Mange Lal, who is now deceased, and Ram Bai, the parents of Mukesh Singh, one of the convicts in the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, in December 2012, which came to be known as the Nirbhaya case. Mukesh and three other convicts are scheduled to be executed at 5.30 am on 20 March 2020.

Mange Lal, who is now deceased, and Ram Bai, the parents of Mukesh Singh, one of the convicts in the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, in December 2012, which came to be known as the Nirbhaya case. Mukesh and three other convicts are scheduled to be executed at 5.30 am on 20 March 2020. Mansi Thapliyal / REUTERS

Sixty-eight-year old Ram Bai reached Delhiʼs Tihar Jail at around 4.30 pm on 19 March, expecting to meet her son, Mukesh, for the last time. Less than two hours earlier, a Delhi court had refused to stay the execution of her son. He is scheduled to be hanged at 5.30 am on 20 March.

Ram Bai, a frail old woman of less than five feet, seemed crushed by the finality of the decision. She was sobbing. “It's just that I had hoped for so long, so long,” she said, as tears streamed down her cheeks, and fell on the frayed shawl wrapped around her. “What will they get by killing him, tell me? What will they get? They took away my other son, my husband … Now what will they get by taking him away too?”

*

I last met Ram Bai a little after noon on 31 January, when she had visited Tihar Jail for what she then expected would be the last opportunity to meet her son. At the time, Mukesh was due to be hanged on 1 February. “What do I say?” she asked, her gaunt face looking tired. “Who has ever listened to us?” “We are poor, and the poor have no one,” she told me, her voice cracking. “At night, I am unable to sleep … I just keep wondering how my son is, whether he has eaten.” She herself had lost the desire to eat or drink, she said. “Only one worry is eating at me, that what has god done?”

As cases go, only a handful are known as widely as Mukesh’s—the gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh, in Delhi, which came to be known as the “Nirbhaya” case. (Nirbhaya, which translates to “fearless,” is a moniker that the media gave to the victim. Her parents have since said that they have no objection to their daughter being referred to by her name.) As Ram Bai had been preparing to say a final goodbye to her son, his lawyers had approached Delhi’s Patiala House court, seeking a stay on the execution.

Mukesh’s mercy petition before the president of India had been rejected two weeks earlier, but one of his co-accused’s plea for mercy was still pending before the president. Citing the pending clemency petition, the lawyers insisted that the hanging could not proceed, as all the accused could only be hanged once each of them had exhausted all their constitutional and legal remedies. Dharmendra Rana, the presiding judge, reserved the order for that evening.

Outside the entrance to jail number three, Ram Bai’s third son, Suresh, was with her. As he ushered his mother inside, he took a piece of paper out of his wallet and handed it over to me. “Mukesh had written this, in his own hand,” he said. “Take it.” Suresh and several of his family members, including his wife and his 10-year-old son, had come to meet their condemned relative as well. Once the family had entered the gate, I opened the note. Mukesh had asked his brother to raise a voice about his case. He told Suresh to say:

My brother is in Tihar jail in the 16 December case and is on death row. Session high supreme court have confirmed the sentence, the curative and the mercy petition before the president are pending. In my brother’s case, a lot of politics has been done, and the judgment has been given based on public and media sentiment and our cases were not heard, nor were we given a chance to present our side. A one-sided judgment has been given due to political pressure.

The Tihar Jail complex, comprising nine prisons, is an expansive site of over two-hundred acres, located alongside a busy road in west Delhi—helpfully named Jail Road—that branches off the National Highway 8. Outside the gate for jail number three, I waited for Mukesh’s family to return, along with many bereaved family members of various jail residents who sat on the pavement. Some were calm, others clearly anguished. One woman, a young wife of a convict, burst into tears as soon as she came out, while another consoled her. The sun was shining bright, offering some respite from one of the harshest winters Delhi had seen in over a hundred years.

As they waited, they exchanged notes—on the crime their relatives were accused of, on the distance between their homes and the jail, and the visiting procedures. Without exception, the waiting family members were not affluent. Most were dressed in inexpensive-looking clothes, carrying plastic bags with their paperwork, prominently holding their identification—government-issued Aadhaar cards, laminated and bent. Many wore chappals or open sandals, even in the January cold.

Nearly all the waiting family members had left by the time Ram Bai came out from main gate, over two hours after she had entered. Visiting her son appeared to have infused her with some hope, and transformed her despair into defiance. “Nothing can happen to my son,” she said firmly. “Nothing that god hasn’t willed.”

