Brave heart gang-rape victim wanted to live

File photo from 21 December shows students of Sri Vishnu Engineering College for Women, staging a demonstration against gang-rapes in New Delhi. Photo: A.V.G. Prasad

Fighting with great fortitude and courage after sustaining grievous injuries, the 23-year-old gang-rape victim had expressed her intention to live and wanted her tormentors to be brought to justice.

“I want to live,” the girl had told her brother and mother when they first met her on December 19, three days after she was brutally gang-raped and assaulted in a moving bus in south Delhi.

During the entire process of her treatment, the girl remained communicative through signs most of the time, spoke to her parents and gave statements to a magistrate not once but twice.

The paramedical student was courageous and brave throughout the treatment period and even expressed some thoughts about her future when psychiatrists assessed her thrice during her 10-day treatment at the Safdarjung Hospital.

She also gave a “brave statement” to a Sub-Divisional Magistrate on December 21 in which she gave details about the incident and the sequence of events which was also corroborated with the statement given by her male friend who was with her in the bus.

When the statement landed in a controversy, she again narrated the incident to the magistrate and expressed her wish that the men who brutally raped and assaulted her be brought to justice.

Doctors have been lauding the spirit of the girl calling her “brave” especially as she withstood the extensive treatment that she underwent since December 16.

The victim, whom doctors described as “psychologically composed and optimistic about future”, had shown signs of improvement during treatment but her condition worsened on Christmas night after her pulse rate plummeted for a brief period and was shifted to Singapore hospital.

The girl, who was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital on December 16, underwent two major and one minor surgeries in the past 10 days during which major part of intestine was removed.

The 23-year-old victim has been on ventilator for majority of her stay in the hospital, except for two days when she was taken off ventilator and started breathing on her own.