The 2012 Delhi Gangrape

On the dark and cold night of December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old woman was brutally assaulted and raped in a moving bus in south Delhi. A 23-year-old female physiotherapy intern was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured on December 16, 2012, in Munirka, a neighborhood in South Delhi. She was traveling with her friend, Awindra Pratap Pandey.

The woman and her friend Pandey were returning home after watching the movie "Life of Pi" on the night of December 16, 2012. They boarded an off-duty charter bus at the Munirka bus stand in which there were six other men including the bus driver. The bus started moving in an off-route direction and the men shut the doors of the vehicle. Suspecting something wrong, when Pandey objected, he was shouted down and a scuffle broke out as the drunk men started molesting her. Her friend was knocked down with a rod and the men dragged her to the back of the bus and repeatedly gang-raped her for over an hour. As she fought back, one of the juvenile attackers inserted an iron rod into her private parts, pulling and ripping her intestines apart. The bus driver drove all over Delhi while this was happening. After the attack, both of them were thrown out of the bus to die on the side of the road. The two were found half-dead by a passerby who informed the Delhi Police. She was taken to the Safdarjung Hospital where doctors found she had only five percent intestines left inside her body. She succumbed to her injuries on December 29, 2012. In her statement to Police, she said she wanted justice against the six attackers. The incident led to widespread demonstrations and protests across the country. It also started changes in the laws about violence against women.

Why is she called 'Nirbhaya'?

The rape laws in India do not permit using a victim's name in media. Hence, various publications gave her different names, out of which 'Nirbhaya' which means 'fearless' was widely used. In 2013, she received the International Women of Courage Award from the US Department of State, posthumously.

All the six men in the Nirbhaya rape case, including the juvenile, were convicted by the court.

One of them, Ram Singh,(Bus Driver) was found dead in jail in March 2013, having taken his own life.

Another, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was released in 2015 after serving three years in a reform facility - the maximum term possible for a juvenile in India.

Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, and Mukesh Singh were sentenced to death by a trial court in 2013.

The four were hanged in the capital's high-security Tihar prison in the first executions in India since 2015.

Minutes after the convicts were hanged on Friday morning, the victim's mother said, "I hugged my daughter's photograph and told her we finally got justice."

Source

BBC

Times of India