Jyoti Singh stood by the side of the road, wrapped up from the chill of a Delhi winter evening, looking out for the headlights of a bus. It was about 9.30pm and she was on her way home from watching Life of Pi at the cinema in the Citywalk mall with a young male friend, Awindra Pandey.
The date was 16 December 2012. She was 23 years old, a young woman making her way in the world, working nights in an IBM call centre to put herself through medical college to achieve her dream of becoming a physiotherapist. She had less than two weeks left to live.
A white bus was approaching, one of the many private vehicles plying the streets of the city. The conductor was calling their destination – Dwarka – so they handed over their money and stepped on board. There were five other passengers, all young men. The doors closed behind them. And the trap was sprung.
What happened to Jyoti Singh over the best part of an hour physically sickens everyone who has been obliged to listen to the details. The men took it in turns to rape her and then they used an iron bar on her. They beat Awindra and threw the couple out, half-naked, into the night. The police found them by the side of the road at about 11pm. It was clear that Jyoti had suffered catastrophic injuries.
We know all this because Jyoti did not die there at the roadside. She clung on, because she was determined to tell the police enough to catch the men who had violated her.
“I want to survive,” she wrote on a piece of paper she handed to her doctors.
It is five years later. A bus pulls up to the Munirka stop where Jyoti and Awindra waited that night.
The doors open, 10 rupees change hands and the bus noses back into the traffic. The darkness outside is full of the smoke from wood fires that hangs in the cold air. There are neon signs and the lights of cars and lorries and the cacophony of horns. These are the last sights and sounds Jyoti would have heard before the men closed in on her.
Tonight, the bus is almost empty, just as it was when the doors shut behind Jyoti and Awindra.
“The conductor closed the doors of the bus. He closed the lights of the bus and came towards my friend and started abusing and beating him,” Jyoti told the police as she lay in her hospital bed.
“They held his hands and held me and took me to the back of the bus. They tore my clothes and raped me in turns. They hit me with an iron rod and bit me on my entire body with their teeth.
“They took all belongings, my mobile phone, purse, credit card, debit card, watches etc. Six people raped me in turns for nearly one hour in a moving bus. The driver of the bus kept changing so that he could also rape me.”
Tonight, the handful of people who have got on the bus have now departed. The driver turns off most of the lights. Alone, in the semi-darkness, there is that sense of vulnerability familiar to any young women brave enough to travel at night in a city where, even five years after the promises that lessons would be learned, many feel that beneath the surface, little has changed.
But on the surface, in the bright light of day, life for young Indian women growing up in 2017 looks very different to the way it was for their mothers and a world away from that of their grandmothers.
They wear jeans and T-shirts, hang out in coffee shops, obsess over their mobile phones and mingle with boys just like their western counterparts do and in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
“Gender sensitisation” is the new phrase: trying to change deeply ingrained attitudes about male and female roles. Taxi drivers get lessons in why they cannot leer at their passengers. Two years ago, the country’s first all-woman police station opened in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi. There is even a campaign for compulsory gender sensitisation programmes in all of India’s schools to try to catch them young.
There is a lively feminist movement, hotly debating issues such as the continuing stigma attached to menstruation – by women as well as men. There have been milestone victories, including the supreme court’s decision to rule as unconstitutional the “triple talaq” practice, which allows a man to divorce his wife by saying “divorce” three times.
Yet it is an uphill battle: many men brought up seeing their mothers doing all the household chores expect the same of their wives. Daughters, especially those in poorer families, are widely expected to perform the household chores while the boys are not. It is worse in the rural areas, where traditional attitudes prevail and there are still widely held beliefs that girls who go out to bars and drink with boys are not decent Indian girls but westernised and sexually permissive.
That mindset was at work on the night of Jyoti’s last bus ride. The men who fell upon her had no respect for her as a person: to them, she was simply an object to do with as they wanted.
“I heard these people saying, ‘Catch them, tear their clothes, hit them, take her bag’ and using abusive language,” Jyoti told the police. “Ram Singh, Thakkur, Raju, Mukesh, Pawan, Vinay etc were their names. We were all the time in total darkness…
“Half of the time I was unconscious, but whenever I came to consciousness they beat me up. My friend tried to save me but these people beat him every time he came forward to save me. They also beat him with an iron rod and hit him in the head.
“They removed all the clothes of my friend and they thought we had both died. They threw us out of the moving bus. We were both naked on the side of the road and many passersby actually saw us and informed the police control room.”
Outside the hospital, the city was ablaze with anger. The initial reports of the rape and the sheer savagery had brought women out on to the streets. The police responded by beating them. The anger grew and spread.
Eventually, on 26 December, the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and his cabinet took the extraordinary decision to fly Jyoti to a transplant specialist hospital in Singapore. Cynics suggested the real reason was that no one wanted her to die in an Indian hospital that would become the focal point for more violent protests.
