Mother of 'India's Daughter' calls for rape gang to be hanged
The mother of the young woman who was gang raped and murdered in New Delhi has spoken for the first time about the attack that shocked India.
An Indian activist prays as she takes part in a vigil for the Delhi rape victim. Photo: AFP/Getty
9:00PM GMT 12 Jan 2013
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The anguish of the last three weeks has already taken a heavy toll on Lakshmi.
Her face looks drawn and exhausted, and as she sits with a cheap printed
shawl wrapped around her bird-like frame, relatives watch over in case she
suffers yet another fainting fit. She can barely bring herself to eat, and
when someone offers her milk to drink, it goes untouched.
Ask her what she thinks should happen to the men arrested for gang-raping and murdering her daughter, though, and a sudden steel comes into the 46-year-old's quiet, hesitant voice. "Mercy" is not among the words that comes forth.
"My soul will never know any rest if the men who tormented my daughter are not hanged," she says. "If they are not, the idea of them being in jail, eating and watching television, talking and laughing when my daughter has gone from this world will eat away at me. Living out the rest of my life will be very hard if those men are not hanged."
That Lakshmi has no interest in leniency is hardly surprising. The killing of her daughter has caused shockwaves across India, firstly because it epitomised a culture of sexual violence that has long gone unchallenged, and secondly because of its sheer, frenzied brutality. Using a tyre iron as a weapon, the gang beat the 23-year-old student so badly that she died 13 days later in a hospital in Singapore, having suffered massive internal injuries, brain damage and a heart attack. Yet her mother's rejection of clemency is also a way of fulfilling her daughter's dying wish, whispered during one of her brief bouts of consciousness as she lay in her hospital bed.
"When one of few things she said to me was: 'Mama, I want them to be burnt alive'," said her mother, who sat last week hunched in a charpoy, a traditional string cot that her relatives had set up in the yard of her home. "What they did to her, how they used that iron rod on her was so inhuman, I can't understand it."
Lakshmi - not her real name - was speaking to The Sunday Telegraph at
her ancestral home in Medawara Kalan, a dirt-poor farming hamlet of mud huts
and squat brick homes that lies amid yellow-green mustard fields in the
northern state of Utter Pradesh. Life here has changed little from how it
was centuries ago: buffaloes wander the sidestreets, heating is from cowdung
cakes rather than gas or electricity, and women grind spices outside their
homes for meals still cooked on wood-fired clay stoves. It was in the hope
of providing their children with better prospects than these that Lakshmi
and her husband moved to the Indian capital, Delhi, before she was born.
Following their daughter's cremation in Delhi a fortnight ago, however, the family returned to the village for the first time in five years, prompted by the desire to be among a large extended family and friends. The constant presence of people to sit with, talk to, and just be with, is a solace, according to her father, 53. "I couldn't bear the idea of walking into our house without my daughter," he said. "That's going to be the hardest thing for all of us."
On Friday, the tiny village was abuzz as as it greeted another rare visitor - Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, who, in the style of most Indian politicians, arrived in a manner more befitting of a head of state. Beforehand, the massive craters on the long winding road leading to Medawara Kalan were filled hastily with sand and broken stones, while workers erected a small white marquee outside the family's modest home, connected by stretches of green carpet to a hastily-erected helipad.
As some 500 policemen stood guard, the minister himself finally touched down, chatting briefly to the family and then handing over a cheque for £26,000 as compensation for their daughter's death. He also announced plans to build a hospital in the village, currently some 120 miles away from proper medical facilities.
Yet in its grandstanding pomp and ad hoc largesse, the minister's visit also underlined the divide between India's "haves" and "have-nots" - a divide that Lakshmi and her partner devoted to their lives to getting her on the right side of. Like millions of modern Indians, they were determined that their own children - boys and girls alike - would be the first to have a chance of a decent education and a professional career.
Lack of funds, though, was not the obstacle to their ambitions.
"My father's family couldn't believe it," said Lakshmi's elder son, 20, as he sat stroking his mother's hair.
