Delhi rape accused lived on margins of India's boom

safia@coastaldigest.com (Reuters)
January 12, 2013

delhirapevNew Delhi, Jan 12: In a village in Uttar Pradesh, a woman sits hunched on the ground in a green shawl, visibly weak and shivering in the January cold. She says she has not eaten for days, and neither have her five young children.

She has never heard of Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, having never ventured further from her village than a nearby market town, and ekes out a living working in potato fields on other people's land.

Her eldest son left home when he was 11. He never returned, and the woman thought he was dead. The first news she got of him was when police from New Delhi turned up at her brick hut to say he had been arrested for the gang rape and death of a student, a crime whose brutality stunned India.

In an interview with Reuters, the mother of the juvenile, the youngest of six members of the gang accused of the attack, recalled the son who left home five or six years ago for the bright lights, and seemed stunned by the accusation against him.

"Today, the infamy he earned is eating me up," his mother said as villagers stood and stared. "I can't even sit with two other people in the village because of the shame that my son has brought to the family."

A 23-year-old physiotherapy student was beaten and raped on a moving bus in the Indian capital on December 16. She was left bleeding on a highway and died two weeks later from internal injuries.

The five men who have been charged with rape and murder are all expected to plead not guilty. One says police tortured him.

The sixth member of the gang, the woman's son, is being processed as a juvenile and has not been charged. He will be tried separately.

Police have said they are conducting bone tests to determine his age as they suspect he may be over 18 years old. Reuters is withholding his name for this story.

The trial of the five men is due to start within weeks.

"BLACK MAGIC"

It is from a life of rural penury that the youth sought to escape, one of about two million Indians who migrate to cities every year, chasing an economic boom that has propelled India for the past two decades but has trickled down slowly to its poor.

Conversations with relatives, neighbours and police show the extent to which the accused lived on the margins of the city's emerging prosperity, holding menial jobs and living in a slum.

Their lives stand in contrast with that of the victim.

She was also from a humble background but funded her studies by taking a job in one of the call centres that are a hallmark of modern India's economy and have helped build an aspirational new middle class.

According to his mother, the youth joined a group of other village boys travelling to New Delhi, found work in a roadside eatery and - for the first year - used to send 600 rupees a month back to his family.

After he stopped sending money, his mother never heard from him again. At first she thought he might have been forced into bonded labour. Later, she presumed he was dead. A couple of months before the rape, she consulted a Hindu holy man about her son, whom she remembered as a good boy.

"The holy man told me that someone has practiced some black magic on him, but that he would come back," she said.

Living on the breadline and with a husband who is mentally ill, the mother works in fields with her daughters to feed her family. Halfway through the conversation with Reuters, she fainted, apparently from hunger, and had to be carried to bed.

About half of her village are landless labourers, and about a quarter of all men migrate to cities in search of work, according to farmer Vijay Pal.

"SING-SONG VOICE"

The details of the boy's life after he left his village are patchy. Even his fellow accused did not know his real name and called him by an assumed name, a senior police officer told Reuters. Police described him as a "freelancer" at a Delhi bus station, cleaning buses and running errands for drivers.

"He was a helper on buses who would solicit customers by calling out to them in a sing-song tone," the officer said.

He was popular with the contractors who ran the bus services and frequently changed jobs.

It was during this time that he met Ram Singh, the main accused in the case, whom he had gone to meet on the day of the attack in the hope of getting back money that Singh had borrowed from him, police said.

The juvenile went to Singh's house to claim 8,000 rupees but Singh invited him to stay for food instead, according to a police report. After the attack, police say they found the juvenile's blood-stained clothes on Singh's roof.

In an interview with Reuters, the friend of the victim who had accompanied her on the bus, and who was also beaten, said the juvenile had beckoned the pair to board.

"There was a young boy who was standing at the door of the bus and calling passengers in," the friend said by telephone. "He had a light moustache, very sharp eyes and a very sweet demeanour. He was thin and was calling out to people saying 'come sister, please sit'."

When they started assaulting the victim's friend, the juvenile "was one of the first to attack me", he said.

Singh and three of the other accused lived in a poor pocket in the otherwise largely middle-class Delhi neighbourhood of RK Puram, whose wide streets and tree-lined boulevards contrast with the dark lanes, communal taps and open sewers where Singh lived.

Many of the people who live there are migrants, working as electricians, auto-rickshaw drivers, day labourers, bus drivers, mechanics and street vendors.

Singh was a bus driver, despite an accident in 2009 that fractured his right arm so badly that doctors had to insert a rod to support it. He appeared on a reality television show in a compensation dispute with a bus owner, who in turn accused Singh of "drunken, negligent and rash driving".

Singh's neighbours describe him as a heavy drinker with a temper. One young woman said he used to get embroiled in violent rows and a relative recalls a physical altercation with her husband.

"I WILL MAKE IT BIG"

India's rapid growth over the past two decades, kickstarted by a period of free-market economic reforms, accelerated the process of urbanisation.

The world of the juvenile's mother is still one where carts drawn by horses and bullocks ply the lanes, and dung cakes are stacked in villages to be used as a fuel.