Her family went with her to Singapore, but her strength was gone. On the evening of 28 December, the doctors told them there was nothing more to be done. They sat with her as her heartbeat faded. At 4.45am on 29 December, it finally stopped and Jyoti Singh’s fight was over.
Jyoti’s parents, Asha Devi and Badrinath Singh, had sacrificed everything to give their children the chance of a better life. They lived in a small house down a blind alley in the Mahavir Enclave II area in the south-west of the city, a poor area of slum dwellings. They had sold their little plot of farmland in their home state of Uttar Pradesh to pay for their three children – Jyoti and her younger brothers Gaurav and Saurabh – to study and make something of themselves. Asha was 46, Badrinath 53. He was working double shifts as a baggage handler at the airport to pay the bills.
The day of the attack, 16 December 2012, was a Sunday. Jyoti had made tea for the family and gone off to meet Awindra. When she failed to return, the family started calling her phone but each time it was switched off. At 11.15pm, the police called to say that there had been an accident. Badrinath went to the hospital and called the others to join him at 2am. Even then, the surgeons had little hope: the iron bar had torn out most of her intestines.
A thick blanket of smog covers the city. The family moved to a new two-bed apartment in Dwarka in 2013. The area is not far from their old home, but smarter and on the up; earlier this year, the government chose it as a new diplomatic area for foreign embassies.
The couple were given the flat by the government as part of a compensation package – it’s an improvement on their previous home but still one of the cheapest types of housing in the city. They greet visitors in one of the bedrooms. There is a single bed placed on one side of the room and on the other, four plastic chairs and a small tea table.
A large poster on one wall shows the burning flame of a candle against a black background, the symbol for the women’s welfare trust they have formed in the name of their daughter – the Nirbhaya Jyoti Trust.
Nirbhaya – the Hindi word for fearless – is the name by which Jyoti came to be known because Indian law initially prevented the publication of her identity. The authorities, anxious to avoid the creation of a martyr, were quick to threaten publications with section 228a of the Indian penal code and the possibility of two years in jail for identifying a rape victim. However, the code also contains a clause permitting the next of kin to give written consent and after Jyoti’s family consented to her name being published, it started to be used more often. They continue to refuse to give permission for her photograph to be used.
A glass cabinet on another wall displays the mementoes and certificates they have been given for their tireless campaigning. It includes a photograph of Asha with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Asha fiddles with her mobile phone. She is angry still, angry that the men who were convicted of the rape and murder of her daughter have still not hanged, angry that the youngest member of the gang, who was tried separately as a juvenile, was released from prison after serving his three-year sentence, angry that nothing has really changed.
“I disclosed the name of my daughter, Jyoti Singh. She was a victim. She did not commit any crime. Why should we suppress her details? They, who gang-raped and murdered her, should hide their names for committing that brutal act,” she says.
“I cannot have peaceful sleep at night. I cannot explain how difficult it is to accept that those who gang-raped and murdered my daughter so brutally are still alive. I fight with myself every day. The question comes every time to mind: what was Jyoti’s fault? What did she do? I have no answer. We are still waiting for justice.”
Her eyes fill with tears. No one can really appreciate their pain, she says.
“I lost my daughter. I know she will never come back again. But the work I am doing in her memory will save a lot of daughters from brutal rapes in India. I will continue to raise my voice against rapes while I am alive, whether I have people on my side or not.”
The trust is trying to work with rape victims in Delhi. “I feel good when I voice protest against rapes. It gives me a sense of satisfaction,” says Asha.
But she doesn’t feel good about what has happened since 2012.
“[At first] there was a huge public outcry to change the system as far as the issue of women safety was concerned. But there has hardly been any change that has taken place.
“Five years have gone. These five years have been really difficult for us. We suffered a lot. Our emotional pain was enormous. Everyday girls are being raped and targeted for sexual assault, be it in Delhi or other states across the country.”
She does not understand why the men whose death sentences were upheld by the supreme court on 5 May this year have still not been executed.
“What is the benefit of the law if it takes so long to punish perpetrators in connection with such heinous crimes. Justice delayed is justice denied. We all know that,” she says.
“We are always ready to point fingers at girls. We never ask questions to our boys. If any rape takes place, we immediately raise questions about the behaviour of the victim, like: why did she step out so late at night? What was she doing so late outside? Why was she skimpily clad, etc.”
There are tears pouring down her face, tears of sadness and rage.
“It has been five years now since we lost our daughter, but still we are suffering that pain and dying a slow death every day. We are waiting for the justice. There would be thousands of such parents like us waiting for justice in our country.”
Better law, faster justice, stiffer penalties: that’s what she wants. But more than anything, she wants attitudes to change.