Her faith did not betray her that day. At close to 5.30 pm, Rana stayed the hanging until further orders. Mukesh would live, at least until the next date of execution. Since then, the court has issued a death warrant twice—once for 3 March, which was again stayed because another co-accused’s mercy petition was pending, and then for 20 March.

Each time the death warrant was stayed, news channels ran headlines claiming that the convicts had used “delay tactics” to escape the death penalty. Newspapers described the convicts’ lawyers as strategic, as having laid the latest “paintra,” or ploy. While news channels condemned the convicts for exercising their constitutional right to seek mercy, social-media became crowded with posts decrying the delay. Hundreds upon thousands of people posted that the law had failed in delivering justice. “If I was to believe the newspapers,” Mukesh had written in his mercy petition to the president, “it would appear that for the last seven years the country has waited for my execution with bated breath.”

In pleading the president to spare his life and save him from execution, Mukesh had a singular question. “The overwhelming truth of my life is that I turned my back on a young woman as she was raped and thrown out of a moving bus,” Mukesh wrote. “I do not want you to think I am running away from my culpability for what happened that cold winter’s night. I have thought about it incessantly over the last seven years. I was driving the bus where a woman was brutalised. I neither stopped the bus, nor called for help and I must be punished. But will that penal purpose be met only with the taking of my life? Will no other punishment suffice?”

*

On the evening of 16 December 2012, a group of six, namely Mukesh, his brother Ram Singh, a fruit seller named Pawan Gupta, a bus conductor named Akshay Thakur and a gym assistant named Vinay Sharma, along with a juvenile, lured Jyoti and her male friend onto a private bus. They assaulted and harassed the two, beat up the male friend, and then gang raped Jyoti in the back of the bus. The media repeated the case’s details so many times that these were burned into the consciousness of the citizenry—the accused not only gang raped the young woman, they inserted a rod into her and pulled out her entrails. They threw the bleeding Jyoti and her friend off the bus, first trying to run them over, and then leaving them for dead. Jyoti’s insides were damaged beyond repair; in about two weeks, she died due to multiple organ failure, resulting from her injuries.

The crime resulted in an outpouring of anger, almost from the first day it was reported. Starting 17 December, students took to the streets to demand justice, and were later joined by activists, academics, political organisations—including leaders who would subsequently form the ruling Aam Aadmi Party—and most significantly, young citizens of the republic. There were candle marches at India Gate, and protesters stormed the streets outside the Indian parliament, with many demanding that the rapists be hanged or publicly lynched. Some made faceless effigies to represent the accused, and hung them from makeshift rods. The hanging figures loomed over the protesters, seemingly gesturing to the vigilante justice they wanted to deliver.

The media, both print and broadcast, amplified these visuals incessantly. News channels covered the protests almost 24x7, even as newspapers ran daily updates from the police about the emerging details of the crime. The academic and journalist Pamela Philipose noted in her book Media’s Shifting Terrain that the mainstream media “systematically amplified an already widespread perception that such criminals were a threat to society … the feeling that the time had come to ensure that bestial criminals like these would ‘pay for their sins’ was ubiquitous.” After the gangrape came to light, “one of the first statements that figured widely in the media was a quotation from her brother”—Jyoti’s—“indicating that the family wanted the culprits to be hanged as early as possible,” Philipose wrote. “It was a demand that was to be reiterated several times by the family in the days ahead, lending it a uniquely emotional justification for the public.”

In September 2013, a trial court convicted Mukesh, Akshay, Pawan and Vinay of the rape and murder. Mukesh’s elder brother, Ram Singh, the prime accused, was not convicted—on 11 March that year, Ram Singh was found hanging in his cell in Tihar’s jail number 3. The prison authorities claimed that he took his own life.

On 10 September 2013, protesters staged a mock hanging outside a Delhi court to demand the death sentence for the four men convicted of the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. Raj K Raj / Hindustan Times / Getty Images

Through this time, Ram Bai and her husband, Mange Lal, who has since died, were effectively mute spectators to the public baying for their sons’ blood, classified in the public imagination as “bestial criminals.” “The media people have never listened to us, they’ve never put forward our side—not on TV, not in the papers, not on radio,” Ram Bai said. “These are also six lives,” she added, referring to the accused. “Ram Singh is gone, we were living with the hope of this one, but they want to kill him too.”

*

If Delhi changed on the night of the crime, so did Ram Bai’s life. Since that day, her existence has revolved only around the fate of her two sons. As she spoke to me, the toll of the past seven years was starkly evident—she appeared weary and exhausted, oscillating between despair, anger, anguish, and tears.

