Mother of rape accused in shock
The mother of the man accused of leading the gang-rape and murder which provoked protests throughout India has spoken about the moment she was told two of her sons had committed one of the country’s most notorious crimes.
The parents of Ram Singh grieve outside their home Photo: REX
By Dean Nelson
9:00AM GMT 22 Mar 2013
Her son Ram Singh, the keeper of the bus on which 23 year old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh was gang-raped and mutilated by six men in December, was found dead in his cell earlier this month at Delhi’s Tihar Jail where he and his brother Mukesh were in custody for her rape and murder.
Kalyani Devi and her husband Mangelal Singh believe he was murdered after weeks of being raped, tortured and forced to eat his own feces by police and prison guards.
They said he did not deserve to die in that way and was entitled to a fair trial, but in an interview with the Daily Telegraph last week she told how her late son had confessed to being on the bus at the time of the gang-rape, to destroying the evidence the following day, and how she has faced every mother’s worst fears: the loss of a child and the possibility that he may have committed a terrible crime.
Since her sons were arrested her family has suffered a bomb attack on their home, her grandson has been expelled from school because of the association, and they have been reviled by strangers.
In another son’s tiny one-room flat in South Delhi last week, she cried for Jyoti Singh, the 23 year old victim of the gang-rape, and her family, and said she, as a mother who had lost her child, knew what they were going through.
But as the mother of two men who may have caused her brutal death, her own anguish is inconsolable.
Shortly before she died from her injuries – ninety per cent of her intestines had been destroyed by an attack with an iron rod kept on the bus – Jyoti Singh made a statement in which she named Ram and Mukesh Singh among the six men who battered and raped her after she and her friend boarded their bus home from watching the film Life of Pi at a cinema. Police traced the vehicle the next morning and found Ram Sing in blood-stained clothes washing the victim’s flesh and blood from his bus.
Kalyani Devi and her husband were in their ancestral village in Rajasthan, where they were poor farm labourers, when the police arrived and ordered Mukesh to tell them what he had done. He said he’d been returned home after hearing his brother Ram had been in a fight and found him and his colleagues drunk.
“Then this incident had happened. Mukesh was told to drive the bus. [He said that] Ram Singh was drunk and out of his senses. He did not know what was happening on the bus because the driver’s area is separate from the rest of the bus,” she said.
When she first saw Ram Singh in prison one month after his arrest he said he had been too drunk to know what was happening. "He was on the bus, no doubt about that, but he was not in a condition to do anything. He was out of his senses. He was aware of what had happened, and what we fear, he tried to wash the bus,” she said.
He worked hard driving his bus from 6am to 8pm every day to support his family, and had worked since he left school at seven, she said. He was a talkative child, always wanting to entertain people, but as an adult he got into fights when drunk.She knows the charges against her sons might be true, she said, but as their mother she cannot believe it.
“I don’t know whether my sons were involved or not. Only God knows exactly what happened. But my sons told me they were not [involved]. Even if they were not, I still feel sorry for the girl’s family. And if they were involved I feel sorry. It’s a terrible loss for the family. As a mother I can’t believe it but it could be true. No mother wants her children to do something like this. It’s the worst thing a mother could ever imagine of her children. We always want them to prosper and grow in a positive way. It’s shocking for us that they got involved in this. I do not know what they did, but we are in a terrible state because of the allegations,” she said.