"Fighting broke out when my parents sold some land to finance her education. Then, when they sold the jewellery they had inherited, my relatives were just stunned. They thought my parents were mad and told them to stop. But they went ahead, they were determined to give her a good future."
In Lakshmi's daughter's case, it turned out to be money well spent. She was, by all accounts, exactly the kind of hard-working, dutiful daughter that every Indian family dreams of, the sort who would fulfil the expectations of even the most socially-aspirant parents.
A star pupil at school, she supplemented her own fees by tutoring other children, raising her nose from books just long enough to scold her younger siblings for not following her example.
"She used to say to me: "You have to make something of yourself'," her brother recalled. "Do you think Papa left his village and his whole family to come to Delhi just so that you could be a failure?"
At first, she had wanted to be a doctor, but her father, who held down jobs variously as a mechanic, security guard and airport loader, could not raise the necessary bank loans. The Sai Institute of Paramedical and Allied Sciences, in the city of Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills, offered an alternative: a 4½-year physiotherapy course that was far cheaper. Once qualified she would earn a monthly salary of 30,000 rupees (£340), more than four times her father's income.
Having enrolled in 2008, she also worked night shifts at a call centre, advising Canadians about their mortgages and honing her English; she became an avid reader Sidney Sheldon novels and of "One Night @ the Call Centre," a best-selling Indian novel about six call-centre workers. As her confidence grew, the once-shy girl swapped her traditional dresses for jeans, tops, and high-heels. By virtue of her education, she also become the second "head of the family" alongside her father.
"Whenever there was a problem at home, some issue, we always waited to speak to her," said her brother. "Papa too would consult her, even more than consulting Mama, because he knew she would be sensible and know what to do."
"She was our life," added her mother. "She always used to tell me that the struggle to educate her would soon be over and then, when she started working, our lives would improve."
Had she ever feared for her daughter's safety in Delhi?
"I would sometimes say that I was scared, that she should be very careful whenever she went out. But she always told me to relax. 'Don't worry, I'll be fine, nothing will happen."
That turned to be the one thing which her daughter - always the family member who got things right - got wrong.
One the night of December 16, after seeing the movie Life of Pi, she and a male companion took a ride home in what seemed like an ordinary private mini-bus. Instead, both the driver and the other "passengers" were a gang on the prowl for victims. As the bus drove around the streets, its windows blacked out from view, her male companion was beaten unconscious while she was raped, the attackers eventually discarding the two of them by a roadside.
When her parents, already distraught by her failure to return home on time as usual, received a phone call from a hospital to say she had been admitted, they initially assumed it was just a minor car accident. Ten days later they were being flown with with her to an intensive care ward in Singapore, where the Indian government - stung by outrage over the incident - hoped that specialists might be able to save her life.
By then, Lakshmi's daughter was so weak that much of her last communication with her parents was in sign language. In some ways, the limits on communication may have been a blessing.
"She did not know that her intestines had been ripped out," said her mother. "When she asked me why the doctors had done such a big operation on her abdomen, I just told her that I didn't know. I kept telling her she would recover and come home.
"Then, one day, I saw the machine for her blood pressure make a strange noise, and the line (on the monitor) changed. I looked at the doctor and he said that she had gone, that there was nothing more he could do for her."
As the family continued mourning last week, five men appeared in court charged with kidnap, gang-rape and murder, while a sixth defendant, believed to be 17, faces charges in a juvenile court.
Lawyers for some of the suspects - who could face the death penalty - have said they were tortured by police into making false confessions, a claim that brings a snort of dismissal from the victim's mother.
Some reports of the story have focused on the fact that several of the accused came from the same notorious district of Delhi, a so-called "slum cluster" called Ravidas Camp that sits in an otherwise upmarket area near the city's main airport. A maze of alleyways and squalid brick housing, its lawless reputation gives easy credence to the narrative that the crime was the tale of two contrasting Delhis - one chasing the modern Indian dream of middle-class prosperity, the other embracing a ghetto culture of violence and sexual pugnacity. Not in the mind, though, of the victim's mother, who herself knows how it it is to be raised poor.
