Six Men Ripped Her Intestines Out With Their Bare Hands In Public
Jyoti Singh was born into a lower middle class family on May 10th, 1990, in Delhi, India. She was the eldest of three children and the only daughter of parents Asha Devi and Badrinath Singh. She had two brothers, Gav and Sarab. Jyoti’s mother was a homemaker, while her father worked as a baggage handler at the airport, often working double shifts and making the equivalent of about $200 US a month. The pair had risked it all to give their children a shot at a better life. Originally from a small village in the Ballia district within the state of Uttar Pradesh, the pair sold their plot of farmland in order to pay for their kids to go to school.
That sacrifice wasn’t without hardship. According to reports, the family lived in a small home down an alley in a neighborhood known as the Mahavir Enclave Part Two in Southwest Delhi. The area has been described in some publications as poor and made up of slum-like dwellings. In a later interview, Badrinath shared that as a child, he dreamt of being a teacher, but sadly, like many children living in rural poverty, his family could not afford to send him off to college. He made a promise to himself that he would send his children to school as a way to fulfill his own desire for knowledge.
When discussing Jyoti, he said, “It never entered our hearts to ever discriminate. How could I be happy if my son is happy and my daughter isn’t? It was impossible to refuse a little girl who loved going to school.” According to the New York Times, the father sometimes referred to his daughter as “beta,” a Hindi word for son. It seemed like the family sacrifice had paid off. Jyoti, now 22 years old, was a physiotherapy intern. During the evening, she worked at an IBM call center in order to help pay her way through college.
Jyoti was described as just an ordinary girl. She enjoyed shopping, mainly for shoes, and she loved going to the movies. December 16th, 2012, could have been like any other night in South Delhi. It had been a relatively mild day in Northern India, with temperatures ranging between 55 to 73° F. On that fateful Sunday, Jyoti had tea with her family and then set off to meet a friend, Avendra Pratap Pandey, who worked as a software engineer. After going for a walk, the pair decided to watch the new Ang Lee film, “The Life of Pi,” at the PVR Cinema located within the Select Citywalk Shopping Center in Saket District.
Jyoti really wanted to see it. Afterwards, the two hailed an auto-rickshaw, or Tuk Tuk. The pair tried to get the driver to simply bring them to Jyoti’s house, but he refused. Instead, they had the driver bring them to the Munirka bus stop, about a 7-mile drive northwest. There, they hoped to find another way home. The pair were headed for Dwarka, a neighborhood located another 23 miles west past the Indira Gandhi International Airport. But sadly, these two would never reach their final destination.
At 9:30 p.m., Jyoti and Avendra boarded a small white Yadav Travels bus after being told by a young passenger the vehicle was headed towards Dwarka. They paid 10 rupees a piece and joined the other six men on board, which included the driver. These men, described as working-class migrants, were already drunk. All seemed well and good until Avendra, who no doubt had made this trip before, noticed the bus was deviating from its normal path. The driver also locked the doors and switched off the interior lights.
Avendra’s gut told him that something was wrong. He was right. When he spoke up, the six men, including the driver, began to harass the couple, asking what Jyoti and Avendra were doing out alone in the dark at such a late hour. The men exchanged words until eventually a physical altercation broke out on the still-moving vehicle. Being outnumbered five-to-two, Avendra was quickly overtaken by the mob. According to reports, the man was gagged and beaten, subsequently being knocked unconscious with a rusted L-shaped rod used as a wheel-jack handle.
Avendra later recalled that during the melee, he pounded on the windows of the van in an attempt to alert passing motorists to the attack that was taking place. With Avendra incapacitated, the men set their sights on 22-year-old Jyoti. The young woman was dragged by her hair to the back of the bus and beaten with the same rod that had been used to attack her friend. As the bus driver continued driving into the night, the men took turns violently assaulting Jyoti. At one point, she fought back, biting her attackers.
