Jyoti Singh was born into a lower-middle-class family on May 10, 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, Gaurav and Saurabh. 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 USD 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 in a neighborhood known as 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’s 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 16, 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, Awindra Pratap Pandey, who worked as a software engineer. After going for a walk, the pair decided to watch the new Ang Lee film, Life of Pi, at the PVR Cinema located within the Select Citywalk shopping center in the 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 PM, Jyoti and Awindra boarded a small, white Yadav Travels bus after being told by a young passenger the vehicle was headed towards Dwarka. They paid 10 rupees apiece 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 Awindra, 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.
Awindra’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 Awindra 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, Awindra 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. Awindra 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 Awindra 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 Awindra 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, Awindra attempted to flag down a passing motorist, but no one would stop for them. Around 11:00 PM, 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 Awindra, 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 was never stated which hospital Awindra was admitted to. This led to chaos, with family members searching for the young man in every hospital across Delhi. Awindra 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 and took 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 19, 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, 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.
Many felt that the decision to move a patient who was still in the ICU was a political charade. 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 created 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. A December 28th press conference was held in which doctors informed members of the media that in addition to the litany of injuries 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 AM.
Word of Jyoti’s death brought great shock to her family. On December 30, 2012, while under high police security that came under scrutiny from India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Jyoti’s body was cremated.
Due to both peaceful and violent demonstrations 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 Awindra. Their testimony assisted in creating composite sketches, and police were also able to track one of the suspects via a stolen cell phone.
Based on their description of the bus, police were able to locate it 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 Singh. The pair lived in a South Delhi slum known as Ravi Dass 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. Thakur was married and the father of a little boy at the time of the crime, which makes everything even more disgusting.
Allegedly, the attack on Jyoti and Awindra 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. 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 in South Delhi.
This is where things get even more infuriating: the carpenter actually reported the incident to three police officers (referred to in reports as Kailash, Ashok, 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. The two stations are literally 7 minutes apart.
The adult men were charged with destruction of evidence, kidnapping, sexual assault, attempted homicide, and homicide on January 3, 2013. All denied the charges against them. 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. Attorney Manohar Lal Sharma specifically referred to Awindra as wholly responsible for the attack because, in his words, “he 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 A. P. Singh also made the following statement:
“If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital 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.”
One of the five adult men never made it to trial. The driver, 30-year-old Ram Singh, was found dead in his shared cell at 5:45 AM on March 11, 2013. He was found dangling from the ventilator shaft. It was unclear if it was a suicide or murder by one of his three cellmates.
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 31, 2013, he was convicted of sexual assault and homicide. He was sentenced to 3 years in a reform facility. He was released on December 20, 2015.
The four surviving adult men were fast-tracked through trial. On September 10, 2013, all four men were found guilty on all counts and were sentenced to death by hanging. While awaiting his fate, Mukesh Singh made disgusting comments about Jyoti from death row, blaming the young student for her own attack:
“A 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… 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, but thankfully, everything was rejected. Finally, at 5:30 AM on March 20, 2020, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma, and Akshay Thakur were put to death by hanging at the Tihar Jail in New Delhi.
In the wake of Jyoti’s death, massive protests broke out all over India. The protests started a wave of demonstrations all over South Asia, demanding reform and legislation against violence towards women. 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. When female tourism in India dropped 35% following Jyoti’s death, former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley dismissively stated, “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 was depicted in the BBC documentary film India’s Daughter. Indian courts banned the broadcast due to the interview of Mukesh Singh blaming his victim, but it went viral internationally.
Jyoti’s death did make some small changes to how sexual assault and homicides are handled in India. The government created six fast-track courts that specifically handled the prosecution of these types of cases. Gang rapes now have a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. The Juvenile Justice Act also saw revision; those accused of heinous crimes above the age of 16 will now be treated as adults.
Jyoti Singh went on to be known as Nirbhaya (meaning Fearless), not just because she fought her attackers and lived long enough to provide testimony, but also because Indian law originally prohibited the press from naming victims of sexual assault. In addition to Nirbhaya, Jyoti went on to be known as 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 posthumously awarded an International Women of Courage Award by the US State Department. When discussing Jyoti, her father shared the following:
“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.”
