NEW DELHI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A woman whose gang rape sparked protests and a national debate about violence against women in India died of her injuries on Saturday, prompting a security lockdown in New Delhi and an acknowledgement from India's prime minister that social change is needed.
The six suspects
held in connection with the December 16 attack on the 23-year-old
medical student on a New Delhi bus were charged with murder following
her death, police said. The maximum penalty for murder is death.
Earlier, bracing
for a new wave of protests, Indian authorities deployed thousands of
policemen, closed 10 metro stations and banned vehicles from some main
roads in the heart of New Delhi, where demonstrators have converged
since the attack to demand improved women's rights.
Despite efforts to
cordon off the city centre, more than 1,000 people gathered for peaceful
protests at two locations. Some protesters shouted for justice, others for the death penalty for the rapists.
The woman severely beaten, raped and thrown out of a moving bus, had been flown to Singapore in a critical condition by the Indian government on Thursday for treatment.
The intense media
coverage of the attack and the use of social media to galvanize
protests, mostly by young middle-class students, has forced political
leaders to confront some uncomfortable truths about the treatment of
women in the world's largest democracy.
Most sex crimes in
India go unreported, many offenders go unpunished, and the wheels of
justice turn slowly, according to social activists who say that
successive governments have done little to ensure the safety of women.
"The need of the
hour is a dispassionate debate and inquiry into the critical changes
that are required in societal attitudes," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement.
"I hope that the
entire political class and civil society will set aside narrow sectional
interests and agenda to help us all reach the end that we all desire -
making India a demonstrably better and safer place for women to live
in."
Hundreds of
protesters took to the streets in the northern Indian city of Lucknow.
In Hyderabad, in southern India, a group of women marched to demand
severe punishment for the rapists. Protests were also held in the cities
of Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.
The demonstrations
were peaceful, unlike last weekend, when police used batons, water
cannon and teargas in clashes with protesters.
Sonia Gandhi, the
powerful leader of the ruling Congress party, directly addressed the
protesters in a rare broadcast on state television, saying that as a
mother and a woman she understood their grievances.
"Your voice has
been heard," Gandhi said. "It deepens our determination to battle the
pervasive and the shameful social attitudes that allow men to rape and
molest women with such impunity."
The Indian
government has chartered an aircraft to fly the student's body back to
India on Saturday, along with members of her family, T.C.A. Raghavan,
the Indian high commissioner to Singapore, told reporters.
The body was taken
to a Hindu casket firm in Singapore for embalming. Indian diplomats
selected a gold and yellow coffin to transport her home, staff at the
firm told reporters.
"She was courageous
in fighting for her life for so long against the odds but the trauma to
her body was too severe for her to overcome," Kelvin Loh, chief
executive officer of the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore said in a
statement announcing her death from multiple organ failure.
The victim and a
male friend were returning home from the cinema by bus when, media
reports say, six men on the bus beat them with metal rods and repeatedly
raped the woman. Media said a rod was used in the rape, causing
internal injuries. Both were thrown from the bus. The male friend
survived.
Six suspects, from a slum in south Delhi, are in custody.
The attack has put
gender issues centre stage in Indian politics arguably for the first
time. Issues such as rape, dowry-related deaths and female infanticide
have rarely entered mainstream political discourse.
Analysts say the
death of the woman dubbed "Amanat", an Urdu word meaning "treasure," by
some media could change that, although it is too early to say whether
the protesters calling for government action to better safeguard women can sustain their momentum through to national elections due in 2014.
WORST PLACE
The outcry over the attack caught the government
off-guard and it was slow to reach. It took a week for Singh to make a
statement on the attack, infuriating many protesters who saw it as a
sign of a government insensitive to the plight of women.
The prime minister,
a stiff 80-year-old technocrat who speaks in a low monotone, has
struggled to channel the popular outrage in his public statements and
convince critics that his eight-year-old government will now take
concrete steps to improve the safety of women.
"The Congress
managers were ham-handed in their handling of the situation that arose
after the brutal assault on the girl. The crowd management was poor," a
lawmaker from Singh's ruling Congress party said on condition of
anonymity.
Commentators and sociologists say the rape has tapped
into a deep well of frustration many Indians feel over what they see as
weak governance and poor leadership on social issues.
A global poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in June
found that India was the worst place to be a woman because of high
rates of infanticide, child marriage and slavery.
New Delhi has the highest number of sex crimes among
India's major cities, with a rape reported on average every 18 hours,
according to police figures. Government data show the number of reported
rape cases in the country rose by nearly 17 percent between 2007 and
2011.
(Additional
reporting by Devidutta Tripathy, Satarupa Bhattacharjya, Diksha Madhok,
Shashank Chouhan and Suchitra Mohanty in Delhi, Sharat Pradhan in
Lucknow, Sujoy Dhar in Kolkata, Anupama Chandrasekaran in Chennai, Kevin
Lim, Saeed Azhar, Edgar Su and Sanjeev Miglani in Singapore; Editing by
Mark Bendeich and Robert Birsel)
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