File photo of Nirbhaya convicts

NEW DELHI: They were ordinary men, and like everyone had their own traits, some likeable, some unpleasant. Each had a different job, at least four of them: a fitness instructor who loved dancing, bus driver, the driver’s assistant, or ‘cleaner’, and a fruit vendor. The fifth was mostly unemployed but helped clean the bus occasionally and the sixth was an underaged boy who sometimes assisted the bus driver. None had a crime history to speak of. Until a joyride in a bus brought out the demon in them.

Ram Singh, a bus driver, and Mukesh Singh were brothers with a local reputation as toughies who regularly got into fights with neighbours and shopkeepers at Ravidass Camp in south Delhi’s RK Puram. The siblings mostly lived by themselves but were visited once in a while by their parents. It was in Ram Singh’s bus that the six picked up Nirbhaya and her friend on December 16, 2012 from Munirka. The bus driver and his assistant, Akshay Thakur, took turns at the steering wheel as the six ravaged the physiotherapy intern.

Ram Devi, the Singhs’ neighbour, remembered, “The brothers never talked with anyone. There was something strange about their behaviour. If they talked, it was always to argue. They were not kind men.” According to the locals, the mother visited the house once in a while, but she too seldom had conversations, just sat outside the house and smoked a hookah by herself.

Ravidass Camp residents recalled the ruckus when Ram Singh started living with a married woman, whom he later married. In jail no 3 at Tihar, awaiting the verdict in the rape and murder case, Ram Singh was found dead on March 11, 2013.

Mukesh, who held down no permanent job, helped his brother on the bus. He and Vinay Sharma were friends. The latter’s childhood friend, Sapna, said Sharma danced and acted “really well”. “We used to perform together at Janamashtami and for many years, Vinay played the role of Krishna’s friend Sudama. People from other colonies came to see him act,” said Sapna, adding, “His dream was to become a gym trainer which he eventually achieved.

The day Sharma got the job of an instructor at a gym, he went around Ravidass Camp happily telling everyone about it. He wasn’t always so friendly. A woman neighbour revealed that though he often did not pick a fight, he would be the first to join in a brawl in the locality. “Vinay and Mukesh hanged together. They never misbehaved here but there were times we heard stories about them having done something illegal or got into fights,” the woman said.

Thakur too was a friend of Sharma. He was employed by Ram Singh as the cleaner for his bus. It was while working at Manesar that he met the bus driver and a 17-year-old boy who had driven a group of labourers to the site. A police officer who interrogated the men said, “Akshay was a labourer in Gurgaon earning Rs 5,000 a month when Ram Singh offered him Rs 8,000 to work on the bus.”

Thakur had left his family consisting of parents, brothers, his wife and two children in Lahankarma in Bihar’s Aurangabad district in 2010 when he came to Delhi looking for a job. Another cop described him as “calculative” and someone who “could lie through his teeth”. He said, “When we arrested him, he created an alibi showing he hadn’t been present in Delhi during the rape and murder.”

The younger of the accused, Sharma and Pawan Gupta, were the most aggressive of the lot. Ravidass Camp residents were most shocked at Gupta’s arrest. They described the fruit vendor’s family as “kind”, a neighbour sighing, “Kya kismat thi in logo ki, abhi hi aaye the (Bad luck, they had only recently moved here and their son was arrested).”

People in the fruit market, however, recall the young man as a ‘bully’. A vegetable seller who Gupta addressed as Mamu, disclosed, “Pawan bullied people who were not physically strong. He was abusive and his mother always sided with him. It was only after his arrest that his parents toned down.”

A police officer who had interrogated Sharma and Gupta revealed how the two once tried to harm themselves in jail with nails. “We had to use force to take the nails from them,” he said.

Of all the men, it was Thakur’s parents who least afforded regular visits to jail. Saryu Singh, a farm labourer, could not afford the cost of coming often from Bihar. He had also spent much of his savings to send Thakur to Delhi in the hope that he would find a remunerative job. When consoled by jail officials during the family’s last meeting with the death row convict, Saryu Singh groaned, “We have spent all our money due to his deeds.”

Thakur’s brothers, Abhay and Vinay, now work in Gurgaon. They were his regular visitors at Tihar. “He was a good man when he was in the village, but the big city changed him,” claimed Abhay to officials at the family’s last meeting with Thakur. The convict’s wife, Puneeta, stood by him at the time of the arrest, but after seven years of litigation lost the will even to be associated with him and filed for divorce in a Bihar court on Tuesday.

(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme court directives on cases related to sexual assault)

