"This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing." "On 16th December 2012, at around 8.30 pm, a 23-year-old medical student was on her way home from a movie with a male friend." "The couple boarded a private bus, which claimed to be going their way." "Her friend was badly beaten and she was dragged to the back... where she was gang-raped by six men, as the bus drove round and round the highways." "According to the latest government figures, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes." "But most rapes are unreported." "This rape led to unrecedented protests erupting across India." "The silence has been broken." "SHE SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE" "CHANTING:" "We want justice!" "We want justice!" "Justice!" "We want justice!" "We want..." "screaming" "CHANTlNG CONTINUES" "CHANTING:" "We want justice!" "We want justice!" "TIGER GROWLS" "TIGER ROARS" "CAR HORNS BEEP" "If very important, if very necessary, she should go outside, but she should go with their family members, like uncle, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother." "Etc, etc." "She should not go, in night hours, with her boyfriend." "The rape was extremely brutal." "And it's something very unusual to find that you not only rape the girl, but you put an iron rod and take out her entrails." "I mean, this is something I--I can't understand." "What kind of human beings are these who do something like that?" "The idea of the gang rape is to send a message - you are not to breach this boundary." "This is a bondary between us and you to do with power." "Before this event, there was still a very, very strong culture of shame around rape, that to be raped was deeply shaming, that to be raped was worse than to be dead, in fact." "And so you would get politicians saying the most extraordinary things." "about rape victims, that it was better that a rape victim had died because had she lived, she would just be a walking corpse." "BADRl SINGH:" "At around 11.30 pm, she was brought to the gynae casualty room by the police constables." "She was bleeding very much from her vagina." "So..." "Definitely she was scared." "'She was conscious but she was not sobbing out of her pain, 'she was describing everything in clear detail." "'She was slapped on her face, she was kicked on her abdomen 'and she had multiple injuries over her body, over her 'private parts.'" "There were multiple bite marks over her face, over her lips, over her limbs." "A young woman was gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi last night." "Not only was she raped, she was brutally beaten and thrown off the bus." "It was the kind of brazen attack that explains why Delhi, our national capital, has been called India's rape capital." "The accused started the argument with the boy when they asked him inside the bus what he was doing with a girl at that time of the night." "Since the couple retaliated" "And, especially the girl, fought back very hard, the men got even more angry and they thought they must teach her a lesson." "We were able to arrest the first accused." "We were able to identify the bus within a span-time of 24 hours." "We checked all the hotels along the route and on one of the hotels, there was one particular camera which was facing towards the road." "In the CCTV footage of that camera, we noticed that there was a bus which had crossed that area twice which was unusual for a bus which was going on a highway and on closer examination of that bus," "we came to note that this bus is a school bus." "These were the clues because of which we were able to narrow down our search to 50-60 such buses." "For the first time in this case, we had used dental forensics." "The bite marks on the body of the victims matched with the..." ""dental impression of one of the accused which was a very clinching piece of evidence." "The whole idea was, the case was so brutal, the conviction, if it is earlier, it is much better, it gives a good message to the society." "When most of us heard about the case very soon after it happened on December 17th, the very next day, and almost immediately the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University there is a very powerful student union there and strong movement there." "So student organisations amd the union from there immediately came out on the streets to protest on the same day." "Happening to a young woman who represented a symbol of new aspiration, sent shock waves through the society." "In the last 15-20 years, the economy has changed a lot in India and it's created opportunities for young women." "and single women to come and work and it's raised expectations accross a range of classes of young, single women of how they should be allowed to live their lives." "There are many gang rapes that take place in India and they've been taking place over the years but somehow this caught the imagination of people." "For one thing, it happened in the capital city." "It happened in an evening hour, which was not a late hour, eight o'clock, a young girl and boy returning home from a movie." "I mean, it was the most normal kind of behaviour." "And most other sources of this district, I'll say a strength of more than 2,000 persons." "They were