Before she was gangraped aboard a moving bus on December 16, the 23-year-old woman had just watched The Life of Pi. In the film, a young boy and a tiger overcome their innate hostility and “comfort each other”, while enduring starvation and thirst. But hours later, the film possibly still “etched in her mind”, she was preyed upon by six men possessed by “satanic beastliness”, the Delhi High Court said on Thursday, while upholding the death sentence for the four convicts in the case. The bench of Justices Reva Khetrapal and Pratibha Rani noted that the 23-year-old was returning home with her friend after watching the film that explores, “how a young boy and a carnivorous (tiger) comfort each other in adversity and despite both being hungry and nothing available for their survival, did not harm each other. must be etched in her mind.” Unlike the tiger and the young boy, the convicts were neither hungry nor starving. Their crime, the court noted, “was not committed to alleviate poverty or the pangs of hunger and starvation”. Instead, the bench said, their only motivations were “debauchery, avarice, profligacy and viciousness”. According to the bench, the sheer brutality of the gangrape that followed wasn’t “worthy of human condonation”. Her internal organs were “pulled out with bare hands coupled with the twisting of iron rods through every orifice in her body”. The court said in the woman and her friend, the convicts had found “easy prey”. They lured them, “pretending to be ferrying passengers”. They boarded the bus hoping for a “comfortable journey at an affordable fare”, not realising “what destiny had in store for them”. Stating that if this case - where the distinction between man and beast fades away — “is not the rarest of rare cases, there is likely to be none”, the court concluded by saying that “a strong message needs sent to the perpetrators of grotesque and ghastly crimes against women that such crimes shall not be countenanced”.