In response, the men inserted the L-shaped rod inside of Jyoti, perforating her uterus and bowels, which caused her intestines to spill outside of her body. According to reports, one of the attackers later testified that he saw a rope-like object being pulled out of Jyoti’s body by another one of the men. They were quite literally disemboweling her with their bare hands. The gruesome attack went on for the better part of an hour before both Jyoti and Avendra were thrown from the bus, half-dressed, to die on the side of the road.
The men later cleaned the bus in an attempt to destroy the evidence of their crime, but thankfully, they didn’t do a great job. Barely conscious and losing hope, Avendra attempted to flag down a passing motorist, but no one would stop for them. Around 11:00 p.m., a highway patrol van located the pair and contacted the Delhi police. They were rushed to Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, where Jyoti was placed on a ventilator. It was discovered that she only had 5% of her intestines left inside her.
Her whole body was littered with bruises and bite marks from her attackers. According to Avendra, he was lying naked in a pool of his own blood on the hospital floor, begging for staff to contact his father. It was the only phone number he could remember. Someone did contact his father, but it never stated which hospital Avendra was admitted to. This led to more chaos with family members searching for the young man in every hospital across Delhi. Avendra suffered from broken limbs and many superficial wounds, but thankfully, he survived the attack.
What Jyoti did next earned her the moniker “Nirbhaya,” meaning Fearless. Conscious, she scribbled a note on a piece of paper and handed it to her doctors. It said, “I want to survive.” Jyoti clung desperately to life so that she could tell the tale of what happened to her. According to The Guardian, while she lay on her hospital bed, she told the police, “The conductor closed the doors of the bus. He closed the lights of the bus and came towards my friend and started abusing and beating him. They held his hands and held me and took me to the back of the bus. They tore my clothes. They beat me in turns. They hit me with an iron and bit me on my entire body with their teeth. They took all belongings, my mobile phone, purse, credit card, debit card, watches, etc. Six people ran to me in turns for nearly 1 hour in a moving bus. The driver of the bus kept changing so that he could also rape me.”
As one could imagine, Jyoti’s extensive internal injuries required many surgeries to repair the damage done to her body. On December 19th, 2012, she went under the knife for the fifth time. This surgery removed much of what was left of her intestines, and doctors claimed she was in stable condition but still critical. By Christmas, Jyoti had a fever of 103° F. She also had internal bleeding due to sepsis, which was said to be under control. Despite this, and after all that she went through, Jyoti was awake and could communicate with medical staff.
News of the attack quickly spread around, which led to public outrage. In response, then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed that Jyoti would receive the absolute best care that could be provided. It was decided that Jyoti would be airlifted to Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore, which specializes in multi-organ transplants. This hospital, also known as Mount E, is a world-class hospital that practices 31 specialties, not just multi-organ transplant. Much like many hospitals in Southeast Asia, it attracts international patients interested in medical tourism. It’s such an outstanding facility that the royal family of Brunei has their own suite for personal use.
So this would be the perfect place for Jyoti to receive care, right? Well, many felt that the decision to move a patient who was still in the ICU was a political charade of sorts due to the fact that her body was so badly damaged and she was still intubated and on life support. Jyoti couldn’t even be scheduled for organ transplants for weeks or even months. Her body needed time to heal, and she was in no condition for the long plane ride across the Bay of Bengal. Despite very valid concerns for her well-being, on December 26, 2012, 10 days after the attack, Jyoti was put on a plane anyways.
As suspected, the nearly 6-hour flight from New Delhi to Singapore was not without complication. While in the air, Jyoti went into cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness, even after doctors creating an arterial line to stabilize her. The three minutes that Jyoti had been without a pulse or blood pressure was far too much for her body to handle. After her arrival at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, things continued to worsen for the young student. December 28th, a press conference was held in which doctors informed members of the media that, in addition to the litany of injuries that we already discussed, Jyoti was suffering from severe brain damage, pneumonia, and an infection in her abdomen.