commanded by this special investigation team and everything was put into this case." "There was a juvenile in conflict with law" "Who was subsequently arrested on 21st." "There was another accused, Akshay, who had fled to Bihar." "So he was arrested from Bihar on 21st of December." "As well, Criminal Procedure Code of India..." "In such cases like murder, rape and all these heinous cases, we normally get the time permitted for us to file charge sheet is 90 days-- but we are supposed to file a charge sheet within the first 90 days," "But in this case, we had filed charge sheet in 17 days." "Immediately almost from day one, it had stopped being about this cas alone." "It had become about the culture and about women's generalised anger against being told that they could do something to actually remain safe." "It's a very safe city." "Absolutely safe city." "Very safe city." "As safe as any other capital of developing or developed country." "And safe in general sense and even safe for women." "It's always difficult to tell why one particular case and why... you know, it's like a dam bursting." "It doesn't happen out of one case alone," "I think it's an accumulated angle that bursts out." "I think our pain united all of us and I think there wasn't one single woman, you know, on that day, who didn't actually feel the pain that girl had gone through." "So that I think, is what brought us out on the streets." "It was gut-wrenching pain." "I painted a bunch of placards just saying:" ""Women, take back your city."" "Nothing, you know, not inciting violence or anything and we're walking down to India Gate and we get accosted by a truck full of policemen saying," ""You can't go here, it's not allowed."" "They just decided that we're not going to let these women question us any more, it's not their place to do that." "So we decided to challenge them." "We said, you know, we've got civil rights, you know, you can't just stop us from going anywhere, that's--that's one of the freedoms that is granted to us constitutionally." "And then things got ugly." "They--they started pulling and dragging and shoving us into a van saying, "We're putting you in lockdown now."" "My husband tells me I'm stupid because I go and protest, you know, without bothering about the consequences." "But that day was a slap in my face." "I really thought that if you're an educated woman and if you're courageous and you're outspoken, ah, you know, really what can the police do?" "It was a completely peaceful protest and then within 20 minutes, it turned into a warzone." "SCREAMING AND SHOUTING" "They went out day after day protesting." "It just showed that they wanted change." "They believed the change would take place." "It was the first time that young people had gone out to protest without a leader, without being called by any political party." "And the media was all over the young people's protest." "They, day by day, showed how they were protesting and I think that the government was then forced into setting-up a committee to try and calm things down a bit." "The Verma report waa a special judicial committee charged by the Government of India with canvassing all opinion about how the problem of rape could be dealt with, and 80,000 responses were sifted through by this group of ex-senior judges." "It was a landmark report and it was striking in its extreme liberalism." "It made a number of very important recommendations." "For instance, that things must happen much faster in the Indian judicial system." "The definition of sexual assault needed to be broadened, that the language of modesty and shame needed to be removed from the Indian Penal Code." "This was not just about rape and an amendment to a criminal law." "We three were very determined that we are not going to let down society." "Offences against women was a part of the story." "The full story needed to be told." "We felt that we would faiI that fantastic civil society which gathered around India Gate with candles, if we did not tell them the true story." "The constitution provides for equality." "It hasn't happened because the men don't allow it to happen." "And they feel that that's their hold on women and also it's because of the historical tradition of patriarchy which has been over the years, embedded into men and into women." "There are a whole range of indicators that women are not well-treated." "Short of rape, there are high incidence of acid attacks, a high incidence of domestic beatings," "There is, of course, the extraordinary question of the sex ratio differential in India;" "i.e., the notion that there are missing women, demographically speaking," "Which seems to reflect a number of things, but possibly pre-birth sex selection and feticide." "In Maharashtra in Bombay, once when they discovered that there were 10,000 foetuses that had been destroyed, 9,999 were female foetuses." "The conversation to deal with inequality was overdue in India." "Everyone was there, out in the open." "Demanding justice." "Demanding accountability." "And when you do demand accountability, establishments do feel highly threatened." "They first thought that this is a movement which can be dispersed by use of tear gas shells, or hose pipes." "but extraordinary were