Even as the angry protesters took to the streets five years ago, other voices in Indian society, male voices in general, were taking to the airwaves to claim that Jyoti was the author of her own misfortune.
“Can one hand clap? I don’t think so,” religious leader Asaram Bapu told his followers.
Then the president’s son, Abhijit Mukherjee, weighed in, attacking the women who were protesting.
“It is becoming fashionable to land up on the streets with candle in hand. Such people are completely disconnected from reality. They go to discotheques. I am very well versed with student activism and I can bet on it that most of the protesters are not students. They are chasing two minutes of fame.”
Asha says that if change is to come, it must come from the top, from those who should be setting an example.
“In our families, when our daughters come home late after work we ask them so many questions. But for boys it is absolutely normal. We are absolutely fine if they come home late at night. This mindset has to be changed.
“Parents actually create these male-female divides at home. I believe it is the responsibility of all parents to give equal attention to their children, irrespective of boys and girls, and give them proper education. Then only we can fight out the crisis in our society.”
She gets up, offers tea. She doesn’t want to talk about her sons: they have their own lives and must move on, she says. Badrinath is getting ready for work in the cargo section at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport. While Asha is animated, he seems subdued and depressed about the lack of progress.
“The journey has been really painful for us. If you ask me if there has been any change in the system, I would say no with a capital N,” he says.
“I don’t see any significant change. When the incident had taken place, the then government did take some steps to amend the law. But that government completed its term and a new government came in as people voted for a change.
“But the crime graph never stopped. It continued to grow day by day. The situation has worsened to such an extent that nowadays girl children are being raped in various parts of our country.”
Politicians don’t care, he says. “It is unfortunate that for our government, rape is not a grave issue. They think these are trivial matters,” he says.
“When we reach out to people and knock on their doors asking when the death penalty would be executed, they try to convince us, saying that all four perpetrators are dying a slow death behind bars. But who will understand how my wife and I are dying a gradual death every day? And we have no one to share that pain.”
For the rich, able to live in gated colonies and be chauffeured everywhere, the issue seems far removed from their experiences. They don’t have to negotiate the city’s dangerous streets alone at night.
“The saddest part is such incidents of rape only happen with our daughters. These kinds of incidents don’t happen with big people or with ministers’ daughters. Then they would understand the pain we commoners bear when brutal gang-rape murders happen with our daughters or sisters. So, we know where we live.”
The murder changed their lives, he says, but he still believes that they can use it to change the lives of other young women for the better.
“I know my daughter will never come back. But this fight is not for us or our family. It is for many other Jyoti Singhs who are also like my daughter and suffered similar mishaps in life. This fight is to ensure safety for them.”
Yet still the legal process grinds on. The supreme court is due to hear a challenge to its May ruling on the death sentences on 12 December.
There are four men on death row: Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta.
Ram Singh, the driver, never made it to trial. He was found hanged from the grille in the ceiling in his prison cell, a remarkable feat given that the ceiling was 8ft high and he had nothing to stand on to reach it. His family suspect foul play.
“Let’s go and have some fun today,” he is said to have told the others before they set out that night.
“Ram Singh was the first one to rape the girl,” the youngest member of the gang told police. “The girl kept screaming and howling but, in the moving bus, everybody raped her one by one. And they bit the girl on different parts of her body.”
The Delhi Commission for Women has sent notices to Tihar jail, where the men are being held, and to the deputy commissioner of police, asking why the executions have not been carried out.
Swati Maliwal, the DCW chair, recalls the huge upsurge of anger that spread out across the country in the days after the attack and the brutality of the police’s response, hitting women with their lathis – wooden or bamboo sticks often tipped with iron.
“Everybody was out on streets. I remember I was myself lathi-charged. All of us were demanding a system that there should be no rape in the capital,” she says.
Summoned to parliament to explain what the government was doing to protect women, the then home minister promised to set up a special task force intended to meet twice a month. In its first three years, it met just 12 times.
And it was going round in circles. When she started attending the meetings and asking questions, the task force was disbanded.
“It was in 2016. It was really shocking to me,” she says.
She was told the task force had completed its work and the lieutenant governor of Delhi would set up a new one. She had to go to court to get it to happen.
Women struggle to get justice, she says. She had to threaten the police commissioner with an arrest warrant if he did not hand over the figures for crimes against women.
When she did get her hands on the figures, they showed that between 2012 and 2014 there were 31,446 cases of crimes against women in the capital and 150 convictions. No wonder women are scared to walk the street, she says.
“A one-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped just five days back. Then a seven-year-old girl was gang-raped two days back in the capital,” she says. Both girls needed operations as a result of the attacks.
“I went and met the girl. It is really very difficult to describe. And I really could not come back home that night. I was so upset. The entire night I spent there with her.”
The government has to act, she says.
