Indian nurse dies after being in coma for 42 years

An Indian nurse died on Monday in Mumbai after spending 42 years in a coma following a brutal rape and attempted strangulation in the port city in 1973.

Doctors at King Edward hospital where Aruna Shanbaug (67) was fed through her nose twice a day, said she was put on a ventilator last week after developing pneumonia from which she never recovered.

Shanbaug suffered brain damage and lived in a vegetative state after a ward boy in the Mumbai hospital where she worked sodomised her and tried strangling her with a dog chain.

She was discovered in the hospital basement some 11 hours later, her brain irreparably damaged as the steel chain had cut off her supply of oxygen to it. She was 25 at the time.

Her attacker, Sohanlal Bharta Valmiki, was not charged with rape, as sodomy was not considered rape under Indian law at the time. He was freed after serving a seven-year sentence for robbery and attempted murder and his whereabouts have subsequently been unknown.

"Aruna actually died in 1973. Now she is legally dead," Pinki Virani, a journalist who wrote a moving account of the nurse's plight, told the Zee News television channel.

"My broken, battered baby bird finally flew away. And she gave India a passive euthanasia law before doing so," she said.

Virani filed a case in India’s supreme court in 1999, asking that Aruna be allowed to die with dignity as she was virtually a dead person. But in a landmark judgment – that came to be known as the “passive euthanasia” ruling – this was rejected in 2011.

The court decreed that life support systems could be legally removed from terminally ill patients only in exceptional circumstances that mandated a request from the patient’s family and required medical and legal supervision.

It said supervision was necessary to prevent unscrupulous family members from killing off wealthy relatives merely to seize their assets.

It further stated that Virani was not eligible to make her demand on Shanbaug’s behalf, as she was not a relative.

At the time of her assault, Shanbaug was engaged to a resident doctor at King Edward hospital.