Dear Perverts,
We know when you are leching at us. And you look like morons.
Sincerely,
Women.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDYFqQZEdRA#t=26
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
The three year old bravehreat that Delhi forgot
Written by Ketki Angre
When his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter went to play-school on December 17, 2012, it was just a regular day. His family not entirely aware of the emotional and physical trauma another family in Dwarka was only just beginning to understand.
It was barely eight hours after the 23-year-old paramedic student was gang-raped in a moving bus last year last that his daughter came home feeling ashamed, violated and unsure of what she must do. When his daughter explained what had happened to her, he and his wife realised she had been sexually abused at her supposedly 'safe' play-school, by her principal's husband.
Delhi and India was seething with rage as horrific details of the December 16 gang-rape case started coming to light. That's perhaps where the similarities between the two cases end. As India battled for a 23-year-old's fight for justice, this family soldiered on, alone.
The mother of the toddler told NDTV, "He (the accused) threatened my daughter and said if you tell your mom and dad, I will hang you from the fan." Her husband adds, "Mentally she is traumatised. Her physical wounds will heal. But what about her psychological scars? Many nights she wakes up screaming."
The police lodged an FIR. The child was also made to sign as complainant, though her signature was nothing more than a few letters of the alphabet she had learned at school, something, that she, not surprisingly, couldn't remember the next time she was asked about it.
The child even identified the accused in a police line-up, gave a statement to a magistrate but the case hasn't moved much in the last one year. On the other hand, the accused, who is in his forties, was arrested, and got bail in a few weeks.
The attempt to buy this family's silence came just a few days before the bail application. Her mother says, "The accused's sister came a few days before the bail hearing and offered us money. She said they would give us Rs. 4-5 lakh, even more, to stop pursuing the case. They tried to intimidate us by saying it's about our child's honour and that they had enough money to get away. We told them, our daughter's honour is not for sale."
The four-year-old has spent most of the last one year between the court room and the police station. In her case, there was no public outcry for justice - not even a fast-track court. The biggest irony: for her to get justice she has had to remember every detail of her trauma during the court hearings that she is trying so hard to forget.
The family has been threatened, intimidated, even lured. They have had little social support, save an NGO that is helping them with legal aid but the father is the only earning member, who does two jobs to keep the house running.
Ask him how he finds the strength to fight, the father says, "My daughter is my inspiration. Whenever I look at her, it strengthens my determination to fight. I want to see her smile without any fear. I want my daughters to succeed. Most of all, I don't want this to happen to anyone else."
It's this single-minded determination and hope that has kept him going.
One year after Delhi's gang-rape, many have talked of keeping the flame Delhi's brave-heart lit alive. It's a spirit that this father and mother strive for every day no matter what the odds are.
Source: http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/lonely-battle-for-justice-the-three-year-old-braveheart-that-delhi-forgot-459942?ndtv_rhs
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
It couldn't get any worse than this!
Assam: 4 men gangrape woman, gouge her eyes out, kill her
Four men allegedly raped a woman inside a tempo, gouged out her eyes and beat her before throwing the victim out of the vehicle leading to her death in upper Assam's Lakhimpur district, sparking outrage from locals.
The incident took place on Friday when the woman had boarded a shared tempo to pick up her six-year-old daughter from school at Boginadi area, about 14 km from the district headquarters town Lakhimpur, police sources said.
The woman was allegedly raped by the four men inside the tempo before they gouged out her eyes, injured her on the head and neck, they said.
Assam: 4 men gangrape woman, gorge her eyes, kill her
Women's organisations and locals blocked the National Highway 52 on Monday with her body and condemned the incident, demanding justice for the woman and arrest of the culprits.
On the district administration officials assuring them to nab the culprits, the protesters withdrew their blockade on the road, which had disrupted traffic movement to and from Arunachal Pradesh for about two hours.
Meanwhile, police has picked up two persons for questioning in this connection.
Source: Press Trust of India - http://ibnlive.in.com/news/assam-4-men-gangrape-woman-gouge-her-eyes-out-kill-her/436045-3-251.html
Friday, November 15, 2013
NIRBHAYA/FEARLESS
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
An appeal to all of you out there who watch this theatrical form of the 'NIRBHAYA' story - No young girl, women, children should go through such heart wrenching violence in India and through all the corners of this very world.
I salute Purna Jagannathan, Yael Farber and their entire theater group for putting up this story before us.
To ensure that it reaches all of us, to know, to feel the pain, to understand and mobilse a larger audience to combat violence against women. To not let go off the perpetrators of this heinous crime committed against women across the world.
"NIRBHAYA" - Inspirational theater empowering the survivors of gender-based violence to speak out worldwide. Directed by Yael Farber.
Please do watch and share: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nirbhaya/nirbhaya-award-winning-human-rights-theatre-india
An appeal to all of you out there who watch this theatrical form of the 'NIRBHAYA' story - No young girl, women, children should go through such heart wrenching violence in India and through all the corners of this very world.
I salute Purna Jagannathan, Yael Farber and their entire theater group for putting up this story before us.
To ensure that it reaches all of us, to know, to feel the pain, to understand and mobilse a larger audience to combat violence against women. To not let go off the perpetrators of this heinous crime committed against women across the world.
"NIRBHAYA" - Inspirational theater empowering the survivors of gender-based violence to speak out worldwide. Directed by Yael Farber.
Please do watch and share: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nirbhaya/nirbhaya-award-winning-human-rights-theatre-india
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Through the eyes of moral values and the mock of intellectual relationships - Sexual Harassment by Jurists gives a new perspective!
"Through my looking Glass" - by Stella James
Sometimes the most difficult things to write about are also the most essential. I feel this is especially true when many people, much more scholarly than oneself, have already said and written a lot around the issue, and yet your own experience does not seem to fit into the wide net that they’ve cast. Gandhi once said “I have something far more powerful than arguments, namely, experience”. And it is from these words that I derive what I consider the ‘value’ of this piece – not my experience per se, but from what I feel that my experience can tell us about much discussed issues in the country today.