"People ask me if I ever educated my sons on how to treat women with respect and not harass them them or stare at them, but I always reply that I never needed to," she said. "My sons have never misbehaved with women or even thought of it."
She added that she was not interested in compensation from the government, or in the various promises of help that have been made by ministers and organisations, including job offers for her son, who must now face up to a future as the main family breadwinner. "I want only one thing. I want to see those animals hang," she insisted.
This weekend saw the formal Hindu mourning period for her daughter come to a close. For the past 13 days, various prayers and rituals have been performed, designed to let the soul pass peacefully to the next level of existence. At the final ceremony today (SUN), worshippers were due to offer clothes, accessories and other items deemed to help the deceased in their journey. Whether they would be of much use in Lakshmi's daughter's case was a moot point - her education had also made her a committed aethiest, said her brother.
"I've got jeans, a shirt, shoes, shampoo, eyeliner and moisturiser," he said, smiling. "I know it won't reach her, but I'm doing it as a gesture for my sister."
One item that his ever-studious sibling might have been keen to receive will not be offered up. Friday was the day that she was due to receive the results of her final year physiotherapy exams, the culmination of all those years of striving by both her and her parents.
But asked if she would try to find out what the results were, her mother shook her head. "What's the point?" she said. "Nothing matters any more."
Names have been changed in this article for legal reasons
Following their daughter's cremation in Delhi a fortnight ago, however, the family returned to the village for the first time in five years, prompted by the desire to be among a large extended family and friends. The constant presence of people to sit with, talk to, and just be with, is a solace, according to her father, 53. "I couldn't bear the idea of walking into our house without my daughter," he said. "That's going to be the hardest thing for all of us."
On Friday, the tiny village was abuzz as as it greeted another rare visitor - Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, who, in the style of most Indian politicians, arrived in a manner more befitting of a head of state. Beforehand, the massive craters on the long winding road leading to Medawara Kalan were filled hastily with sand and broken stones, while workers erected a small white marquee outside the family's modest home, connected by stretches of green carpet to a hastily-erected helipad.
As some 500 policemen stood guard, the minister himself finally touched down, chatting briefly to the family and then handing over a cheque for £26,000 as compensation for their daughter's death. He also announced plans to build a hospital in the village, currently some 120 miles away from proper medical facilities.
Yet in its grandstanding pomp and ad hoc largesse, the minister's visit also underlined the divide between India's "haves" and "have-nots" - a divide that Lakshmi and her partner devoted to their lives to getting her on the right side of. Like millions of modern Indians, they were determined that their own children - boys and girls alike - would be the first to have a chance of a decent education and a professional career.
Lack of funds, though, was not the obstacle to their ambitions.
"My father's family couldn't believe it," said Lakshmi's elder son, 20, as he sat stroking his mother's hair.
"Fighting broke out when my parents sold some land to finance her education. Then, when they sold the jewellery they had inherited, my relatives were just stunned. They thought my parents were mad and told them to stop. But they went ahead, they were determined to give her a good future."
In Lakshmi's daughter's case, it turned out to be money well spent. She was, by all accounts, exactly the kind of hard-working, dutiful daughter that every Indian family dreams of, the sort who would fulfil the expectations of even the most socially-aspirant parents.
A star pupil at school, she supplemented her own fees by tutoring other children, raising her nose from books just long enough to scold her younger siblings for not following her example.
"She used to say to me: "You have to make something of yourself'," her brother recalled. "Do you think Papa left his village and his whole family to come to Delhi just so that you could be a failure?"
At first, she had wanted to be a doctor, but her father, who held down jobs variously as a mechanic, security guard and airport loader, could not raise the necessary bank loans. The Sai Institute of Paramedical and Allied Sciences, in the city of Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills, offered an alternative: a 4½-year physiotherapy course that was far cheaper. Once qualified she would earn a monthly salary of 30,000 rupees (£340), more than four times her father's income.
Having enrolled in 2008, she also worked night shifts at a call centre, advising Canadians about their mortgages and honing her English; she became an avid reader Sidney Sheldon novels and of "One Night @ the Call Centre," a best-selling Indian novel about six call-centre workers. As her confidence grew, the once-shy girl swapped her traditional dresses for jeans, tops, and high-heels. By virtue of her education, she also become the second "head of the family" alongside her father.
