Is Justice Enough For Nirbhaya?

It was nearly five years ago that this horrific incident happened. On December 16, 2012, a young woman and her friend boarded a bus in a south Delhi. What happened next shook us to the core, and continues to do so even today.

The two friends were attacked, and the 23-year old was brutally gang-raped and hit with an iron rod, from which she never recovered. She died in hospital 13 days later. The perpetrators were caught, and because of the brutality of the crime, and the media outburst, the  men accused in the case were sentenced to death. They have now appealed to the Supreme Court against their death sentence.

Ram Singh, the driver of the bus, was found hanging in his prison cell three months later and the juvenile was found guilty of rape and murder and given the maximum sentence permissible  of three years' imprisonment in a reform facility.

However, is death really enough for a crime like this?

There are questions that still haunt us today. Women in India are definitely not safer than they were five years back. There is an epidemic of rape in this country, and there has to be something the government needs to do that can guarantee the safety of a woman.

In Nirbhaya’s case, is justice really enough?

She was an innocent woman, who happened to cross paths with monsters on that unfaithful night. No one deserves what happened to her. It was a night of horrors and we can’t even begin to imagine what she may have been through.

Even through all the pain, she wanted to live, she wanted to get better and help make India a safer place for women. She did not see that day.

These crimes cannot be undone. Even if the rapists are sentenced to death, they need to understand the gravity of what they did and the pain it caused. Rape is the ultimate insult to a human body which shatters an individual not only physically but emotionally.

We must get to the root cause of all these crimes. These offences are often triggered due to sexual frustration and an inverted idea of masculinity. However, they can’t be pinpointed to one single reason, these crimes happen because of an amalgamation of reasons, and these reasons are only native to India.

So what can we do? Fight on, in the name of Nirbhaya, and every other woman in this country. Fight until one day we finally see things change.

Until then, all we have is hope.

Pic credits: Zee News

Also read: Remembering Nirbhaya with stories of courage in exhibition named ‘Unearthed’