Raise your voice. (Reuters/Ahmad Masood)
by Shelly Walia, Quartz
One of the men who brutally assaulted and raped a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012 blames the victim for the savagery that he—and five other men—inflicted on her.
Had she simply been “silent” and allowed the rape, “then they would have dropped her off after doing her,” Mukesh Singh, one of the convicted in the horrific case, said in an interview from Delhi’s Tihar Jail.
It’s been more than two years since a physiotherapy student, Jyoti Singh, was raped by six men. Later, she was left to die on the city’s streets, as her male companion, who was also severely beaten up, sought help from passersby.
The incident triggered nationwide protests and a demand for a lasting, sweeping change in rape laws. The judge who handled the case said that the rape had “shocked the collective conscience” of India. The assailants are now facing death penalty—but one of them, at least, feels absolutely no remorse.
In an interview for a documentary called India’s Daughter, Mukesh— who was also the driver of the bus in which the incident occurred—said that girls are to be blamed for most of the rapes that occur in India.
“You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good.”
He went on to blame Jyoti for resisting rape.
“She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they would have dropped her off after ‘doing her’ and only hit the boy. The 15 or 20 minutes of the incident, I was driving the bus. The girl was screaming, ‘Help me, help me.’ The juvenile put his hand in her and pulled out something. It was her intestines …We dragged her to the front of the bus and threw her out.”
Death penalty, in his opinion, will only make matters worse for future rape victims.
“The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls.”
“Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death.”
The juvenile who Mukesh mentioned in his interview was six months shy of 18 at the time of the rape, and was tried separately from the other five men in a juvenile justice court. In August 2013, he was sent to a correctional facility for a maximum term of three years. At the reform home in Sept. 2014, he was found to be cooking, sewing, painting, playing volleyball, watching television or pigeons.
Mukesh, who was 26 at the time of the incident, and four other adult perpetrators were given the death penalty by a fast-track court. Though the Delhi high court upheld the penalty in Mar. 2014, the perpetrators are waiting for Supreme Court’s hearing on their appeal.
The documentary will be broadcast in India and seven other countries on BBC4 on March 08, International Women’s Day.
Here’s the trailer.
