NEW DELHI // One of the men convicted of raping and killing a woman in a brutal 2012 gang attack on a New Delhi bus said the victim would not have died if she had not fought back.
Instead, the 23-year-old woman should have remained silent, said Mukesh Singh, who was driving the bus for much of the time that the woman was being attacked.
“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said in a TV documentary that will be released next week.
The filmmakers released transcripts of the interview, which was recorded in 2013, on Tuesday.
“A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night ... Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”
The woman and her friend were returning home after a movie when they were tricked into getting on the bus, which the men had taken out for a joyride. The attackers beat her friend and took turns raping the woman. They assaulted her with a rod, leaving severe internal injuries that caused her death.
Singh and three other men were convicted in a fast-track court in 2013. They confessed to the attack but later retracted their confessions. The appeals against their death sentences are pending in the supreme court.
India, where many people have long believed that women are responsible for rape, was shocked into action after the attack.
In the interview, Singh suggested that the attack was to teach the woman and her male friend a lesson that they should not have been out late at night.
He also reiterated that rape victims should not fight back: “She should just be silent and allow the rape.”
“Then they would have dropped her off after ‘doing her’,” he said.
The death penalty, he said, would make things even more dangerous for women. “Now when they rape, they won’t leave the girl like we did. They will kill her,” Singh said.
Singh's interview is from the documentary India's Daughter by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin. It will be shown on March 8, International Women's Day, in India, Britain, Denmark, Sweden and several other countries.
Indian authorities, meanwhile, objected to the filmmakers releasing the documentary without their approval.
A spokesman for New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where the interview was filmed, said Ms Udwin had agreed to allow them to screen the footage before it was released. “We want to see the documentary as it can be screened only after it was approved by authorities,” said jail spokesman Mukesh Prasad.
* Associated Press