Mukesh and Ram Singh, along with their brother Suresh, grew up in a jhuggi in the Ravidas Camp Settlement in Delhi’s RK Puram area. The settlement is packed with small houses, stacked oddly atop one another. The home in which they lived is a brick structure, hardly six feet high. When I visited, rubble—pieces of wood, broken stones, and discarded clothes and utensils—were piled on the roof. The door frame was lopsided, slanting on one end, and paint was peeling off the bricks. Right outside, next to one wall, stood a small metal staircase, from where a neighbour had climbed to the roof to hang clothes. Ram Bai’s relatives live one house away—the lane separating their homes was hardly wide enough for one person to pass through. Ram Bai said that she and her husband had moved to the settlement around 1990, from their native village in Karoli district, in Rajasthan. “When Rajiv Gandhi died, my Mukesh was still in my lap,” she said.

Though they lived in poverty, the family got by on her husband and her meagre incomes as daily-wage workers. In his mercy petition to the president, Mukesh, too, spoke of the bleak circumstances of his childhood in the Ravidas camp. “Food was scarce and fights would break out over an amenity as basic as water,” he wrote. “Most of the boys my age engaged in informal labour and petty crime.”

Unable to cope with academics, Mukesh wrote, he dropped out of school in the sixth standard. “I flitted through various menial jobs until I started driving autos when I was 16.” In an interview with a Delhi-based filmmaker, who later shared the footage with me, Ram Bai described Mukesh’s attempts to earn a living. “He used to pull a handcart to deliver goods to shops,” she said. “Goods like big, heavy sacks … how old was he then, maybe around 10 or 12.” Pulling the heavy cart made Mukesh’s stomach and his legs hurt. “He used to get crushed under its weight as he pulled it. He often broke down in tears.” Ram Bai told me, “Ek ek paise ke liye mazdoori kari mere bachchon ne”—my children worked hard to earn every paisa.

The family hoped for a better life once the sons grew up and could earn more, Ram Bai said. Over time, the brothers managed to find some work here and there. According to the chargesheet, by December 2012, Ram Singh was a driver for a private bus service named Yadav Travels. “Mukesh learned some skills from his brother, how to clean a bus, driving and so on,” she said. Otherwise, he did some menial work, “10–20 rupay milte the”—he used to earn between ten to twenty rupees. In December 2012, Ram Bai and her husband Mange Lal were in Karoli. Ram Singh had told them that he, too, would join them soon. He had earlier suffered an accident and had become severely disabled in one arm, and was sure he would lose his license soon. “He told me, ‘I will also come there and stay with you. We can grow the food we need to feed ourselves and live, we will do that,’” Ram Bai recalled.

“We worked very hard to raise them, feed them,” Ram Bai said. “They had studied a little, they had managed to stand on their own two feet, they were earning. We were able to eat two square meals a day, we were happy. Then, I don’t know … I don’t know what turn the world took.”

Ram Bai said she had not been able to visit Ram Singh in jail very often—“only one or two times” before he died. The Friday before his death, he had been brought to the court where the trial was ongoing, but she had not been allowed to meet him then. “I thought, okay, I’ll meet him later,” she said. “But by Monday they told me he had killed himself.” She believes that her son was murdered. She cited his disability. “He would use only one hand to lift a spoon to eat,” Ram Bai told me. “How could he have hung himself, 12 feet above the ground?”

Sunil Gupta, a former spokesperson and legal advisor of Tihar Jail, was present in the prison the day Ram Singh died. In his book, Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer, which he co-authored with the journalist Sunetra Choudhury, he wrote, “There is no written evidence anywhere, and I do not have a copy of the post- mortem report, but I do believe that Ram Singh did not commit suicide.” Singh pointed out that the viscera report had found alcohol in Ram Singh’s system, which he found to be suspicious—“how could an inmate get access to alcohol?” He too, found it implausible that Ram Singh could have hung himself from a 12-foot-high ceiling, without his three cellmates being none the wiser. “To me it looked like he was made to drink and then hanged,” Gupta wrote. He noted that Vimla Mehra, an Indian Police Services officer who was then the director general of jails, had purposely refused to grant the convicts heightened security, even though their lives were in danger as there was great public anger against them. “She made it clear that in this particular case, if they faced the ire of a jail mob, she was fine with it.”

