India’s Uber driver guilty of rape

Shiv Kumar Yadav will be sentenced on October 23 after being convicted on four charges -- rape, abduction, intimidation and causing harm.

New Delhi // An Indian Uber driver was convicted on Tuesday of raping a young female passenger in the capital last year, in a case that sparked fresh safety fears in a city plagued by sexual violence.

Uber was banned from operating in Delhi in the aftermath of the December 5 attack, which sparked accusations it had failed to conduct adequate background checks.

However, the ban has never been fully enforced.

The Delhi court found Shiv Kumar Yadav guilty of raping the 25-year-old woman as she returned home from dinner with friends in the Indian capital.

“He has been convicted and found to be guilty for all charges against him, which include rape,” public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava said after the verdict was delivered.

He will be sentenced on October 23 after being convicted on four charges -- rape, abduction, intimidation and causing harm.

Defence lawyer Dharmender Kumar Mishra said his client would appeal the verdict at a higher court.

“I have to see on what grounds my client was convicted. The investigation was completely flawed in this case,” Mr Mishra said.

Shortly after the attack it emerged that Yadav had been accused of assaulting other women, although he had no previous convictions.

Yadav was tried by one of the fast-track courts introduced in 2013 following the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi, a crime that sparked nationwide protests about India’s treatment of women.

The Uber rape occurred days before the second anniversary of the attack on the bus, which earned Delhi the title of India’s “rape capital” and shone a harsh spotlight on the issue of violence against women.

The victim in the December 5 attack said she had dozed off in a taxi while returning home from dinner with friends.

She told police she woke to find the taxi parked in a secluded place where the driver assaulted and raped her, before dumping her near her home in north Delhi.

Women’s rights activists applauded the fast-track court for “quick dispensation of justice” in a country where cases can drag on for years in an understaffed and overburdened legal system.

“I think it [the verdict] is extremely important in times when we are getting more and more incidents of sexual violence,” Ranjana Kumari, head of the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, said.

Tuesday’s judgement comes days after a toddler and a five-year-old girl were raped in separate attacks in New Delhi.

India recorded 36,735 rape cases in 2014, with 2,096 of them in Delhi alone. Experts say those figures are likely to represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Uber, which resumed operations in the capital earlier this year despite the ban, said it had learnt lessons from the case and made improvements to its checks and customer support.* Agence France-Presse