'The Fight Has Just Begun': Nirbhaya's lawyer Seema Kushwaha tells her side of the story

Over the last few months, India has witnessed two events that cannot be underplayed in the continued battle to rid the country of gruesome and heinous crimes against women. The shooting of self-confessed rapists in an encounter by the Hyderabad police after their horrific atrocity committed on a 27-year old veterinarian was the first. And the second - and perhaps biggest development in this regard - was the hanging of Nirbhaya's rapists in the wee hours of March 20. 

Many believed that it would never come to pass. It had been 7 years since the rapists perpetrated among the most depraved acts fathomable. And it had been years since they had been convicted and sentenced to die. But still, even as the wheels of justice inched ahead, day by day, petition by petition and appeal by appeal, hope would often find a way of diminishing.

There were many who still clung on to it, however, even as one of the rapists escaped the hangman by dying in jail and another was deemed juvenile at the time of the act and allowed freedom. Nirbhaya's parents fought for their daughter, turning the pursuit of justice into the sole reason for their being. And so did her lawyer, Seema Kushwaha, who was by Asha Devi's side for every court appearance, during every hint of progress, and for every setback, often breaking down herself while telling the ever-present swarm of cameras that they would soldier on.

Speaking to Humans of Bombay, Seema Kushwaha has shared her own part in the struggle, reaching far back into her own origins and upbringing as a girl born into a regressively patriarchal society, recounting her memories of those fateful last weeks of 2012 where she was present among the shocked crowds that prayed in vain for Nirbhaya to defy the odds and somehow overcome her grievous injuries, to March 20, when her opposing counsel knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court at midnight in a desperate final attempt to stall justice.

“The night before the hanging, while India slept -- I was in court. After trying his luck in the lower courts, AP Singh woke up the Supreme Court at 12:00 am in a last ditch attempt to save the convicts. An emergency session had been called," Kushwaha said, going on to detail the last of the 'delay tactics' that AP Singh could muster. Till that point, and especially in the weeks leading up to the eventual hanging, these 'delay tactics' had appeared to take an almost suffocating quality, so much so that even the Home Ministry had moved the Supreme Court to challenge the fundamental loophole of the rapists' attempts to forestall fate.

Kushwaha described it thusly: "AP Singh tried everything to delay the final execution. He drowned me in petitions–every time I won a round, there were 10 others that hadn’t even begun. He had found his loophole–the convicts had to be hung together or not at all. He could’ve filed petitions for all 4 of them together, but he filed each one after the previous one had been dismissed, prolonging the trial & our agony. It was a vicious cycle."

That night, in the Supreme Court, he even cited the Coronavirus outbreak as one of the reasons why his clients shouldn't be hanged. "I watched as he scrambled in front of the judges. He tried using old arguments, made baseless accusations and even tried to use COVID-19 as an excuse to delay the execution," Kushwaha said, adding, however, that this time she didn't need to fight back.

"The court was tired of his antics and saw through them. Finally, at 3 in the morning, the judge said, ‘It’s time for your clients to meet with God and you need to accept that AP Singh!’," she recounts.

A few hours later, when at 5:30 am the rapists were finally hanged in Tihar Jail, she says she cried along with Nirbhaya's parents. 

"We had finally won -- Nirbhaya’s soul could rest in peace. It’s strange... I’ve never even met her, but I felt attached to her as if she was my little sister. She could have grown up to do such amazing things for the world, had she survived," Kushwaha laments.

It was at the culmination of years worth of struggle against so many forces, from patriarchy and chauvinism, to inertia and the 'system', and to vile threats and abuse. 

"We fought for over 7 years, but we still have a long way to go, because the mentality is still the same. After they were hung, I began receiving threats on my social media handles. They abused me and said things like, ‘We’ll rape you worse than Nirbhaya’". But Kushwaha is not daunted. 

"I don’t care about those comments, but what pains me is that ever since, I’ve received over 500 messages from women -- some send me pictures of the FIRs they’ve filed to no avail and others tell me about how they’ve been raped, harassed or violated without any justice. I’m going to reach out to all of them to say, ‘Hum chodenge nahi unhe’. The fight has just begun," Seema Kushwaha declares.

Here is the entire set of posts by Humans of Bombay of their interview with Seema Kushwaha: