Bus Driver in Delhi Gang Rape Blames Victim

NEW DELHI — In the months after a young
woman was brutalized and gang-raped on a
moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, thousands of
politicians, activists and ordinary citizens
crowded onto India’s airwaves and into its public
spaces to say their piece about the crime.

But there was no comment from the six slight,
ordinary-looking men accused of her murder.
Whisked in and out of the courtroom past
shouting crowds of journalists, they listened
impassively to testimony and offered
monosyllabic answers on the stand. Courtroom
guards said they hummed Bollywood tunes under
their breath. Their opinions were anyone’s guess.

Now, in his first in-depth interview, one of the
men, Mukesh Singh, has told a British filmmaker
that the young woman invited the rape because
she was out too late at night.

“You can’t clap with one hand,” said Mr. Singh,
who drove the bus during the crime but denied
taking part in the assault. “It takes two hands. A
decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at
night. A girl is far more responsible for rape
than a boy. 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 percent
of girls are good.”

The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student,
had been to see “Life of Pi” with a male friend,
and they both boarded the private bus without
realizing that the six men aboard had been
driving the streets in search of a victim. After
knocking her friend unconscious, they took her
to the back of the bus and raped her, then
damaged her internal organs with an iron rod.

An hour later, they dumped the pair out on the
road, bleeding and naked. She died two weeks
later of her injuries.

In the interview, for a film that will air Sunday
on the BBC , Mr. Singh said the woman had
provoked the deadly assault by resisting the rape.
“When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back,” he
told the filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, according to a
transcript provided by the BBC. “She should just
be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have
dropped her off after ‘doing her,’ and only hit
the boy.”

In footage from the film, Mr. Singh tonelessly
narrates the assault, saying that he heard her
screaming for help but that his brother instructed
him to keep driving as they “dragged her to the
back” and “went turn by turn.” Afterward, he
said, he saw the youngest of the assailants, who
was 17 at the time of the crime, withdraw
something from her body.

“It was her intestines,” Mr. Singh said. “He said,
‘She’s dead. Throw her out quickly.’ ”
He called the killing “an accident.”

Ms. Udwin, at a news conference in New Delhi,
said the film crew interviewed Mr. Singh for 16
hours and saw no sign of remorse. “He is almost
like a robot,” she said. “I tried every trick to get
a tear in his eye, but nothing. No tear.”

Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday
demanded an explanation from the Tihar Jail,
where Mr. Singh is incarcerated, as to why they
had allowed the interview while the case was
pending trial.

The prison authorities in Tihar told The Indian
Express, a daily newspaper, that they are in the
process of filing a legal notice against the BBC for
violating its agreement to submit the footage for
approval. The filmmakers said that they
submitted the footage, and that it was approved.

According to police records, the six men divided
the pair’s possessions: Mr. Singh took one mobile
phone, and Vinay Sharma, a 20-year-old gym
instructor, took the other. Pawan Gupta took the
man’s watch and 1,000 rupees cash, a little less
than $20. Akshay Kumar Singh, a bus cleaner,
took the woman’s rings. The juvenile was given a
bank card and some cash from the spoil.

Mr. Singh’s brother, Ram Singh, hanged himself
with his bedsheet in his prison cell months before
the trial. The juvenile defendant, whose identity
was never made public in accordance with
Indian law, was sentenced to three years in a
detention center — the heaviest sentence possible
in India’s juvenile justice system. The remaining
four men pleaded not guilty; they are appealing
their death sentences.

Mr. Singh told the filmmaker that he believed the
harsh sentences, instead of acting as a deterrent,
would drive more rapists to kill their victims in
the future. “Now, when they rape, they won’t
leave the girl like we did,” he said. “They will kill
her. Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her
alone. She won’t tell anyone.’ Now, when they
rape, especially the criminal types, they will just
kill the girl. Death.”