Gang Rape Trial Tests India’s Justice System (original) (raw)

Asia Pacific|Rape Trial Challenges a Jam in India’s Justice System

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/world/asia/gang-rape-trial-tests-indias-justice-system.html

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Rape Trial Challenges a Jam in India’s Justice System

A woman who said she was mindful of her security waited for a ride last week near New Delhi.Credit...Mansi Thapliyal/Reuters

Jan. 23, 2013

NEW DELHI — For Sonia Gandhi, India’s most powerful politician, the 23-year-old victim of the fatal gang rape last month “embodied the spirit of an aspirational India.”

“We will ensure,” Ms. Gandhi pledged in a nationally broadcast speech on Sunday, “that she will not have died in vain.”

Ms. Gandhi’s vow sums up the challenges facing the Indian judicial system. In a South Delhi courtroom on Thursday, arguments are scheduled to begin in a trial for five men accused in the rape, which galvanized the nation and captured the attention of the world. The trial will take place in a “fast track” court for crimes against women that was set up in response to public furor over the assault.

But whether the trial can treat the defendants fairly and provide justice for the victim and her family while laying the groundwork for sweeping changes in India’s judiciary system remains very much an open question. The police say that the rape was a premeditated and vicious attack in which the five men and a teenager, who is being tried separately, raped the victim one by one and then tried to kill her and destroy evidence to cover up the crime. The men are charged with robbery, gang rape and murder, and could be sentenced to death by hanging if found guilty.

All five will plead not guilty, their lawyers said. The news media and outsiders have been barred from the courtroom and from reporting on the day-to-day proceedings, which is common in rape trials in India.

Rare in its reported savagery, the Dec. 16 rape on a moving bus in South Delhi propelled thousands of Indians into the streets to protest. They were outraged over not only the attack but also what many women describe as a pattern of harassment, assault and ill treatment that keeps them bound to a second-tier citizenship even as many increasingly educated and urbanized women are advancing in the workplace. It is a country, they note, where Ms. Gandhi is president of the governing Congress Party, yet hundreds of millions of other women are still trapped in a web of traditional strictures.

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