Despite a valiant fight for her life, sadly, Jyoti Singh succumbed to her injuries the following day at 4:45 a.m. Word of Jyoti’s death brought great shock to her family, including her brothers, who had hoped that their sister would make a miraculous recovery. According to one brother, “The decision to transport Jyoti to Mount Elizabeth Hospital came far too late. 10 days had passed since the attack and she was missing almost all of her intestines. Now, people can still live with just four feet of their small intestine remaining. This requires supplemental fluids, IV nutrition, additional surgeries into a stoma, but it can be done. However, Jyoti was in very bad shape, so we’ll sadly never know if earlier intervention could have helped saved her life or not.”
On December 30th, 2012, while under high police security that came under scrutiny from India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Jyoti’s body was cremated. The BJP compared the added security measures to the Emergency era, which was an almost 2-year period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had a state of emergency declared across the country due to internal disturbance. If you ask me, the BJP was being a bit over dramatic, but I digress. Due to both peaceful and violent demonstrations that were popping up all over India, police were actually quick to act. Within 24 hours of the crime, some of the suspects were already in custody.
This was all thanks to Jyoti and Avendra. Their testimony assisted in creating composite sketches, and police were also able to track one of the suspects via one of their stolen cell phones. Based on their description of the bus, police were able to locate in CCTV recordings of the highway. This was a bus that had been contracted by a private school in South Delhi. You heard that correctly. The same bus used in the attack was used to transport children. Police quickly tracked down the driver, 30-year-old Ram Singh.
Inside of the bus, police recovered two blood-stained metal rods, the same rods that had been used to cause the fatal injuries inflicted upon Jyoti. In all, six men were arrested in connection to the attack. This included Ram Singh and his brother, 26-year-old Mukesh. The pair lived in a South Delhi slum known as Ravidas Camp along with two of the other suspects. Also arrested were 20-year-old gym instructor Vinay Sharma, 19-year-old fruit seller Pawan Gupta, 17-year-old Mohammed Afroz, who had only met the other suspects the day prior, and 28-year-old Akshay Thakur, an unemployed migrant worker. He was married and the father of a little boy at the time of the crime, which makes everything even more disgusting.
After this attack, many of the suspects fled Delhi and were located in the states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. The juvenile was found at the Anand Vihar Terminal in Delhi trying to make his escape. Allegedly, the attack on Jyoti and Avendra wasn’t even the first crime these men committed that evening. After getting drunk together earlier that day, the men robbed 35-year-old Ramit Singh, who worked as a carpenter. He too was lured onto the bus as part of the men’s attempt at “a little fun,” as they referred to it.
Mind you, Ram Singh wasn’t even allowed to pick up public passengers on his bus or even operate in the area because of the window tint. Just like he would hours later, the minor, Mohammed Afroz, lured the man onto the bus on the promise that it was going to his end destination. Instead, the men beat him up, stole his cell phone, 1,500 rupees, and dumped him at the IIT flyover, which is an overpass in South Delhi. Now, this is where things get even more infuriating. The carpenter actually reported the incident to three police officers, referred to in reports as Kailash, Asach, and Sandeep. However, they refused to do anything about it because the actual scene of the crime wasn’t within their jurisdiction.
Had the officers actually done their jobs and made the call over to the correct police station, Jyoti might still be alive today. I want to stress that it wasn’t even like these two stations were far from each other; they are literally 7 minutes apart. The adult men were charged with destruction of evidence, kidnapping, rape, attempted homicide, and homicide. On January 3rd, 2013, all denied the charges against them. Some claimed that they were tortured by the police into making false confessions.
On January 10th, their lawyers held a press conference in which they blamed the victims for their own attack, citing the fact that they were an unmarried couple using public transportation at night, something they felt they shouldn’t have been doing. Attorney Manohar Lal Sharma specifically referred to Avendra as “wholly responsible” for the attack because, in his words, “failed in his duty to protect the woman.” He went on to state, “Until today, I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady. Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl without respect.”
Attorney AP Singh also made the following statement, which was featured in a documentary that we’ll discuss a bit later. He said, “If my daughter or sister engaged in premarital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse and, in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.” Thankfully, the courts had enough of the men in their defense team. On March 13th, they tacked on robbery for the incident with the carpenter to their laundry list of charges.
