‘Feel betrayed’ says mother of December 16 gang rape victim after court sets new execution date

On Friday, moments after a Delhi court set February 1 as the new date for hanging all four convicts of the December 16, 2012, gang rape case, an angry, desperate

On Friday, moments after a Delhi court set February 1 as the new date for hanging all four convicts of the December 16, 2012, gang rape case, an angry, desperate and helpless Asha Devi — the mother of the 23-year-old victim — broke down.

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“Humein bas tareekh pe tareekh mil rahi hai (We are only getting date after date),” she said, summing up her struggle to get justice for her daughter in the last seven years.

From the original hanging date of January 22, a new death warrant was issued by a Delhi court on Friday for the four convicts, setting February 1 as the new date for execution.

Devi said, “I do not know what to feel anymore. We are only being given dates and pushed from one courtroom to other.”

Devi and her husband Badri Singh have been fighting a long legal battle to get the four convicts — Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma — hanged. The 23-year-old paramedical student was brutally gangraped by six people—four of who will be hanged on February 1—on a moving bus in December 2012. She later succumbed to her injuries at a Singapore hospital on December 29.

“This is what they (the convicts and their lawyers) want. They want to buy as much time as possible from the courts. I am not at all satisfied. I will not be at peace till I see these four criminals hanged, and every passing day in the courts feel like only the convicts have rights, while the victims have none,” she said.

She continued, “These people did a very bad thing to my daughter. They are now violating the process of justice just like they violated my daughter. I would like to request the governments and the judges to please hang them.”

The parents also lashed out at the political parties for politicising the hanging. The woman also denied reports on social media that she was joining the Congress Party. She said she neither intends to join a political party nor contest elections.

Badri Singh said that whichever party is delaying the hangings and is trying to gain political mileage from the rape and murder of his daughter was indulging in a shameful act.

“We are only fighting to get justice for her (December 16 victim). We do not understand politics and we have nothing to do with it either,” he said.