In his mercy petition, Mukesh, too, wrote of his brother’s death, claiming that Ram Singh had been killed. He told the president that his brother had admitted to being severely sexually abused in prison. “On 9 March 2013 when I met him in court, I noticed severe injuries on his legs and face. On 11th March, my brother died,” Mukesh wrote.

Mukesh went on to describe the impact his brother’s death had on his own mental state. When he received news of it, Mukesh said he knew “that the day of reckoning had arrived. Punishment had been meted out and it would be said that Justice has been done.” He wrote that he often thought of his brother at the moment of his death, “alone, vulnerable, abused, ready prey for a murderous mob, emboldened by their own righteousness. I live my own life in perpetual fear of this ‘Justice’ marching towards me.” The fear that he would be “killed like my brother, Ram Singh … is visceral,” Mukesh wrote. “It does not let me sleep.” Even sessions with the prison psychiatrist and several rounds of medication had been of no help. “Can you imagine living every single day in this state of uninterrupted torment?” Mukesh asked.

Ram Singh’s death was only the first blow to Ram Bai. Her husband was extraordinarily pained by the death of his son “He stopped eating, he ate very little,” she told me. “He fell ill, and he died.”

His father’s death, Mukesh wrote in his petition, had left Ram Bai “emotionally crippled.” It made the prospect of her son’s execution only more devastating, more bleak. “Yeh Mukesh nahi hai, meri jaan hai. Mera Mukesh nahi hai toh main bhi nahi hun”—He is not just Mukesh, he is my life. If my Mukesh is not there, then neither will I be, she told me. Mukesh pleaded with the president to spare his life for the sake of his mother. “The public conscience outraged at the inhuman brutality meted out to Nirbhaya on 16 December 2012 has claimed the life of one of her sons. Must she lose another?”

“How can a mother’s heart be soothed?” Ram Bai asked me. “If I don’t see him for a while, my heart aches. I travel very far to meet him, to talk to him a little, and only then I am at peace. What to do? God has willed this distance between us.”

Ram Bai told me that she could not see her son when she went to meet him. “There’s a glass, no one cleans it,” she said. “My eyes are weak … I can barely see him.” Of his meetings with his mother, Mukesh said, “We have lived our lives in those brief visits across a glass pane and through a telephone wire.”

In the recent weeks, as the certainty of his execution became a reality, she said she requested the jail authorities to let her see her son properly. A jail officer, taking pity on her, complied. He allowed Mukesh to meet her in his office, Suresh told me.

Every time she spoke of her son’s impending death, Ram Bai could not hold back her tears. “The government speaks of the youth … is he not someone’s young son? Is he not yours?” Human beings should think of others, she said. “You think he is guilty, that’s okay. Punish him … punish him as hard as you like. Keep him in jail. But nobody has the right to kill him. God has brought him here and only god can take him away.”

“There are lakhs of rapes, lakhs of murders every day,” she said. “But not everyone is executed. Why only my son?” For her, their poverty is what sealed Mukesh’s fate. Rich people, she said, do not get executed for the crimes like those her son has been convicted of. “If the poor commits a crime, they can kill him.”

“Even god forgives one crime,” Ram Bai said. She told me that she wanted to get a message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Everyone thinks Modi is god, does he also have no mercy for me?” She spoke of her bleak circumstances. “God has sent the rich, and also the poor … the law is the same for both. My one child is gone, you can punish the other one as harshly as you like, but please spare him,” she said, tears streaming down her face.

Sometimes, anger and despair flashed across Ram Bai’s sunken eyes. With so many years past, she said, the family had become hopeful that perhaps the public demand for the death penalty would have dwindled, and that her son’s life would be spared. Then, in December 2019, the case came into public view again. “Elections are coming, that’s why these people are putting pressure again,” she said. (At the time we spoke, Delhi was due to go to polls in around one week, on 8 February.)

Referring to the political parties in Delhi, who had all supported the call for the execution to proceed at the earliest, she said, “Ask them, if they win the election after killing my son, will they be happy? Will they be at peace?”

Any journalist who has attended any of the court hearings related to this case can testify to the media’s attentive focus on Jyoti’s mother, Asha Devi. Every time she leaves the court, the media swarms her, pushing, punching and pulling for one byte. In the past seven years, the media has extensively covered her plight. Her tears, her despair, and the grave loss she suffered, has been played over and over again, for the whole nation.

