NEW DELHI: One of the men on death row for the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young medical student has, displaying singular lack of remorse in an interview to the BBC, said that the woman was to be blamed and “she shouldn’t have fought back.
The interview is a part of “India’s Daughter”, a documentary which premiers on Tv Channel NDTV 24×7 on International Women’s Day, March 8 at 9 pm IST.On 16 December 2012, the 23-year-old woman was brutally assaulted and tortured with an iron rod on a moving bus by five men and a 17-year-old. She died 13 days later.
Mukesh Singh, who has admitted to driving the bus but denied raping the woman, was one of the four men sentenced to death for the killing that sparked worldwide condemnation and spurred major changes in Indian law.
Speaking from jail, Mukesh Singh says that “women are more responsible for rape than men.”Singh, 28, refers to the savage attack as “an accident” and says, “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.”
Singh claims that his execution will endanger rape victims. “Now when they rape, they won’t let the girl go like we did. They will kill her. Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death,” he has told BBC.
He also says it is up to women to prevent rape. “You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. Boys and girls 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 per cent of girls are good,” he says.
A fifth man involved in the assault, Ram Singh, was found dead in his cell in 2013. A minor was sentenced to three years in a reform facility.
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