"Whenever there was a problem at home, some issue, we always waited to speak to her," said her brother. "Papa too would consult her, even more than consulting Mama, because he knew she would be sensible and know what to do."
"She was our life," added her mother. "She always used to tell me that the struggle to educate her would soon be over and then, when she started working, our lives would improve."
Had she ever feared for her daughter's safety in Delhi?
"I would sometimes say that I was scared, that she should be very careful whenever she went out. But she always told me to relax. 'Don't worry, I'll be fine, nothing will happen."
That turned to be the one thing which her daughter - always the family member who got things right - got wrong.
One the night of December 16, after seeing the movie Life of Pi, she and a male companion took a ride home in what seemed like an ordinary private mini-bus. Instead, both the driver and the other "passengers" were a gang on the prowl for victims. As the bus drove around the streets, its windows blacked out from view, her male companion was beaten unconscious while she was raped, the attackers eventually discarding the two of them by a roadside.
When her parents, already distraught by her failure to return home on time as usual, received a phone call from a hospital to say she had been admitted, they initially assumed it was just a minor car accident. Ten days later they were being flown with with her to an intensive care ward in Singapore, where the Indian government - stung by outrage over the incident - hoped that specialists might be able to save her life.
By then, Lakshmi's daughter was so weak that much of her last communication with her parents was in sign language. In some ways, the limits on communication may have been a blessing.
"She did not know that her intestines had been ripped out," said her mother. "When she asked me why the doctors had done such a big operation on her abdomen, I just told her that I didn't know. I kept telling her she would recover and come home.
"Then, one day, I saw the machine for her blood pressure make a strange noise, and the line (on the monitor) changed. I looked at the doctor and he said that she had gone, that there was nothing more he could do for her."
As the family continued mourning last week, five men appeared in court charged with kidnap, gang-rape and murder, while a sixth defendant, believed to be 17, faces charges in a juvenile court.
Lawyers for some of the suspects - who could face the death penalty - have said they were tortured by police into making false confessions, a claim that brings a snort of dismissal from the victim's mother.
Some reports of the story have focused on the fact that several of the accused came from the same notorious district of Delhi, a so-called "slum cluster" called Ravidas Camp that sits in an otherwise upmarket area near the city's main airport. A maze of alleyways and squalid brick housing, its lawless reputation gives easy credence to the narrative that the crime was the tale of two contrasting Delhis - one chasing the modern Indian dream of middle-class prosperity, the other embracing a ghetto culture of violence and sexual pugnacity. Not in the mind, though, of the victim's mother, who herself knows how it it is to be raised poor.
"People ask me if I ever educated my sons on how to treat women with respect and not harass them them or stare at them, but I always reply that I never needed to," she said. "My sons have never misbehaved with women or even thought of it."
She added that she was not interested in compensation from the government, or in the various promises of help that have been made by ministers and organisations, including job offers for her son, who must now face up to a future as the main family breadwinner. "I want only one thing. I want to see those animals hang," she insisted.
This weekend saw the formal Hindu mourning period for her daughter come to a close. For the past 13 days, various prayers and rituals have been performed, designed to let the soul pass peacefully to the next level of existence. At the final ceremony today (SUN), worshippers were due to offer clothes, accessories and other items deemed to help the deceased in their journey. Whether they would be of much use in Lakshmi's daughter's case was a moot point - her education had also made her a committed aethiest, said her brother.
"I've got jeans, a shirt, shoes, shampoo, eyeliner and moisturiser," he said, smiling. "I know it won't reach her, but I'm doing it as a gesture for my sister."
One item that his ever-studious sibling might have been keen to receive will not be offered up. Friday was the day that she was due to receive the results of her final year physiotherapy exams, the culmination of all those years of striving by both her and her parents.
But asked if she would try to find out what the results were, her mother shook her head. "What's the point?" she said. "Nothing matters any more."
Names have been changed in this article for legal reasons
posted by Neale Sourna @ January 17, 2013
