Indian rape victim was 'planning to marry man she was attacked with'
The young Indian woman who died on Saturday from injuries she suffered in a gang-rape that has prompted national soul-searching was set to marry the man she was with when they were attacked, said friends and relatives.
A girl lights candles during a candlelight vigil for the gang rape victim Photo: REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri
By Dean Nelson, New Delhi7:06PM GMT 30 Dec 2012
The funeral pyre was lit after traumatised relatives and friends said their final prayers at a ceremony in south-western Delhi. Friends revealed that the 23-year-old student was engaged to the man who was attacked alongside her, and that they planned to marry in February.
“They had made all the wedding preparations and had planned a wedding party in Delhi,” said Meena Rai, who was a close friend and neighbour. “I really loved this girl. She was the brightest of all.”
Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, and Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the ruling Congress party, were at Delhi airport to console her parents as they arrived home on a chartered plane with their daughter’s body in the early hours.
After treatment in a Delhi hospital following the attack on Dec 16, the woman was flown to Singapore on Wednesday, but doctors were unable to prevent multiple organ failure. She was pronounced dead in the early hours of Saturday.
An ambulance transporting the body of the gang-rape victim is seen outside her residence in New Delhi (AFP/Getty images)
Her killing has prompted government promises of better protection for women, and profound soul-searching in a nation where horrifying gang-rapes are commonplace and sexual harassment is routinely dismissed as “Eve-teasing”.
Several thousand people gathered in the centre of the Indian capital — some to express sympathy for the victim, others to voice their anger at the government.
Stringent security measures in which government offices and other public areas in New Delhi have been sealed off to prevent protests have been seized on by critics as further evidence of an out-of-touch government bungling its response.
“We cannot understand the high-handedness of the police. This is our city, we should be free to move around and protest peacefully,” said Mahima Anand, 21, who works for a multi-national company.
She spoke from the Jantar Mantar area of Delhi, where protesters have been allowed to gather. “She was not just one woman, she epitomises every Indian woman who has been wronged in some way or the other,” she added.
(AFP/Getty Images)
The student, whose identity has been withheld to protect her family, with her fiancé were attacked by men wielding an iron bar after they boarded a bus in South Delhi’s upmarket Saket neighbourhood. She was raped repeatedly by six men, who have been charged with her murder, as the bus – which had tinted windows and closed curtains – cruised the capital’s streets. The couple were hurled from the bus.
The fiance, whose name has also been withheld, was treated in hospital and later released. The Hindustan Times newspaper reported that the woman, a trainee physiotherapist, was the joker of her family who always entertained her two younger brothers and tutored neighbours’ children to boost her family’s income. A dedicated student, she was determined to get a well-paid job to help repay her father, who had sold his ancestral home to fund her tuition, reports said.
The tragedy has forced India to confront the reality that sexually assaulted women are often blamed for the crime, which discourages them from going to the authorities for fear of exposing their families to ridicule. Police often refuse to accept complaints from rape victims, and the rare prosecutions that reach courts can drag on for years.
Human Rights Watch said Indian rape survivors “usually find it difficult to register police complaints, and often go from one hospital to another even for a medical examination”. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, sent his condolences to the family.