“We need a proper system to function, particularly in these cases of child rapes. Should a one-and-a-half-year-old girl, for the next 15 years, tell everybody that she was raped and demand punishment for that person? Is that the civilised society we want?
“So, we need to create a mechanism that in six months, at least in the cases of child rapes, the death penalty should be given to the rapists. And for this you need to create a mechanism. You need better numbers of police resources.
“You need better police accountability, better forensics, more courts. And you need a committee to really get the political will together. The committee cannot be on the level of the bureaucracy.
“We have done such things before, but it never worked. We are trying to wake up this completely apathetic system.”
Despite everything, there has been some progress. In January 2013, a three-member commission, spearheaded by a former chief justice of India, published its review of laws pertaining to sexual crimes. The committee, set up in response to the protests and given just 30 days to complete its work, identified “failure of governance” as the root cause for sexual crime. It criticised the government, the police and even the public for their apathy and recommended dramatic changes, including obliging the police to record all rape allegations. Parliament obliged with new legislation that, among the introduction of several new sexual offences including stalking, provided for compulsory jail sentences for officials who failed to register rape complaints.
It may sound extraordinary in 2017 that the police needed to be told to take rape seriously, but they did. There were regular reports of rape victims being thrown out of stations, ignored and browbeaten for having the temerity to bother the police.
So now it is easier for women to report rapes. The DCW has a helpline that has taken 316,000 calls and the number of reports has increased as women gain confidence that they may be taken seriously.
Yet still some women who report rape are being subjected to the notorious “two-finger” test: two fingers inserted into the vagina, to establish its elasticity and to assess whether the victim is “habituated” to sex. This is despite the supreme court ruling in 2013 that someone who enjoyed sex regularly could not be presumed to have consented in rape cases.
Only last month, a teenager was turned away from three police stations in Bhopal when she tried to report a rape. She was only taken seriously when her parents – both police officers – got involved.
Last month, too, Human Rights Watch published an 82-page report citing the difficulties faced by women and girls in reporting sexual assault.
There is so much further to go, says Maliwal.
“I am also a citizen of Delhi. I am a girl. Do I feel safe when I walk at night? No I don’t and neither does any girl who is walking on the streets in Delhi. That is what we have to change. Though we have achieved so much, we have put in our effort, there is this complete apathy in the system.”
Campaigner Yogita Bhayana has been helping Jyoti’s family for the past five years. Like Maliwal, she was on the receiving end of police violence for joining the 2012 protests. But for a while, she thought it might be a turning point.
“We all saw the rage and were beaten up by the police. There was some kind of silver lining that we were seeing at that time,” she says.
“We were hopeful that things might change for betterment. So, we just took it like that. One year passed, two years passed, three years passed… I think we get to hear more cases. Instead of being eradicated, the incidents of rapes were increasing every day. The saddest part is that there is nothing done on prevention.
“Nobody talks about it. Has anybody come forward and asked what happened after Nirbhaya? Has the scenario of women safety improved in Delhi? People are not bothered about it.”
She is scathing about what she regards as multiple government failures.
“Everybody is in denial mode. They are just not ready to acknowledge the problem. First of all, they have to acknowledge the issue and then address it.
“If you look at the records, all these crimes are done mostly by juveniles. There lies the problem. We have to address the problem from there. I believe if you have the right value system early enough, we can prevent crimes against women.”
Even the words used to refer to sexual harassment of women – “eve-teasing”, so-called as a reference to Eve’s role in the biblical fall of man, implying that the victim is responsible for provoking the harassment – demonstrate the mountain to climb.
That’s the attitude the police take, says Bhayana. “If you go to the police station or court with a complaint of eve-teasing, they will just throw you out, saying it is a petty issue,” she says. “People are also not sensitive enough to understand that eve-teasers are potential rapists. There is a typical mindset issue here also. In most of the cases, people just don’t understand the gravity of the issue.”
Outside Jyoti’s parents’ apartment, the smog has worsened. Asha stands on the balcony, looks out at the city and contemplates what has changed in the past five years. The best thing is that women are starting to report rapes to the police, she says.
“There is an awareness now. Earlier, women used to hide such cases owing to social pressure and they never used to report to the local administration. That area has undergone a significant change.”
The young are trying to tackle the issue, she says, but still more needs to be done.
“It is true that the law was amended, but the approach still remains the same. If we don’t change our mindset and the approach of our system, we cannot reduce crime against women in India.”
They always treated their daughter and their sons the same, says Badrinath. Only when everyone does the same will change come. But at least people are starting to understand that change is possible.
“When we started the fight, we were alone. Now we have many people by our side,” he says.
Back on the bus trundling through the night towards Dwarka, a couple more passengers get on. Like every other passenger tonight, they are men.
Five years after Jyoti Singh’s death shocked the nation and the world, most young women feel it is still too dangerous to venture out alone on to the streets of their city at night.