Last December was momentous for the feminist movement in the country – almost an entire population seemed to rise up spontaneously against the violence on women, and the injustices of a seemingly apathetic government. In the strange irony of situations that our world is replete with, the protests were the backdrop of my own experience. In Delhi at that time, interning during the winter vacations of my final year in University, I dodged police barricades and fatigue to go to the assistance of a highly reputed, recently retired Supreme Court judge whom I was working under during my penultimate semester. For my supposed diligence, I was rewarded with sexual assault (not physically injurious, but nevertheless violating) from a man old enough to be my grandfather. I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice it to say that long after I’d left the room, the memory remained, in fact, still remains, with me.
So what bothered me about this incident? As a conditioned member of the society, I had quickly “gotten over” the incident. But was that what worried me: that I had accepted what was essentially an ‘unacceptable’ situation. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the crux of my unease lay in my inability to find a frame in which to talk, or even think, about my experience. While the incident affected me deeply, I felt little anger and almost no rancour towards the man; instead I was shocked and hurt that someone I respected so much would do something like this. My strongest reaction really, was overwhelming sadness. But this sort of response was new to me. That I could understand his actions and forgive him for them, or that I could continue to think of him as an essentially ‘good’ person, seemed a naïve position that were completely at odds with what I had come to accept was the “right” reaction to such incidents.
This emotional response was also completely at odds with the powerful feelings of righteous anger that the protestors in Delhi displayed. I am not trying to say that anger at the violence that women face is not a just or true response, but the polarization of women’s rights debates in India along with their intense emotionality, left me feeling that my only options were to either strongly condemn the judge or to betray my feminist principles. Perhaps this confusion came out of an inadequate understanding of feminist literature, but if so, isn’t then my skewed perception a failing of feminism itself? If the shared experiences of women cannot be easily understood through a feminist lens, then clearly there is a cognitive vacuum that feminism fails to fill. Feminists talk of the guilt a woman faces when sexually harassed, like it is her fault. I felt a similar guilt, except, my guilt wasn’t at being assaulted, but at not reacting more strongly than I did. The very perspective that was meant to help me make sense of my experiences as a woman was the one that obscured the resolution of the problem in my own mind, presumably an effect that feminism does not desire. And if not a result of feminist theory itself, the form that it has taken in India, especially after recent incidents of sexual assault, strengthened the feeling of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” in a fight that I feel I can no longer take sides in.
All the talk during that time was of stricter punishment, of baying for the blood of “creepy” men. Five years of law school had taught me to look to the law for all solutions – even where I knew that the law was hopelessly inadequate – and my reluctance to wage a legal battle against the judge left me feeling cowardly. On reflection though, I cannot help but wonder why I should have felt that way. As mentioned earlier, I bore, and still bear, no real ill-will towards the man, and had no desire to put his life’s work and reputation in question. On the other hand, I felt I had a responsibility to ensure that other young girls were not put in a similar situation. But I have been unable to find a solution that allows that. Despite the heated public debates, despite a vast army of feminist vigilantes, despite new criminal laws and sexual harassment laws, I have not found closure. The lack of such an alternative led to my facing a crippling sense of intellectual and moral helplessness.
The incident is now a while behind me, and they say time heals all wounds. But during the most difficult emotional times, what helped me most was the ‘insensitivity’ of a close friend whose light-hearted mocking allowed me to laugh at an incident (and a man) that had caused me so much pain. Allowing myself to feel more than just anger at a man who violated me, something that I had never done before, is liberating! So, I want to ask you to think of one thing alone – when dealing with sexual violence, can we allow ourselves to embrace feelings beyond or besides anger, and to accept the complexity of emotions that we face when dealing with any traumatic experience?
Source: http://jilsblognujs.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/through-my-looking-glass/
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Gang rape in India, routine and invisible
Ellen Barry & Mansi Choksi, NYT News Service | Oct 27, 2013, 12.09 PM IST
MUMBAI, India — At 5:30pm on that Thursday, four young men were playing cards, as usual, when Mohammed Kasim Sheikh's cellphone rang and he announced that it was time to go hunting. Prey had been spotted, he told a friend. When the host asked what they were going to hunt, he said, "A beautiful deer."
As two men rushed out, the host smirked, figuring they did not like losing at cards.
Two hours later, a 22-year-old photojournalist limped out of a ruined building. She had been raped repeatedly by five men, asked by one to re-enact pornographic acts displayed on a cellphone. After she left, the men dispersed to their wives or mothers, if they had them; it was dinnertime. None of their previous victims had gone to the police. Why should this one?
The trial in the Mumbai gang-rape case has opened to a drowsy and ill-attended courtroom, without the crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi in which a woman died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The accused, barefoot, sit on a bench at the back of the courtroom, observing the arguments with blank expressions, as if they were being conducted in Mandarin. All have pleaded not guilty. They are slight men with ordinary faces, nothing imposing, the kind one might see at any bus stop or tea stall.
But the Mumbai case provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the top of the state's agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in.
An editor at the photographer's publication, who was present when a witness identified the first of the five suspects, a juvenile, said the teenager dissolved in tears as soon as he was accused.
"It was exactly like watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something," said the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim, who cannot be identified according to Indian law. "It's like a bunch of kids who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent, what happened."
In spots Mumbai is an anarchic jumble, its high-rise buildings flanked by vest-pocket slums and vacant properties that have reverted to near-wilderness. One such place is the Shakti Mills, a ruin from the prosperous days of Mumbai's textile industry. When night falls, it is a treacherous span of darkness lined with sinkholes and debris, but still in the middle of the city, still close enough to look up and watch the lights flicker on in the Shangri-La Hotel.
The photographer and her colleague, a 21-year-old man, were interns at an English-language publication and had decided to include this spot — the backdrop for any number of fashion shoots — as part of a photo essay on the city's abandoned buildings, the editor said. On that Thursday last August, they reached the ruined mill about an hour before sunset.
The five men they encountered there later came from slums near the mill complex, claustrophobic concrete warrens where electrical wires tangle at one's head and acrid water flows in open gutters around one's feet.
None of the men worked regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand — a hot, stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking. Luxury was pressed in their faces in the sinuous form of the Lodha Bellissimo, a 48-story apartment building rising from an adjacent lot.
