the condemned began last-minute attempts to halt the executions by filing review petitions and writing to the authorities asking for leniency.
Activists also point out that studies around the world have shown that the death penalty does not reduce crime, rather it leads to more homicides as perpetrators seek to remove evidence.
But Asha Devi, the death penalty’s biggest advocate, insists it is justified.
He told me, “There are people talking about the defendant’s human rights, but what about the rights of the girl who died as a result of rape and brutal murder? Nothing will change unless people calculate the consequences and are afraid.”
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The families of the condemned tried to stop the execution of the death sentence by various means and methods, to no avail.
As the case was playing out in the Indian court system, Asha Devi says sometimes people would say to her, “Your daughter is gone, give it up, you’re banging your head against a stone.”
“But I’ve had tremendous support from the community. It’s made me think that they don’t know my daughter and are standing by her, so I have to.”
Asha Devi says that she was afraid at times but she kept her faith.
“I used to say to myself, if these guys don’t get hanged, then who gets hanged? In what rare cases will the death penalty be applied?”
The case went through many twists and turns before the convicts were executed at 5.30am on March 20, 2020.
She told me, “I couldn’t save her, but when they executed her, I felt at peace, because they paid the price for what they did to my daughter.”
Shruti Singh, a gender rights activist who had been working with Asha Devi for about a year at the time, described the night of the hanging: “We didn’t wait outside the prison where the executions took place, we went home to stay with Nirbhaya.”
They sat in the room where her picture hung on the wall. Asha Devi said to her daughter, “Now we can hold our heads up, we have not let you down my daughter.”
