NEW DELHI — India’s Supreme Court upheld on Friday the death sentence for four men who were found guilty of raping and disemboweling a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in 2012, a crime that came to embody the menace lurking in India’s sprawling, chaotic cities.

The decision was unusual. While Indian trial courts aggressively impose death sentences, 95 percent of them have been overturned or commuted by higher courts in recent years, a recent study showed, typically in consideration of “mitigating circumstances” like slipshod investigations or the potential of the accused to be rehabilitated.

The “Delhi gang rape,” as it came to be known, riveted the public from the start, setting off street protests and months of play-by-play coverage.

The 23-year-old, Jyoti Singh Pandey — dubbed “Nirbhaya,” or “fearless,” by Indian journalists — was a kind of avatar of aspirational India. Her father, who earns around $200 a month as an airport baggage handler, had sold family land to pay for her training as a physiologist. Sometimes, he called her “beta,” the Hindi word for “son.”