"Every boy in this neighborhood, including myself, would look at those buildings and say, 'One day, I will own a flat in that building,' " said Yasin Sheikh, 22, who knew two of the accused men from the neighborhood. Because of his work helping find slum locations for film crews, he sometimes has a chance to interact with wealthy people, he said, and it fills him with yearning.
"I feel really sad around them, because I want to sit at the table with them," he said.
Only Kasim Sheikh, 20, the card player who took the call, seemed to have shaken off the drag of poverty. A plump man in a neighborhood of the half-starved, he wore flashy shirts and hooked up his friends with catering jobs at weddings. He had been convicted of theft — iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site — and occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai's joint police commissioner, Himanshu Roy.
Some people steered clear of Sheikh. The grandmother of one of the accused men, a 16-year-old whose name is being withheld because of his age, had forbidden Sheikh to cross their threshold. But her grandson craved nice things; that was his weakness, his grandmother said. Sheikh "wore good clothes, he had a nice mobile, obviously he would, because he was a thief," said Yasin Sheikh, the neighbor.
When another of their friends, a 27-year-old father of two named Salim Ansari, spotted the interns in the mill that day, the first thing he did was call Kasim Sheikh to tell him that their prey had arrived.
Nothing to lose
During the year since the Delhi gang rape, sexual violence has been discussed endlessly in India, but there are few clear answers to the questions of how much is it happening or why.
One problem is that perpetrators may not view their actions as a grave crime, but something closer to mischief. A survey of more than 10,000 men carried out in six Asian countries — India not among them — and published in The Lancet Global Health journal in September came up with startling data. It found that, when the word "rape" was not used as part of a questionnaire, more than one in 10 men in the region admitted to forcing sex on a woman who was not their partner.
Asked why, 73 percent said the reason was "entitlement." Fifty-nine percent said their motivation was "entertainment seeking," agreeing with the statements "I wanted to have fun" or "I was bored." Flavia Agnes, a Mumbai women's rights lawyer who has been working on rape cases since the 1970s, said the findings rang true to her experience.
"It's just frivolous; they just do it casually," she said. "There is so much abject poverty. They just want to have a little fun on the side. That's it. See, they have nothing to lose."
The photographer and her colleague reached the mill but, visually, it was not what they wanted. That is when two men approached them, the victim told the police later, offering to show them a route farther in. There the images were better, and the two had been working for half an hour when the two men returned.
'The prey is here'
This time they came back with a third, Sheikh, who told them something odd — "Our boss has seen you, and you have to come with us now" — and insisted they take a path deeper into the complex. As they walked, she called an editor, who said to leave immediately, but it was too late for that. "Come inside, the prey is here," Sheikh called out, and two more men joined them.
The men said that the woman's colleague was a murder suspect, asked the pair to remove their belts and used them to tie the man up. After that, the woman told the police, "the third person and a person who had a mustache took me to a place that was like a broken room."
The men had done the same thing a month before, said Roy, the police commissioner, taking turns raping an 18-year-old call-center worker who, accompanied by her boyfriend, had sprained her ankle and was trying to take a shortcut through the mill. They had done the same thing with a woman who worked as a scavenger in a garbage dump, and a sex worker, and a transvestite, Roy said.
Sheikh took the broken neck of a beer bottle out of his shirt pocket and thrust it at the young woman, telling her: "You don't know what a bastard I am. You're not the first girl I've raped," she told the police later, according to the charge sheet filed in the case.
On the other side of the wall, her friend heard the woman cry out. "An inquiry is going on," the man guarding him said. They went in to her and returned, one by one.
"Did you inquire properly?" Sheikh said to one as he came out.
"No, she's not talking," he replied.
So Sheikh said he would "go inquire again," and the rest of them laughed.
At last they brought her out, weeping, and told the two to leave along the railroad tracks. Before releasing her, they threatened to upload video of the attack onto the Internet if she reported the crime, a strategy that had worked with previous victims.
But this one did not hesitate. The two caught a cab to the nearest hospital. There they reported the crime, and the woman's mother arrived. "I went inside. I saw her there crying," her mother told the police later. "She told me in English, 'Mummy, I'm vanished.' "
The woman did not respond to a request for an interview.
Sheikh, too, saw his mother for a few moments that night. He discussed the rape with her, she said, and tried to explain why it had happened.
"I asked Kasim, 'Son, why did you do this to her? If it happened to your sister, would you come here and tell me or would you beat him?' " said his mother, Chandbibi Sheikh. He told her that his friends had come upon the couple embracing in the mill, and "they thought: 'What is she doing with this boy here? She must be loose.' "
She related this exchange from the family's home, a sort of shelf wedged between a gas station and a garbage dump; as she spoke, a rat the size of a kitten clambered over containers stacked in a corner. She said far too much onus was being put on the men.
"Obviously, the fault is the girl's," she said. "Why did she have to go to that jungle? It's her fault, too. Also, she was wearing skimpy clothes."
She did not deny that he had done it. "He must have," she said. "He told me that they tied up the boy who was doing bad things to her and said, 'Madam, let us also do it.' The madam said, 'Don't do it to me, take my mobile, take my camera, but don't do it to me.' Her body was uncovered. How could he control himself? And so it happened."
High-level response
Though the men in the mill may not have known it, rape had become a matter of great public import in India, a gauge of a city's identity. Mumbai's top officials, who had told themselves that the Delhi gang rape could not have happened here, were horrified and initiated a broad, high-level response, as if an act of terrorism had taken place.
The police lighted up their networks of slum informants and all five were arrested and gave confessions in quick succession. Several made pitiful attempts to escape. Sheikh went to the visitor's room of a nearby hospital and covered himself with a blanket, trying to blend in with a crowd of relatives. He was caught with 50 rupees, or about 81 cents, in his pocket. When the police asked him to sign his confession, he told them he could not write, so he signed it with a thumbprint.
"It is incredible how quickly the whole thing unraveled," said the editor, who was present when the photographer's colleague picked the first of the five men out of a lineup. A second victim, the call-center worker, came forward, inspired by the first, and said she was ready to testify. The suspects confessed to the other rapes under questioning, the police said.
The public prosecutor selected for the case is famous for prosecuting terrorists, with a resume of 628 life sentences, 30 death sentences and 12 men, as he put it, "sent to the gallows."
