Every day between 8pm and 9pm, Asha Devi goes to a memorial in her housing complex in Dwarka, west Delhi, and lights a lamp for her daughter, the 23-year-old physiotherapist intern who was brutally gang-raped and killed in one of the most horrific crimes in India in December 2012. For Asha Devi, keeping alive the memory of that bright young girl is very important. And also very difficult, because the ugly memories of her last days keep popping up. The distraught mother has not found closure, not while the killers stay alive.
There are no lamps in the hovel at Sant Ravi Dass camp in south Delhi, where an old and lonely widow ekes out an existence on the charity of others. Known locally as tai (aunt), she is the mother of Ram Singh and Mukesh, two of the six men who violated the girl. Ram Singh died mysteriously while he was an undertrial in Tihar jail in 2013. Mukesh is on the death row; his lawyer is making another desperate bid to extend his life, though legally it appears that all recourses have run out. Among the impoverished, there is a greater acceptance than there is among the middle class, which places a premium on morality. In this neighbourhood, residents can separate the criminal from his family, and the social ostracism one finds in better neighbourhoods is more tempered here.
In another home nearby lives another mother; her son Pawan Gupta is on death row, too. She does not smile, not even at the adorable antics of her toddler grandchild. To those who do not know, the home almost appears normal, with a younger son and daughter who are studying and a married daughter who visits often. But in a family where the older son is just days away from the noose, normalcy is an ideal they can only dream of. Pawan’s ageing grandparents are just too baffled with life to utter anything.
Every time the courts push the date of hanging, which has now been set for March 20, Asha Devi withers a little more inside. “Only after these four men [including Akshay Thakur and Vinay Sharma] are executed will I believe that there is justice in our system. It has been so long. Seven years,” she says, wearily. She, and her husband, Badrinath Singh, are frustrated by a system that is dragging its feet over a sentence that was given within months of the crime. “What is the use of fast-track courts?”she asks.
Hanging on to hope: Mukesh’s mother and (right) Pawan’s mother | Rahul R. Pattom
The couple waited patiently for law to follow its course. It was only in July 2018 that the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence, which was announced in September 2013. “We waited for another year, but when nothing happened we wrote to the apex court, asking why the execution was not done,” recalls Badrinath. After their third letter, they were told they were not a party to the case, which was now between the government and the convicts. “We then hired lawyers and got an intervention and became party,” he says. “That is how matters began moving last year. But it is still dragging.”
In the homes of the convicts though, every deferment is received with mixed feelings. The relief that their sons can draw a few additional breaths is subsumed by the knowledge that time is running out, and fast. Denial and dread plague these families. Most conversations with them follow a similar pattern. It begins with a ferocious denial of their sons’ crimes. However, even they find it difficult to sustain that argument for long, and though they are baffled that their boys, with no criminal antecedents, could have committed this horror, they know it is the bitter truth.
Then come the excuses. Pawan’s mother insists her son was underage. That one of the six accused got away because of juvenility hits her every day. The juvenile has been free since December 2015, when he was released from a comparably easy term in a reform home. With the anonymity that the law gave him, he got a second lease at making a more meaningful life. Whether he is at peace with himself is something the world is not likely to know.
Finally, it comes down to a plea for mercy. “Let them not hang. Let them be in jail for the rest of their lives, but let them live,” wail the mothers and sisters.
Pawan’s family is not rich, but reasonably comfortable with a small business. That business has taken a hit though, with his father, Heeralal, busy doing the rounds of the jail and courts on his battered Honda Activa and trying every recourse to save his son.
The last seven years have taught all these families who are, at best, moderately educated a lot about the legal system, especially its loopholes. They have learnt about a lethargy in the system when it comes to going ahead with an execution. They have learnt that matters can be delayed ad nauseam by rapping on the courts’ doors repeatedly. That co-convicts in a case cannot be hanged separately, yet there is no rule that mandates them to file their pleas together. While the loopholes frustrate the victim’s family, they provide hope for the convicts. For Asha Devi, the focus shifting to the rights of the killers is yet another blow. What about the rights of the victim and her family, she asks.
Mukesh’s mother does not understand any law or loophole. She vacillates between prayer and pleading, between tears and relief. “God will listen. He cannot be so cruel to me,” she says. Her husband died last year, a broken man. She keeps going back to December 2012. The couple had returned to their village when the crime happened. “Maybe if we had been here, this would not have happened,” she says. “How could this happen?”
The victim’s parents have made their peace on this one count. “It is kaal (destiny). There is no point thinking that if only we had stopped our girl from going out, she would have been alive,” says Badrinath. “I heard an old man on television berating himself for sending his son to buy milk. The boy never returned—he was killed in the riots [in North East Delhi recently]. It was destiny; he could not have changed it.” Their mission is to ensure the killers meet their destiny, too, and soon. “It is not only for our daughter that they should hang. It is for so many other women who were brutalised subsequently, because criminals are confident of getting away,” says Asha Devi. And, the hangings will not be the end of the road for them. They next plan to challenge the lacunae in rules that they encountered during their fight for justice. The victims have become crusaders.
The couple has conducted itself with dignity, never uttering a derogatory word against the families of the convicts, despite coming face-to-face with them several times in court. But they cannot forgive. “They are crying over losing their sons. That is the grief they have to live with. I have lost my daughter, and how. I am living with that grief,” says Asha Devi. She has kept her two sons out of the limelight so that they get a chance at a normal life.
The killers are allowed time to meet their families. It is a difficult choice when the visiting slot coincides with a court hearing. Vinay’s family went to meet him in jail on March 2, when the hanging was deferred to March 20, after Pawan filed his clemency plea. The four were scheduled to hang on March 3, and Vinay’s family chose to spend what could have been last minutes with him, instead of being in the midst of the nail-biting tension in court. Vinay has now approached the Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Akshay’s impoverished family, including wife and a ten-year-old son, lives in a remote Bihar village.
The meetings, across a glass partition, do not help much either. “He tells me, ‘It is OK, what has to happen will happen’,” says Mukesh’s mother, who cannot even afford the trip to the jail. “Watching my son cry, how will I feel?” asks Pawan’s mother, bitterly. His older sister remembers meeting him on January 31. “I told him then that if he was not wrong, he would live. But if he was wrong, he will face God soon.” Her words will be put to test in the days to come.