these protesters." "And the protests kept coming, kept escalating and escalating, not just in Delhi, but also in Calcutta and Bangalore and Mumbai." "This was something that was actually quite qualitatively different." "I really couldn't recall an event like this in India before." "This was, in my view, a very important and momentous expression of hope by civil society." "Late last night, an ambulance took off for Singapore with the girl." "She's at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital, one of the best hospitals in the world for trauma management and organ transplant." "We just..." "Our only wish today is that she recovers and that she comes back to us." "This country has huge problems." "A country which is so proud of itself today," "A country which claims to be fourth largest economy." "One of the most powerful countries in the world, you know." "50% of India's population living almost below poverty line." "Living a life which is not worth living." "Now, because we run a home for juveniles that happens to be where the Juvenile Justice Board, the children's school, was situated, so one had an opportunity to know what exactly was behind this child." "This boy was like millions of Indian children who are street children, toiling to survive, sometimes working in a dhaba, that is a small tea shop, sometimes working on a bus." "And then whatever happened after that in the company that this gang rape took place and he was party to it." "this boy in my opinion did not have any serious aberration." "This boy had suffered endless misery in life." "He was a child in need o care and protection, where the family could not look after the child and the child at the age of 11 drifted and ran away from home, and was a typical profile of a child who had to be like this, in a way." "Ram Singh, one of the prime accused in the gruesome" "December 16th gang rape of a 23-year-old girl allegedly committed suicide in a special cell in Tihar Jail this morning." "The incident took place in Jail Number Three at around 5.45 am." "Nobody is a monster that he is excluded from society." "After all, any society which has these rapists has to take responsibility for them." "And this is the first thing which the feminist callers who came before the Verma Committee said that:" ""These are our people." "These men are ours."" "If you come from a family where things like this are seen by those who are growing up they tend to look at it very differently." "They can say, "Oh well, well, well, my sister was given less milk than I am." ""I am given a whole glass of milk," ""because everybody thinks, in the family thinks, I am the boy and I must get more energy." ""And my sister's just given a little bit of milk."" "Or, "She eats last of all."" "Now, these are society's practices which somehow get imbedded in the mind." "So, many of our people grow up thinking that a girl is less important than a boy is." "And because she's less important, you can do what you like with her." "The wording from the Juvenile Justice Board was delivered a short while ago on the juvenile chart with the gang rape of India's daughter." "This young boy who was 17 years and six months at the time of the crime has been given the maximum sentence allowed for a juvenile." "That is a person who is under 18 years." "He will serve just three years in a special home." "Public opinion should not become the reason for any kind of conviction or even death sentence at times." "I don't think we belong to that kind of social order or that kind of country." "India is not that kind of country." "Many countries are like that - hang the person on the pole." "Kill the man straightaway." "Cut his hand." "Throw him away." "And that kind of thing doesn't happen in this country." "It's a democratic country." "And a very liberal country from that point of view." "We have very rich traditions of tolerance also." "So probably from that point of view, the present demand for death sentence in many cases is not in the spirit of India's history." "CROWD CHANTS" "'At 2.30 this afternoon, 'unemployed Mukesh Singh, 'bus cleaner Akshay Thakur, 'gym instructor Vinay Sharma 'and fruit seller Pawan Gupta 'were sentenced to death." "'The court declared this to be the rarest of rare cases 'that warranted the death penalty." "'And stated that gruesome crimes against women have become rampant." "'Defence lawyer AP Singh has reacted to the sentencing in a way 'that has exposed the mentality that is perhaps the biggest hurdle in 'the fight for giving women the respect they deserve.'" "The only way you can change things is education." "Because education gives a girl self-importance, self-worth." "And it also teaches young men the value of the woman." "Her death has made a huge difference." "I think that first of all, it has really ah, brought home the issue of the problems of the way women are perceived, young and independent women are perceived in Indian society." "It's opening up a debate in India that I think hasn't been held publicly and widely about exactly what the relationship between men and women should be." "These things will change." "It's only because of how hard we push." "And I think if the young people are going to push, we're going to get it."