Much news coverage over the next days zeroed in on the defendants' poverty, but Roy shrugged off that line of inquiry. After interrogating the five accused men personally, he said they were "social outcasts," not indicative of any deeper tensions in the city.
"They were deviants, sociopaths, predators," he said in an interview. "If there was a larger socioeconomic framework, these crimes would be happening again and again. It was only these guys. I'm 100 percent sure that this kind of crime doesn't happen in Mumbai. I've been here all my life and have been born and brought up here."
But in a constellation of neighborhoods around Mumbai, people are still trying to match up the crime with the ordinary men they knew.
Shahjahan Ansari, the wife of the oldest accused man, Salim Ansari, looked terrified when a stranger appeared at her door, at a hulking, trash-strewn public housing complex beside a petroleum refinery on a distant edge of the city. The neighbors had started to shun the family since Salim's arrest became public, and she dreaded the extra attention.
"We can't even walk on the street. You don't understand," she said. Inside the apartment, she calmed down a little. The whole story baffled her; she said she had no idea who her husband's friends were or what he did during the day when she went to work cleaning houses. All she knew was that until his arrest, he came home for dinner every night, "He was to me like any husband is to his wife," she said.
"How do I know how he got into this mess? It must be the Devil," murmured Salim's mother, who was sitting on the floor, one eye blind, cloudy white.
Ansari was remembering better days before her husband lost his job, at a factory that made cardboard boxes. He was so proud of the factory, with its big machines, that he brought his sons to watch him on Sunday shifts. Tonight the younger one was streaked with dust; the older one watched from a cot, glassy-eyed and much smaller than his 10 years, bony limbs folded under his chin. She would try, Ms. Ansari said, to move them somewhere else, to a place where no one knew who their father was.
"I want my children to grow up to be good human beings, that's all," the mother said.
Neha Thirani Bagri contributed reporting.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Gang-rape-in-India-routine-and-invisible/articleshow/24774478.cms
The gang rape of a photojournalist by five suspects in Mumbai reinforces the notion that such crimes remain largely invisible in India.
MUMBAI, India — At 5:30pm on that Thursday, four young men were playing cards, as usual, when Mohammed Kasim Sheikh's cellphone rang and he announced that it was time to go hunting. Prey had been spotted, he told a friend. When the host asked what they were going to hunt, he said, "A beautiful deer."
As two men rushed out, the host smirked, figuring they did not like losing at cards.
Two hours later, a 22-year-old photojournalist limped out of a ruined building. She had been raped repeatedly by five men, asked by one to re-enact pornographic acts displayed on a cellphone. After she left, the men dispersed to their wives or mothers, if they had them; it was dinnertime. None of their previous victims had gone to the police. Why should this one?
The trial in the Mumbai gang-rape case has opened to a drowsy and ill-attended courtroom, without the crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi in which a woman died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The accused, barefoot, sit on a bench at the back of the courtroom, observing the arguments with blank expressions, as if they were being conducted in Mandarin. All have pleaded not guilty. They are slight men with ordinary faces, nothing imposing, the kind one might see at any bus stop or tea stall.
But the Mumbai case provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the top of the state's agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in.
An editor at the photographer's publication, who was present when a witness identified the first of the five suspects, a juvenile, said the teenager dissolved in tears as soon as he was accused.
"It was exactly like watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something," said the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim, who cannot be identified according to Indian law. "It's like a bunch of kids who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent, what happened."
In spots Mumbai is an anarchic jumble, its high-rise buildings flanked by vest-pocket slums and vacant properties that have reverted to near-wilderness. One such place is the Shakti Mills, a ruin from the prosperous days of Mumbai's textile industry. When night falls, it is a treacherous span of darkness lined with sinkholes and debris, but still in the middle of the city, still close enough to look up and watch the lights flicker on in the Shangri-La Hotel.
The photographer and her colleague, a 21-year-old man, were interns at an English-language publication and had decided to include this spot — the backdrop for any number of fashion shoots — as part of a photo essay on the city's abandoned buildings, the editor said. On that Thursday last August, they reached the ruined mill about an hour before sunset.
The five men they encountered there later came from slums near the mill complex, claustrophobic concrete warrens where electrical wires tangle at one's head and acrid water flows in open gutters around one's feet.
None of the men worked regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand — a hot, stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking. Luxury was pressed in their faces in the sinuous form of the Lodha Bellissimo, a 48-story apartment building rising from an adjacent lot.
"Every boy in this neighborhood, including myself, would look at those buildings and say, 'One day, I will own a flat in that building,' " said Yasin Sheikh, 22, who knew two of the accused men from the neighborhood. Because of his work helping find slum locations for film crews, he sometimes has a chance to interact with wealthy people, he said, and it fills him with yearning.
"I feel really sad around them, because I want to sit at the table with them," he said.
Only Kasim Sheikh, 20, the card player who took the call, seemed to have shaken off the drag of poverty. A plump man in a neighborhood of the half-starved, he wore flashy shirts and hooked up his friends with catering jobs at weddings. He had been convicted of theft — iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site — and occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai's joint police commissioner, Himanshu Roy.
Some people steered clear of Sheikh. The grandmother of one of the accused men, a 16-year-old whose name is being withheld because of his age, had forbidden Sheikh to cross their threshold. But her grandson craved nice things; that was his weakness, his grandmother said. Sheikh "wore good clothes, he had a nice mobile, obviously he would, because he was a thief," said Yasin Sheikh, the neighbor.
When another of their friends, a 27-year-old father of two named Salim Ansari, spotted the interns in the mill that day, the first thing he did was call Kasim Sheikh to tell him that their prey had arrived.
Nothing to lose
During the year since the Delhi gang rape, sexual violence has been discussed endlessly in India, but there are few clear answers to the questions of how much is it happening or why.
One problem is that perpetrators may not view their actions as a grave crime, but something closer to mischief. A survey of more than 10,000 men carried out in six Asian countries — India not among them — and published in The Lancet Global Health journal in September came up with startling data. It found that, when the word "rape" was not used as part of a questionnaire, more than one in 10 men in the region admitted to forcing sex on a woman who was not their partner.