One of the five adult men never made it to trial. The driver, 30-year-old Ram Singh, who is described as a heavy drinker that often became violent, was found dead in his shared cell at 5:45 a.m. on March 11th, 2013. He was found dangling from the ventilator shaft. It was unclear if he met his fate by his own hand or the hand of one of his three cellmates. This would be a reasonable assumption as his brother, Mukesh Singh, was assaulted by other inmates of the Tihar Jail and had to be placed in solitary for his own safety.
Due to the fact that he was not yet 18 at the time of the attack, Mohammed Afroz was tried as a juvenile. On August 31st, 2013, he was convicted of rape and homicide. He was sentenced to 3 years in a reformed facility with 8 months time served. After hearing the verdict, one of Jyoti’s younger brothers tried to attack him in the courtroom. While in prison, he was trained in cooking and tailoring as part of his rehabilitation program. He was released on December 20th, 2015. On his release, he was provided 10,000 rupees from the government’s Department of Women and Children as a one-time grant to open up a tailoring shop.
They also provided him with a sewing machine. However, it’s been reported that instead of doing any of this, he went on to work as a cook. Thankfully, his family never forgave him for his crimes and has since disowned him. The four surviving adult men were fast-tracked through trial. The defense relied heavily on both victim and witness statements and forensic evidence such as fingerprints, DNA, and dental models of the men’s teeth. They rested their case on July 8th, 2013. All four men were found guilty on all counts. September 10th of the same year, 3 days later, they were sentenced to death by hanging.
This no doubt satisfied Jyoti’s father, who stated, “We will get complete closure only if all the accused are wiped off from the face of the Earth.” While awaiting his fate at the end of a rope, Mukesh Singh made disgusting comments about Jyoti from death row, blaming the young student for her own attack. He went on to state that, “Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20% of girls are good.” But he didn’t stop there. He just couldn’t keep his lying mouth shut. He continued, “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after doing her and only hit the boy.”
For the next seven years, the four men filed appeal after appeal and even pled for mercy to the President of India. It’s all very long and drawn out, so we’ll spare you the details, but thankfully, everything was rejected. Between January 17th and February 17th of 2020, four death warrants were issued. Finally, at 5:30 a.m. on March 20th, 2020, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma, and Akshay Thakur were blindfolded and put to death by hanging at the Tihar Jail in New Delhi. Their gallows had been specifically designed to hang four people at once.
They were pronounced dead a half hour later. In accordance with jail policy, the men were offered a last meal and new clothes prior to their execution, which they refused. Allegedly, Vinay Sharma began pleading with the guards for mercy as he was being led to his death. It’s been reported that prior to their deaths, Mukesh Singh requested to donate his organs, and Vinay Sharma donated all of the paintings that he made while in custody to the jail superintendent.
In the wake of Jyoti’s death, both peaceful and violent protests broke out all over India, including outside of the home of the president. Demonstrators were beaten with batons, shot with water cannons, and gassed with tear gas shells. Some were arrested, including yoga guru Baba Ramdev and former Army Chief General V.J. Kumar Singh. To discourage assembly around Raisina Hill, which is similar to our Capitol Hill, police blocked roads and closed nine Metro stations. This not only affected the demonstrators but thousands of commuters that rely on public transportation to get around the city to their jobs.
The protests in India started a wave of protests all over South Asia, including demonstrations in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Their purpose: to demand reform and legislation towards violence against women. According to the South Asia Analysis Group, New Delhi, where Jyoti was attacked and ultimately killed, has the highest number of instances of rape in any major city in India. On average, women in New Delhi experience an attack once every 18 hours. According to reports, only one of the 76 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012 saw a successful conviction; that was Jyoti’s case.
