Amid heavy police deployment, the bodies of Nirbhaya convicts Vinay Sharma and Pawan Gupta reached their residence in Rama Krishna Puram’s Ravidas Camp at 2.14 p.m. on Friday. The two, who had spent the last seven years together in jail, were cremated together.
Around 50 men, mostly family members and neighbours, walked about 4 km from the camp to the Green Park cremation ground to attend the cremation.
“ Faansi waale [ those who have been hanged ]” was the term used for the group of men by passers-by as they crossed the roads and streets in full public glare. “Who is attending their cremation?” asked a man to another. “Who knows! Probably only family because they are not martyrs,” the other replied.
At 3.05 p.m., they began the rites and the pyre was set alight. Vinay’s father was spotted sobbing.
Back in the camp, while locals in the area did not sympathise with the families of the convicts, their neighbours did and sat around them under a white tent outside Pawan’s house. His mother sat in the middle against the wall, quiet.
“She is not talking to anyone. She is not even crying. We are trying to make her cry, but she isn’t. She is saying that he will call her like he used to every day. She has not come to terms with the fact that he is dead,” said a neighbour standing outside Pawan’s house.
Pawan’s father sat with a few men on a bench.
While condoling him, a neighbbour said, “There have been more brutal crimes than this. What about the Nithari case?” Another sitting next to him said, “If crime would have reduced by doing this, then we would not have complained but that has no been the case”.
A neighbour said that they stood with the families. “If these people were bad, then no one would have stood with them. They are poor and these families are the real victims,” he claimed.
‘Blame the media’
The neighbours also blamed reporters for the deaths of the four convicts in the 2012 gang rape and murder case and alleged that the media “blew the case out of proportion while there are so many such cases” and that “death sentence was given because of the trial by the media”. Pawan’s father said that they had already told the police in the morning not to let journalists enter the street.
When the bodies arrived at the camp, a reporter with a national daily was beaten up by Pawan’s father and the neighbours when he pulled out his notebook to write.
However, only Vinay and Pawan’s bodies had reached the camp. The body of Mukesh Kumar, another convict and resident of the camp, was taken to his village in Rajasthan while his mother sat at home in the camp on Friday afternoon.
She said she spent every penny that she had to save her son, including a property. She also met the President, she said.
Talking about her last meeting with Mukesh on Thursday, she said that he kept on comforting her that nothing would happen to him as the date of execution had been postponed thrice.
At the mortuary of Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital where the post-mortems of the four convicts were conducted, Central Reserve Police Force and the local police were deployed to ensure that no one except family members were allowed near the bodies.
From around 8.30 a.m. till 1.30 p.m., the post-mortem proceedings became a public spectacle as those who were visiting the hospital came, clicked pictures and took videos. As it took time for the families to arrive to claim the bodies, rumours claiming that “no one will come to claim them” started doing the rounds. However, about two hours after the bodies reached, families of all four arrived.
In separate ambulances, the mortal remains of Akshay Kumar were taken to his village in Bihar, Mukesh’s were taken to Rajasthan, and Vinay and Pawan were brought to Ravidas Camp.
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