Asked why, 73 percent said the reason was "entitlement." Fifty-nine percent said their motivation was "entertainment seeking," agreeing with the statements "I wanted to have fun" or "I was bored." Flavia Agnes, a Mumbai women's rights lawyer who has been working on rape cases since the 1970s, said the findings rang true to her experience.
"It's just frivolous; they just do it casually," she said. "There is so much abject poverty. They just want to have a little fun on the side. That's it. See, they have nothing to lose."
The photographer and her colleague reached the mill but, visually, it was not what they wanted. That is when two men approached them, the victim told the police later, offering to show them a route farther in. There the images were better, and the two had been working for half an hour when the two men returned.
'The prey is here'
This time they came back with a third, Sheikh, who told them something odd — "Our boss has seen you, and you have to come with us now" — and insisted they take a path deeper into the complex. As they walked, she called an editor, who said to leave immediately, but it was too late for that. "Come inside, the prey is here," Sheikh called out, and two more men joined them.
The men said that the woman's colleague was a murder suspect, asked the pair to remove their belts and used them to tie the man up. After that, the woman told the police, "the third person and a person who had a mustache took me to a place that was like a broken room."
The men had done the same thing a month before, said Roy, the police commissioner, taking turns raping an 18-year-old call-center worker who, accompanied by her boyfriend, had sprained her ankle and was trying to take a shortcut through the mill. They had done the same thing with a woman who worked as a scavenger in a garbage dump, and a sex worker, and a transvestite, Roy said.
Sheikh took the broken neck of a beer bottle out of his shirt pocket and thrust it at the young woman, telling her: "You don't know what a bastard I am. You're not the first girl I've raped," she told the police later, according to the charge sheet filed in the case.
On the other side of the wall, her friend heard the woman cry out. "An inquiry is going on," the man guarding him said. They went in to her and returned, one by one.
"Did you inquire properly?" Sheikh said to one as he came out.
"No, she's not talking," he replied.
So Sheikh said he would "go inquire again," and the rest of them laughed.
At last they brought her out, weeping, and told the two to leave along the railroad tracks. Before releasing her, they threatened to upload video of the attack onto the Internet if she reported the crime, a strategy that had worked with previous victims.
But this one did not hesitate. The two caught a cab to the nearest hospital. There they reported the crime, and the woman's mother arrived. "I went inside. I saw her there crying," her mother told the police later. "She told me in English, 'Mummy, I'm vanished.' "
The woman did not respond to a request for an interview.
Sheikh, too, saw his mother for a few moments that night. He discussed the rape with her, she said, and tried to explain why it had happened.
"I asked Kasim, 'Son, why did you do this to her? If it happened to your sister, would you come here and tell me or would you beat him?' " said his mother, Chandbibi Sheikh. He told her that his friends had come upon the couple embracing in the mill, and "they thought: 'What is she doing with this boy here? She must be loose.' "
She related this exchange from the family's home, a sort of shelf wedged between a gas station and a garbage dump; as she spoke, a rat the size of a kitten clambered over containers stacked in a corner. She said far too much onus was being put on the men.
"Obviously, the fault is the girl's," she said. "Why did she have to go to that jungle? It's her fault, too. Also, she was wearing skimpy clothes."
She did not deny that he had done it. "He must have," she said. "He told me that they tied up the boy who was doing bad things to her and said, 'Madam, let us also do it.' The madam said, 'Don't do it to me, take my mobile, take my camera, but don't do it to me.' Her body was uncovered. How could he control himself? And so it happened."
High-level response
Though the men in the mill may not have known it, rape had become a matter of great public import in India, a gauge of a city's identity. Mumbai's top officials, who had told themselves that the Delhi gang rape could not have happened here, were horrified and initiated a broad, high-level response, as if an act of terrorism had taken place.
The police lighted up their networks of slum informants and all five were arrested and gave confessions in quick succession. Several made pitiful attempts to escape. Sheikh went to the visitor's room of a nearby hospital and covered himself with a blanket, trying to blend in with a crowd of relatives. He was caught with 50 rupees, or about 81 cents, in his pocket. When the police asked him to sign his confession, he told them he could not write, so he signed it with a thumbprint.
"It is incredible how quickly the whole thing unraveled," said the editor, who was present when the photographer's colleague picked the first of the five men out of a lineup. A second victim, the call-center worker, came forward, inspired by the first, and said she was ready to testify. The suspects confessed to the other rapes under questioning, the police said.
The public prosecutor selected for the case is famous for prosecuting terrorists, with a resume of 628 life sentences, 30 death sentences and 12 men, as he put it, "sent to the gallows."
Much news coverage over the next days zeroed in on the defendants' poverty, but Roy shrugged off that line of inquiry. After interrogating the five accused men personally, he said they were "social outcasts," not indicative of any deeper tensions in the city.
"They were deviants, sociopaths, predators," he said in an interview. "If there was a larger socioeconomic framework, these crimes would be happening again and again. It was only these guys. I'm 100 percent sure that this kind of crime doesn't happen in Mumbai. I've been here all my life and have been born and brought up here."
But in a constellation of neighborhoods around Mumbai, people are still trying to match up the crime with the ordinary men they knew.
Shahjahan Ansari, the wife of the oldest accused man, Salim Ansari, looked terrified when a stranger appeared at her door, at a hulking, trash-strewn public housing complex beside a petroleum refinery on a distant edge of the city. The neighbors had started to shun the family since Salim's arrest became public, and she dreaded the extra attention.
"We can't even walk on the street. You don't understand," she said. Inside the apartment, she calmed down a little. The whole story baffled her; she said she had no idea who her husband's friends were or what he did during the day when she went to work cleaning houses. All she knew was that until his arrest, he came home for dinner every night, "He was to me like any husband is to his wife," she said.
"How do I know how he got into this mess? It must be the Devil," murmured Salim's mother, who was sitting on the floor, one eye blind, cloudy white.
Ansari was remembering better days before her husband lost his job, at a factory that made cardboard boxes. He was so proud of the factory, with its big machines, that he brought his sons to watch him on Sunday shifts. Tonight the younger one was streaked with dust; the older one watched from a cot, glassy-eyed and much smaller than his 10 years, bony limbs folded under his chin. She would try, Ms. Ansari said, to move them somewhere else, to a place where no one knew who their father was.