But Ram Bai could not understand why the media is not moved by her own tears. “I’m also a mother,” she said. “It has been almost eight years now, and no one in the media has wanted to hear my story.” Modi speaks of empowering women, she said, “Sometimes, we go three, four days without eating, just crying, tears flowing like a river … does he not have mercy for mothers like me?”

*

In the petition, Mukesh spoke keenly, strikingly, about the value of life—his own, his mother’s and even Jyoti’s. “For the last six years … I have eked out my days in solitary confinement with death as my only companion. When faced with one’s own death you are overwhelmingly aware of the promise of life,” he wrote. “I feel keenly the loss of that promise in Nirbhaya and her family’s life.” For no fault of hers, Mukesh acknowledged, Jyoti’s life was cruelly cut short. “I will not deny that I was driving the bus that night. I have never attempted to deny it,” he said. “However, I am not responsible for the loss of her life. I did not rape her. I did not insert a rod in her body. I did not participate in the acts that led to her death.”

The police stated in the chargesheet that Mukesh admitted to participating in the rape, and that one of the co-accused had taken over driving the bus during this period. But Mukesh disputed this in his mercy petition. He argued that the evidence against him in the chargesheet was fabricated, and pointed to the fact that the forensic reports did not identify any of his DNA on the young woman’s body. “I have the greatest respect for the Judiciary,” Mukesh wrote. “However, in my case the verdict has been decided by media trial. The Courts in their effort to appease the popular demand for punishment have abdicated their commitment to unbiased adjudication.”

“My life cannot bring Nirbhaya back,” he said. “My life, even in its bare, incarcerated and limited state holds promise for my widowed mother.” His mother’s tears and pleas for mercy had moved no one, and prompted no one to spill out onto the street. “Perhaps, my harshest sentence has been to helplessly watch her suffer,” Mukesh continued. “On her last visit she told me that she feels immobilized. She sits at home all day, waiting to see me and watching her money plant grow. She had bought it in the hope that it would bring me luck. She is unable to do more.”

Addressing the president, Mukesh described the circumstances of his existence. As a prisoner on death row awaiting execution, Mukesh said, “Currently I am kept in solitary confinement. The cell is about 8ft x10ft. It has a small window for an exhaust fan about 15 ft high. It receives barely a flicker of sunlight. I am allowed to leave the cell for a total of 1.5 hours.” He was not allowed to meet, speak with or eat with anyone. “This is not the only time I have been kept in solitary confinement. In 2013, I was kept in the mulhazia ward for nine months. In 2014, when I was in jail 5, I was kept in isolation for 1.5 months. In almost every jail that I was transferred to, I have been kept in solitary confinement for long periods.” Such confinement, he wrote, “attacks the very essence of being human.”

The Supreme Court, too, has held that placing an individual in solitary confinement before the rejection of his mercy petition is unconstitutional. Yet, by Mukesh’s account, he was repeatedly subject to this torture.

He described painful and horrifying abuse that he had faced in jail. The first day, he reached prison, he wrote, he was beaten mercilessly. “The beatings took place on a daily basis, as if it were a ritual. In Jail 4 the prison officials encouraged the inmates to beat me with a rod while in Jail 2 the Officer beat me himself,” he wrote. He described facing sexual abuse. Once, he said, he was forced to have sexual intercourse with a co-accused, in public view. On other instances, inmates abused and raped him by putting a stick inside his anus, causing profuse bleeding. “I was a spectacle, abused and humiliated for sport,” he said. “Your Excellency I only ask you one question- have I not already been punished?”

Fear, of abuse, of beating, of being killed, consumed him, Mukesh said. Ten days before he wrote his petition to the President, Mukesh said, “I saw a shadow and was petrified that my assailants had come.” Sometimes, he was unsure if he was alert or hallucinating. “Your Excellency, I ask you again. Have I not been punished?”

*

On 31 January, I rode back with Ram Bai in an auto from Tihar. She told me that she was dependent on her son, Suresh, for bringing her to meet Mukesh. “Earlier I could go to Rajasthan alone, by myself, at night,” she said, “But now I need help getting anywhere.”

She had memorised the fares from her home in RK Puram to the Patiala House court, to Tihar Jail, and to the Saket Court. After we alighted from the auto, she insisted on paying for it. She took out a small wad of notes, and began discussing the appropriate fare with the driver.

Unable to help himself, the driver asked her, “Aap Mukesh ki maa ho?”—Are you Mukesh’s mother?

How do you know Mukesh, she asked. “We have heard on the news …” he said, trailing off.

Ram Bai sighed softly. “Yes, I am his mother,” she said. “Mukesh is my son.”