Jyoti India’s Daughter

In the majority of murder cases, public generally gets a cursory account of a tragedy — the 5Ws of the crime — what, when, where, who and why? This rarely gives them a full picture of the offender’s thinking and cultural upbringing, essential to assess his or her redeeming and rehabilitative capacity.

I congratulate Ms. Leslee Udwin, the BBC and the CBC to document and put Jyoti’s story on their Internet sites, show it in the form of a documentary, and educate us about this “India’s Daughter”.

Emotionally exhausting, it is Ms. Udwin’s face to face interview with Mukesh Singh, the convicted death-row offender. At the end of her interview Ms. Udwin, comes out exhausted and gravely disappointed. Actually, interviewing criminals is always an exhausting experience. I know it first hand.

What made her feel so emotionally drained? It was the subject of her documentary, a psychopath. Ms. Udwin went looking for remorse in him, perhaps not thinking through that remorse is an outcome of deep soul searching. It is an expression of deep regret and guilt. It is that torturing feeling that keeps gnawing at you. It remains a mental and emotional burden until it is sincerely expressed. It lifts only when expressed, only when publicly expressed.

During my professional years at the National Parole Board (Canada), I do not recall I ever had a psychopath expressing his remorse. They show no remorse, not because they cannot, but because they do not have it. Looking for remorse in a psychopath is like trying to find leftovers pieces of a lamb in the den of a hungry lion.

Mukesh Singh holds Jyoti responsible for her death.  His self-serving statement, “It takes two hands to clap.” He justifies and rationalises her torturous life ending experience.

“A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. 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….,” He makes it look as though Jyoti and her male companion boarded the bus for some ex-rated action with those drunken criminals.

Mukesh Singh is a text book example of a psychopath. His irrational thinking, untruthfulness, insincerity, antisocial without apparent compunction, egocentricity and absence of insight, and most certainly, inability and unwillingness to learn from previous mistakes, “She had to be taught a lesson. …If she had quietly given in to the offender(s)’ wishes she would not have been harmed or dead.”

Another indicator of them being psychopaths is how fast, after gang raping and throwing their victim on the lonely roadside, they returned to getting rid of the evidence of their heinous crime and then to resuming their normal life; eating drinking, chatting and moving around.

While I was watching the documentary on the Passionate Eye, I noticed a bus. Perhaps it was the same bus or exactly the same bus, which was used as a mobile shelter for Jyoti’s gang rape. It had garlanded idols of Lord Shiva, goddess Parvati and Son Ganesha sitting on the dashboard.

This religious façade sealed my assessment of who they really were; most certainly psychopaths. They were using religion to hide their true identity; in reality they are monsters; fit to be removed from this planet. And no Rama and Krishna have to reincarnate for this small task. The Government of India can do it.

Mukesh Singh and his band are not the only dark characters in this tragedy. There are their defence attorneys, M.L. Sharma and A.P. Singh as well. They obviously hold similar views about women as Mukesh Singh does; seems as though they all went to the same school of ethics and culture.

ML Sharma opines, “In our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with any unknown person. …. (If) you are talking about man and woman as friends, sorry, that doesn’t have any place in our society. We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.”

ML Sharma, once before, right after this brutal incident, on January 10, 2013, had shared his opinion with Bloomberg News that he had never heard of a “respected lady” being raped in India. Wow! Who is this man?

Lawyer, A.P. Singh said he would not hesitate to honour kill his own daughter or sister. “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced her self and allowed her self 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.”  Bravo, Singh Sahib!

Most probably, they all were culturally educated by a so-called Holy man Asaram Bapu, who thinks that the rape victim should have invoked the goddess Saraswati to seek her protection, and surrendered to the offender. He was only a drunk. (Hindu; January 7, 2013).

A week later, Mohan Bhagwat, the Head of a right wing Hindu organization offered this astute wisdom on rape. “Rape only occurs in Indian cities, not in villages, because women there adopt Western style.”  Who are these people? They all sound more like a diluted version of Boko Haram to me.

Boy! Given these views, PM Mr. Narendra Modi has a steep mountain to scale and come down of it safely. Until then, I would genuinely remain fearful of taking my family back to my birthplace.