"I want my children to grow up to be good human beings, that's all," the mother said.
Neha Thirani Bagri contributed reporting.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Gang-rape-in-India-routine-and-invisible/articleshow/24774478.cms
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Why Sex Education is important in countries with a high Rape ratio over women's safety
Hello everyone,
While this blog is focused on sharing news and resources on Rape and sexual crimes. I couldn't resist sharing this picture and information I found below on Facebook. Here it is for you to read and share widely!
Have a super weekend!!!
The first response many give when asked about rape is 'death sentence for rapists'. While the individual who is sexually assaulted has all the right to argue for death penalty for rapists, the society must understand that there is absolutely no country that has prevented or eliminated rape by implementing death sentence.
What does not prevent rape:
1) Shouting death sentence for rapists every time a rape incident gets media publicity.
2) Making women cover themselves from head to feet.
3) Cultural worshiping of women as goddess and respectable beings.
What can prevent rape:
1) Implementing Sex Education in schools and colleges.
2) Taking action against educational institutions that punish boys and girls for talking to each other. These institutions are the reason many men dont even know how to approach a woman.
3) Teaching our children that no one is inferior because of their gender and making them understand the art of asking consent from the person they wish to have sex with.
The loudness of the mob voice that shouts for death penalty makes us blind to the various underlying social and cultural factors that produce rapists. If we can reach the childhood of these rapists and change their understanding of women and sex when they were kids, they would not turn into rapists in future. Lets try to create a social and educational system that does not produce rapists in the first place.
Source: Picture and text taken from Facebook
While this blog is focused on sharing news and resources on Rape and sexual crimes. I couldn't resist sharing this picture and information I found below on Facebook. Here it is for you to read and share widely!
Have a super weekend!!!
The first response many give when asked about rape is 'death sentence for rapists'. While the individual who is sexually assaulted has all the right to argue for death penalty for rapists, the society must understand that there is absolutely no country that has prevented or eliminated rape by implementing death sentence.
What does not prevent rape:
1) Shouting death sentence for rapists every time a rape incident gets media publicity.
2) Making women cover themselves from head to feet.
3) Cultural worshiping of women as goddess and respectable beings.
What can prevent rape:
1) Implementing Sex Education in schools and colleges.
2) Taking action against educational institutions that punish boys and girls for talking to each other. These institutions are the reason many men dont even know how to approach a woman.
3) Teaching our children that no one is inferior because of their gender and making them understand the art of asking consent from the person they wish to have sex with.
The loudness of the mob voice that shouts for death penalty makes us blind to the various underlying social and cultural factors that produce rapists. If we can reach the childhood of these rapists and change their understanding of women and sex when they were kids, they would not turn into rapists in future. Lets try to create a social and educational system that does not produce rapists in the first place.
Source: Picture and text taken from Facebook
Friday, September 13, 2013
Judgment in Dec 16 gang-rape case: Salient features
NEW DELHI: While pronouncing the verdict, the
fast-track court described the Dec 16 gang-rape as "premeditated" and
"brutal" act.
Salient features of the judgment
* Delhi court convicts four accused of murder, gang-rape, unnatural offences, kidnapping, dacoity, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy, among others.
* The court describes the Dec 16 gang-rape as "premeditated" and "brutal" act.Salient features of the judgment
* Delhi court convicts four accused of murder, gang-rape, unnatural offences, kidnapping, dacoity, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy, among others.
* The court says the facts made all the accused liable for the "cold blooded murder" of the "defenceless victim".
* The injuries were caused in a "brutal manner" and the death was also not accidental, the court says in a 237 page judgment.
* The rods caused as many as "18 internal injuries to several organs" and the cause of death in the case was the direct consequence of the multiple injuries sustained by her.
* The victim was "humiliated" and beaten up inside the bus with the intention of causing death.
* Rejecting claim of Mukesh, that he was only driving the bus and had not participated in the gang rape, the court said they all are liable for gang rape committed with the victim
* The accused had knowledge of what they were doing, says court.
* Court says gang rapists tried to kill her male friend of the victim and says that his evidence is of vital importance in deciding the act of all the accused.
* Court praised Delhi Police investigators for their prompt and professional action.
* Court says dying declaration of victim was consistent, corroborative of the material aspects of the case.
* Court says the bus was on the road not for earning through dropping passenger to their destination bit the purpose was to commit the crime.
Timeline of Delhi gang rape case
* Dec 16, 2012: A 23-year-old physiotherapy intern raped by six people, including a juvenile, inside a moving bus in Delhi.
* Dec 17: Bus driver Ram Singh and two other accused are arrested.
* Dec 18: Protests over the incident, crowds clash with police in central Delhi. Fourth accused arrested.
* Dec 19: Two accused brought before a Delhi court. Accused Vinay tells court "hang me".
* Dec 21: Fifth accused, who was 17-and-half years old at the time of the crime, arrested from Anand Vihar in east Delhi while boarding a bus to flee to his hometown in Uttar Pradesh.
Sixth accused Akshay Kumar Singh nabbed from Bihar.
* Dec 22: Gang rape victim records statement before a sub-divisional magistrate.
* Dec 23: Fast track court set up by the Delhi High Court.
* Dec 24: The government announces setting up of a committee to suggest amendments to laws for speedy trials and enhanced punishment for criminals in rape cases.
* Dec 27: Victim airlifted to Singapore for treatment.
* Dec 29: She succumbs to her injuries at a Singapore hospital.
* Dec 30: The body of the gang rape victim flown back to Delhi, cremated.
* Jan 3, 2013: A case of rape, murder, kidnapping, destruction of evidence, and attempted murder filed against all the six accused in the case.
* Jan 7: Court orders in-camera trial.
* Jan 28: Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) declares that one of the accused is a minor.
* Feb 2: Fast track court paves the way for trial and charges five men for murder, gang rape and other offences.
* Feb 3: The Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance, 2013, issued. The relevant bill passed by the Lok Sabha March 19 and the Rajya Sabha March 21, making laws more stringent.
* Feb 5: Trial begins in the case and court records statements of accused.
* March 11: Accused Ram Singh found hanging in his Tihar Jail cell.
