Thousands protest in India over release of rapist

Several thousand protestors took to the streets of India's capital New Delhi yesterday, to oppose the release of a male juvenile convicted for fatally gang-raping a 23-year-old medical student, three years ago.

The rapist, who was a few months short of his 18th birthday when he committed the horrific crime in a moving bus, along with five other similarly convicted adults, was released from a youth correctional facility, Delhi police said.

“He was handed over to an NGO and is no longer in our jurisdiction,” Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said.

Other Delhi officials said the rapist had been provided with a new identity and his criminal record expunged, in keeping with legal procedure laid down to deal with juveniles.

Protesters that included the parents of the victim who cannot be named for legal reasons, however, condemned news of the release.

"Our fight was all about this convict not being allowed to walk free," the brutalised girl's mother Asha Devi Singh said.

“We want justice for our daughter,” she said, claiming that the boy had been the most vicious of the six rapists.

Mrs Singh told several television news channels that women on the capital’s streets would not be safe with this man on the loose.

Petition

The rapist’s release comes hours before India’s supreme court is scheduled to hear a plea on Monday opposing it, filed by the Delhi Commission for Women. The petition challenges the attacker being set free on the grounds that he had not been rehabilitated despite three years in a juvenile home in Delhi, and was not ready to be reintegrated into society.

The women’s rights group and the dead girl’s parents believe he remains a “menace to society”.

On a cold mid-December night in 2012, the juvenile and five other adult companions lured the 23-year old medical student and a male friend on to an empty bus in Delhi, as they were returning home from the cinema at about 10pm.

They raped her as they drove around the city, before throwing both of them out of the moving bus on a deserted road, where they lay for more than an hour before being taken to hospital.

The girl died two weeks later in a hospital in Singapore and the brutality of the attack shocked the entire country, where newspapers daily publish gruesome accounts of horrific crimes against women.

Furious outcry

Amid countrywide protests and furious outcry over the brutality, the federal government was forced to introduce tougher laws to punish sexual offences, particularly rape.

Four of the other adults were sentenced to death but their appeal against this, in India’s notoriously overburdened and slow judicial system, has been pending before the supreme court for nearly 19 months.

Members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have pushed to change the juvenile law and reduce the age of attaining adulthood from 18 to 16, but the matter is yet to be approved by parliament.