But in the cities, the old barriers of caste and gender are being eroded as India prospers. It is in this world that Vinay Sharma, another of the accused, wanted to make his mark, and aspired to the kind of life that the victim was striving for.

Passionate about boxing and body-building, Sharma earned $55 a month as a helper in a gym and wanted to enrol on a correspondence course, according to his mother and neighbours in the slum where he lived.

"He always used to say 'I will make it big in life'," said his mother, Champa Devi.

Like the juvenile and the victim, Sharma's family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state of some 200 million people where poverty is entrenched.

"When the police came around 4 or 4.30 in the evening, he was at home", his mother said.

"I ran after him when they were taking him away. They would not even tell me why. Even he kept insisting 'Ma, go back home, nothing will happen to me. They are just taking me to ask some questions. I will be back soon.' But that was the last I saw of him."

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News Network
March 30,2020

Kochi, Mar 30: Kerala High Court on Monday granted interim bail to the under-trial prisoners and remanded accused in the state till April 30 in view of the lockdown imposed to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The court said that the accused should report to the local police station immediately after getting bail. Those released on bail must strictly follow the lockdown instructions, the High Court said.

"Those who have been convicted of imprisonment for less than seven years will get bail. Prison Superintendents will release the prisoners who are eligible. But regular offenders are not entitled to get bail," the court said.

After the bail period, the accused should appear in the respective trial courts, where a decision will be taken on their bail by the respective trial courts.

The Supreme Court had last week asked all state governments to release undertrial prisoners, who are facing charges attracting less than seven years imprisonment, to reduce overcrowding of jails amid the ongoing coronavirus scare.

So far, 194 confirmed cases of coronavirus have been reported in the state.

The country is under a 21-day lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, which according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has claimed the lives of 29 people and infected a total of 1071 people as on Monday morning.

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News Network
March 21,2020

New Delhi, Mar 21: A couple was deboarded from a Delhi-bound Rajdhani train on Saturday after co-passengers observed a home quarantine seal on the husband's hand, the Railways said Saturday.

Officials said the Delhi-based couple boarded the Bangalore City-New Delhi Rajdhani at Secunderabad on Saturday morning.

When the train reached Kazipet in Telangana at 9:45 am, a co-passenger noticed the quarantine mark authorities are putting on suspected coronavirus cases —on the husband's hand when he was washing his hands. Other co-passengers then informed the TTE onboard.

The train was briefly detained and the couple was taken to a hospital. The coach was completely sanitised in Kazipet and was locked, officials said.

The air conditioning was also switched off.

The train left for its destination at 11.30 am.

People fleeing quarantine has been a common problem reported from different parts of the country.

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Agencies
February 10,2020

New Delhi, Fevb 10: Of the countries most at risk of importing coronavirus cases, India ranks 17th, researchers have found on the basis of a mathematical model for the expected global spread of the virus that originated in China's Wuhan area in December 2019.

So far, India has reported three coronavirus positive cases -- all from Kerala.

Among the airports in India, the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi is most at risk, followed by airports in Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kochi, according to the model.

The new model for predicting global novel coronavirus cases has been developed by researchers from Humboldt University and Robert Koch Institute in Germany.

"The spread of the virus on an international scale is dominated by air travel," said the study.

"Wuhan, the seventh largest city in China with 11 million residents, was the relevant major domestic air transportation hub with many connecting international flights before the city was effectively quarantined on January 23, 2020, and the Wuhan airport was closed. By then the virus had already spread to other Chinese provinces as well as other countries," it added.

The researchers said that it is possible to estimate how likely it is that the virus spreads to other areas by looking at air travel passenger numbers.

"The busier a flight route, the more probable it is that an infected passenger travels this route. Using these probabilistic concepts, we calculate the relative import risk to other airports. When calculating the import risk, we also take into account connecting flights and travel routes that involve multiple destinations," said the study.

The top 10 countries and regions at risk of importing coronavirus cases are: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, USA, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Cambodia, according to the model.

While Thailand's national import risk is 2.1%, it is 0.2% for India, found the research.

The foundation of the model is the worldwide air transportation network (WAN) that connects approximately 4,000 airports with more than 25,000 direct connections.

The model accounts for both, the current distribution of confirmed cases in mainland China as well as airport closures that were implemented as a mitigation strategy.

This network theoretic model is based on the concept of effective distance and is an extension of a model introduced in the 2013 paper "The Hidden Geometry of Complex, Network-Driven Contagion Phenomena" published in the journal Science.

The current outbreak of the 2019-nCoV virus started in Wuhan city, Hubei province, China. While the first cases were reported as early as December 8, 2019, the outbreak gained global attention on December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was alerted to "several cases of pneumonia" by an unknown virus.

The new virus was soon identified as a novel coronavirus and named 2019-nCOV. It belongs to the family of viruses that include the common cold and viruses such as SARS and MERS. On January 20, 2020, it was confirmed that the coronavirus can be transmitted between humans, greatly increasing the risk of a global spread.

The death toll due to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China has increased to 811 on Sunday, surpassing that of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003.

Although about 20 countries have confirmed cases, China has accounted for about 99 per cent of those infected. The first foreign victims of the virus both died on Saturday in Wuhan.

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