March 2020. Four men have been executed in India for the gang rape and murder of a woman on a Delhi bus in 2012, in a case which drew unprecedented focus to the prevalence of sexual assault in India. “The four convicts were hanged together at 5.30am,” announced Sandeep Goel, head of the Tihar jail on the outskirts of the capital where the men were being held. Despite the early hour, hundreds gathered outside the jail to celebrate the men’s deaths, holding placards that read “Justice for women” and “Hang the culprits”. The victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, became known in the media as Nirbhaya – the fearless one – as she could not be named under Indian law. On the night of the attack, she boarded a private bus after visiting the cinema with a male friend. Both were brutally beaten by five men and one 17-year-old boy on the bus, while the perpetrators repeatedly raped the woman. They were dumped naked on the roadside and while the friend survived, Nirbhaya died of her wounds in hospital two weeks later. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this case in India, with the Supreme Court in 2017 upholding the rare death sentences – Friday’s was the first set of executions since 2015 – on the basis the crimes met the “rarest of the rare” threshold and had created a “tsunami of shock” across the nation. “Justice has prevailed,” tweeted prime minister Narendra Modi, as conversation around the emerging coronavirus crisis temporarily gave way, with hashtags relating to Nirbhaya dominating national trends on social media. The four hanged men were gym instructor Vinay Sharma, bus cleaner Akshay Thakur, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta and unemployed Mukesh Singh. They were sentenced in 2013, and had their final appeals dismissed on Thursday just hours before their deaths.
Mar 2020. Hanging of the New Delhi Rapists