* May 17: Victim's mother appears as a prosecution witness before the trial court and says "give justice to my daughter".
* June 14: Juvenile accused turns 18 in custody. Age determined based on school certificate.
* July 11: Juvenile Justice Board in New Delhi defers verdict on the minor accused to July 25.
* July 25: Juvenile Justice Board defers verdict on minor accused till Aug 5.
* Aug 22: The Supreme Court allows the juvenile board to go ahead with pronouncing its verdict.
* Aug 31: Juvenile Justice Board sentences the minor accused to a three-year stay in a special home.
* Sep 3: Delhi court reserves its order.
* Sep 10: All the four accused Mukesh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh are held guilty on all counts. Court to pronounce quantum of punishment Sep 11.
* Sep 11: Delhi court defers verdict on the four men accused to Sep 13.
* Sep 13: The court sentences to death Mukesh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh.
Source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/judgment-dec-16-gang-rape-case-salient-features-163203988.html
Delhi gang rapists sentenced to death
The four men faced either life imprisonment or death by hanging [AFP]
|
| An Indian court has sentenced four men to death for the gang rape and murder of a studen |
Four men have been convicted over roles in rape and murder of 23-year-old woman in capital Delhi last year.
An Indian court has sentenced four men to death for the gang rape and murder of a student in the capital Delhi.
Friday's ruling came after her parents begged for the "cold-blooded" killers' execution.
Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta were convicted on Tuesday in the December attack of the 23-year-old woman, a crime that unleashed a wave of public anger over the treatment of women in India.
The woman died two weeks after the attack of internal injuries.
Judge Yogesh Khanna said on Friday the case fell in the "rarest of rare category", rejecting pleas for lighter sentence.
'Cannot turn blind eye'
Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta were convicted on Tuesday in the December attack of the 23-year-old woman, a crime that unleashed a wave of public anger over the treatment of women in India.
The woman died two weeks after the attack of internal injuries.
Judge Yogesh Khanna said on Friday the case fell in the "rarest of rare category", rejecting pleas for lighter sentence.
'Cannot turn blind eye'
Khanna said the attack "shocked the collective conscience" of India, and that "courts cannot turn a blind eye" to such crimes.
"This case definitely falls in the rarest of rare categories and warrants the exemplary punishment of death," he added.
The four men faced either life imprisonment or death by hanging.
The men called out to reporters as police drove them into the courthouse complex before the sentencing hearing.
The four men faced either life imprisonment or death by hanging.
The men called out to reporters as police drove them into the courthouse complex before the sentencing hearing.
"Save us, brothers! Save us!" they could be heard shouting from the police van.
One of the convicted men, Vinay Sharma, broke down in tears and cried loudly as the sentence was announced.
Earlier, protesters outside the court had demanded that the four men must be hanged.
As the news broke, crowds inside the building and outside the courtroom roared with cheers and applauded the judgement.
The prosecution team congratulated each other, with lead lawyer Dayan Krishnan saying: "We did our job. We are happy with this sentence".
The father of the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said the family was also satisfied as he left with his wife and sons.
"We are very happy. Justice has been delivered," he told reporters inside court flanked by his wife and sons.
One of the convicted men, Vinay Sharma, broke down in tears and cried loudly as the sentence was announced.
Earlier, protesters outside the court had demanded that the four men must be hanged.
As the news broke, crowds inside the building and outside the courtroom roared with cheers and applauded the judgement.
The prosecution team congratulated each other, with lead lawyer Dayan Krishnan saying: "We did our job. We are happy with this sentence".
The father of the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said the family was also satisfied as he left with his wife and sons.
"We are very happy. Justice has been delivered," he told reporters inside court flanked by his wife and sons.
Delhi rape suspects face death sentences
Juvenile convict was sentenced to three years in a correctional facility, the maximum allowed by law [AFP]
|
Four men will learn on Friday if they are to hang for the shocking murder and gang rape of an Indian |
Indian judge will announce if case of four men, accused for rape and murder, fulfills for meriting death sentence.
Four men will learn on Friday if they are to hang for the shocking murder and gang rape of an Indian student after her parents begged for the "cold-blooded" killers' execution.
Three days after finding the gang guilty of a murderous assault which sickened a nation, Judge Yogesh Khanna will announce whether it fulfils the "rarest of rare" criteria for crimes that merit capital punishment.
There has been a huge clamour for the four, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh to be executed for their attack on a 23-year-old physiotherapy student and her male companion on board a bus on December 16.
After prosecution lawyers argued on Wednesday the gang were guilty of a "diabolical" crime, the victim's mother implored the judge to hand down the death sentence.
"We beg the court that justice should be given to our daughter," said the mother, who cannot be named to protect the identity of her late daughter.
"It was not merely a mistake, they planned and killed her mercilessly," she told reporters.
The victim's father has said only the death penalty can bring the family some closure.
During Wednesday's hearing, defence lawyers argued Judge Khanna should resist "political pressure" and instead jail the gang for life, citing the youth of their clients who are all in their teens or 20s.
Rape cases increasing
Handing down his verdict at the end of a seven-month trial on Tuesday, Khanna found the men guilty of the "cold-blooded" murder of a "helpless victim" whose fight for life won her the nickname of Braveheart.
Feelings though are running high in a country disgusted by daily reports of gang rapes and sex assaults on children.
A total of 1,098 cases of rape have been reported to police in Delhi alone so far this year, according to figures in The Times of India on Friday.
That represents a massive increase on the 450 recorded in the same period last year, although campaigners say the rise is reflective of a greater willingness by victims to come forward after the December 16 attack.
Lawyers for the men have already said they will appeal the convictions in the Delhi High Court, which will spell years of argument and delays in India's notoriously slow legal system.
In appeal, the defence is likely to advocate lesser sentences for some of the gang, and argue it was a "spur of the moment" crime and not premeditated.
There was widespread anger after a juvenile who was convicted last month for his role in the bus attack was sentenced to just three years in a correctional facility, the maximum allowed by law.