Furthermore, leading up to Jyoti’s attack, 564 calls for both harassment and rape were reported to the police, and guess how many were followed up on? Four. Jyoti wasn’t the first woman who lost her life because crimes against women in India weren’t taken seriously, and she certainly wasn’t the last. There have been many “Jyotis” since then. Why? Because no power seems to actually care, at least not until it costs them money. If you’d like an example, look no further than former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. After female tourism in India dropped 35% following Jyoti’s death, he said, “One small incident of rape in Delhi advertised world over is enough to cost us billions of dollars in terms of lower tourism.”
Jyoti’s story has been depicted in various forms of media, including the BBC documentary film “India’s Daughter.” The film was due to be aired on International Women’s Day; however, Indian courts banned the broadcast due to the interview of Mukesh Singh blaming his victim. The BBC aired the documentary outside of India on March 4th, 2015, where it was subsequently uploaded to YouTube by a viewer. From there, it went viral, making its way to India. Anyway, the following day, the Indian government demanded that YouTube block the video in India.
Sadly, it was removed anyway after the BBC filed a copyright violation against the channel that uploaded it. It is still available to rent or buy on the platform as of the date of this recording. The film also garnered some other controversy after the Navbharat Times claimed that Mukesh Singh was paid 40,000 rupees for his interview. Allegedly, he’d asked for five times that amount, but eventually, the negotiated sum was paid out to his family. The filmmakers denied that they paid anything for this interview, but this was not the only allegation of payments being made to participants of the documentary.
Allegedly, Avendra, the male victim in her story, charges money for interviews and was paid to appear in the documentary. It’s been reported that he charges up to 70,000 rupees for his interviews, which, according to our research, has angered many people in India. He went on to promote the film “Taira: The Journey of Love and Passion,” which he claimed was about women’s rights. Avendra, who is currently living in Bangalore, also claimed that the 2019 Netflix series “Delhi Crime,” which was based on the attack he survived, was not accurate.
Jyoti’s death did make some small changes to how rape and homicides are handled in India. The government created six fast-track courts that specifically handled the prosecution of these types of cases. Rape committed by gangs now has a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. The Juvenile Justice Act also saw revision. As of December 22nd, 2015, those accused of heinous crimes above the age of 16 will be treated as an adult. Had this been in place in 2012, they would have had to design a gallows for five instead of four.
The government also promised changes to its Criminal Law Amendment Act, which expanded the definition of rape and added other offenses that women in South Asia suffer from at unacceptable rates, including harassment, voyeurism, stalking, and acid attack. However, it’s been reported that women in India still feel unsafe on the streets. According to reports, public officials still victim-blame women, claiming that they are inviting attacks by how they are dressed. This has led some women to not wear western-style clothing in public out of fear that they’ll be attacked.
Instead of addressing the root cause of the issue, the Indian government has advised women to avoid responding to catcalling and teasing, to wear modest clothing, and to avoid direct eye contact with men. They’ve even suggested for women to not go out at night and to avoid public transportation. Really, it feels like they just want 691 million women to just shut up and stay home. In December of 2014, Jyoti’s father claimed that the government failed to make good on their promises, and he regretted the fact that he had not been able to bring justice for his daughter and other women like her.
As we mentioned previously, Jyoti Singh went on to be known as “Nirbhaya,” meaning Fearless. This wasn’t just because she fought her attackers and lived long enough to provide some of the testimony that led to their capture, but also because Indian law prohibits the press from naming victims of rape—not that her parents had any problem with ultimately naming their daughter, despite the fact that they too received harsh criticism and mistreatment in the wake of Jyoti’s death.
In addition to Nirbhaya, Jyoti went on to be known as “Jyoti,” meaning awareness; “Amanat,” meaning treasure; “Damini,” meaning lightning; and finally, “Delhi Braveheart.” In death, Jyoti Singh has become a symbol of women’s resistance around the world. In 2013, she was awarded an International Woman of Courage Award by the US State Department. When discussing Jyoti, her father shared the following. He said, “My wife and I brought up our children with the sole intention of making them good citizens. I can proudly say that we have achieved that. Our daughter has shown society its true face. She has changed the lives of many young girls. She remains an inspiration even after death. She fought back those devils. We are proud of our daughter.”
