The 23-year-old student who was gang-raped and savagely beaten on a bus in New Delhi, and later died in a Singaporean hospital from multiple organ failure, was cremated today in a private ceremony back in India. So far the government has yet to ‘name and shame’ the six men responsible, as it said it would, though the rapists are in custody and have reportedly been charged with murder. (Police say the men face the death penalty if convicted.) The public outcry has already reached the upper echelons of the Indian government; Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was even on hand to greet the young woman’s body as it arrived at New Delhi airport yesterday. Also at the airport was ruling party chief Sonia Gandhi, who said that the brutal attack on a woman, whose only ‘crime’ was being with a non-relative male friend, “deepens our determination to battle the pervasive, the shameful attitudes and mindsets that allow men to rape and molest women and girls with such an impunity.”