Rattled by the mass protests, the government rushed through new anti-rape laws and ordered the trial be held in a special fast-track court.
|
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Delhi rape sentencing: A look at death penalty in India
India: Four men convicted on Tuesday of gang-raping and murdering a young woman in December face sentencing on Friday. The men, including a part-time bus driver, were joy-riding through New Delhi on a bus on the night of December 16 when they lured the 23-year-old woman and a male friend of hers into boarding. They then beat the friend, took turns raping the woman and violated her savagely with an iron rod. She died two weeks later of internal injuries. They now face the possibility of execution or life in prison.
The prosecutor asked Judge Yogesh Khanna on Wednesday to sentence the men to death, calling the crime barbaric. Their lawyers have called for prison sentences, citing their poverty, poor education and lack of criminal history. Representational image. AFP -India’s legal system allows for execution in what the Supreme Court calls “the rarest of the rare cases.” What defines those cases remains highly debated, but the only executions in recent years have been of convicted terrorists.
The vast majority of the 100-150 death sentences handed down each year are eventually commuted to life in prison. India is thought to have carried out about 50 executions since independence in 1947. -All execution orders must be confirmed by India’s High Court, and cases can also be appealed to the Supreme Court. Final appeals for clemency are made to India’s president. The office of the current president, Pranab Mukherjee, says it does not keep track of how many clemency appeals it receives or signs.
Media reports indicate he has rejected the clemency pleas of 17 people, and commuted one execution. That hard-line attitude is widely seen as an effort by the Congress party, which faces national elections next year, not to look weak on terrorism. Mukherjee is a long-time Congress leader. -For nearly a decade, India had an unofficial moratorium on executions. That ended in November 2012 with the execution of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunmen in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Two months later, Mohammad Afzal Guru, convicted in a deadly 2001 attack on India’s Parliament complex, was also hanged. Both of the executions were done secretly, without any public notice. If the four men are sentenced to hang, it is unclear when they would be executed. -Executions are done by hanging in India, carried out in prisons across the country. Many of the ropes used are made by prisoners at a jail in eastern India.
Source: http://www.firstpost.com/india/delhi-rape-sentencing-a-look-at-death-penalty-in-india-1103957.html
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
India prosecutors seek death for Delhi rapists, defense urges mercy
By Sanjeev Miglani and Sruthi Gottipat
- Indian prosecutors demanded on Wednesday the death penalty for four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist last December, saying it was important to send a signal to the country that such crimes would not be tolerated.
"The common man will lose faith in the judiciary if the harshest punishment is not given," special public prosecutor Dayan Krishnan told trial judge Yogesh Khanna, who will sentence the men on Friday.
Indeed, outside the court, popular opinion on social media sites and comments by top politicians suggest many Indians want to see the men hanged for a crime the brutality of which shocked even in a country where sex crimes against women are rife.
Social commentators say the attack has forced Indians to confront an uncomfortable truth - that social change, in particular patriarchal attitudes towards women, has not kept pace with rapid economic growth over the past decade.
The case has resonated with thousands of urban Indians who took to the streets in fury after the attack. The victim became a symbol of the daily dangers women face in a country where a rape is reported on average every 21 minutes and acid attacks and incidents of molestation are common.
Bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Singh, gym instructor Vinay Sharma, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta, and unemployed Mukesh Singh stood at the back of the courtroom surrounded by policemen. They showed no emotion as Krishnan described their crime as "diabolical" and called for them to be hanged.
The parents of the victim, who may not be identified for legal reasons, sat just feet away from the men. After the hearing, her father bluntly told reporters: "They finished my daughter, they deserve the same fate."
The men were found guilty on Tuesday of luring the woman and a male friend onto a bus as the pair returned home from watching a movie at a shopping mall on December 16.
As the bus drove through the streets of the capital, the men repeatedly raped the victim before dumping her and her friend, naked and semi-conscious, on the road.
The men used a metal rod and their hands to pull the woman's organs from her body after raping her, Krishnan said. Her injuries were so severe that she died in hospital in Singapore two weeks after the attack.
"This is an extreme case of depravity," Krishnan said, likening the woman's injuries to someone "cutting open a fruit".
All four of the men denied the charges. Three of them said they were never on the bus while a fourth admitted driving the vehicle but said he knew nothing of the crime. The prosecution said mobile phone records, CCTV footage, DNA evidence and bite marks on the woman's body placed the men at the scene.
India's interior minister, Sushilkumar Shinde said the death penalty was assured in the case, while a senior leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Sushma Swaraj, said it was important to "set an example for the future".
Under Indian law, the death penalty is reserved for the "rarest of rare" cases. Even when it is imposed, the authorities rarely carry out executions.
"Hang them, hang them," chanted a small group of protesters outside the court.
There are 477 prisoners on death row in India, according to the interior ministry. Last year, India carried out its first hanging in eight years when it executed the lone survivor of a squad ofPakistan-based militants who attacked Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people.
"JUDGES SHOULD NOT BE BLOODTHIRSTY"
Inside the court, lawyers for the four men pleaded for mercy and repeatedly highlighted the reluctance of Indian judges in the past to impose the death sentence.
Judges should not be bloodthirsty, said lawyer Vivek Sharma, who represents 19-year-old Gupta, the youngest of the four on trial. "You can't give capital punishment on demand."
Sharma said his client had not taken part in the rape or torture of the woman. He asked the court to take into account that Gupta was the sole breadwinner for his family and had to take care of his elderly parents and brother and sister.
A.P. Singh, lawyer for Kumar Singh and Sharma, said the death penalty was a "primitive and cold blooded and simplistic response to complex issues". He painted his clients as downtrodden who deserved a second chance.
Mukesh Singh, who said he had been driving the bus at the time of the attack, should not face the same penalty as his co-accused, his lawyer V.K. Anand told the court.
"At best, he can be held for aiding the others. Punish him, but punish him keeping in mind he was only driving the bus."
Women's rights groups have welcomed the guilty verdict but cautioned against giving the death sentence, saying that research across the world has shown that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent and the case should not set a precedent for all rapes to be punished with hanging.
If the men do receive the death penalty, India's high court will still have to confirm the sentences. The four are expected to file appeals, so proceedings could still go on for months or even years.
(This story has been refiled to remove reference to alias of one of the convicted men in paragraph 20)
(Additional reporting by Suchitra Mohanty and Anurag Kotoky; Writing by Ross Colvin; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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