The trial in the gruesome gang rape of a five-year-old girl in Delhi in April 2013, which was overshadowed by the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case that had happened just four months before it, came to an end on Saturday when a Delhi court convicted two persons for the crime.
While in the Nirbhaya case, a trial court convicted and awarded the death penalty to the convicts in 10 months, it took six years, seven judges and 57 prosecution witnesses to complete the trial in the 2013 case.
Advocates Anand Kumar and Virendra Verma, counsel for the rape survivor and her family, said the trial in the case was not fast-tracked, was not held on a day-to-day basis and saw multiple glitches.
The girl's father, however, expressed satisfaction on finally getting justice for his daughter. "Though the trial should have been completed in two years, we are happy we got justice after six years."
"My wife is at home with my daughter. When I was leaving home this morning, she asked if I was going to court for our child and prayed for justice. We are not going to tell our daughter why we were here. She has almost forgotten the incident. We don't want to make her remember the trauma she had to go through. It is best she is not told anything about the case or the judgment," he said.
He added he wished for death penalty for the convicts.
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Additional Sessions Judge Naresh Kumar Malhotra on Saturday convicted Manoj Shah and Pradeep Kumar for raping the girl in east Delhi's Gandhi Nagar. The court fixed January 30 for arguments on the quantum of sentence to be given to Shah and Kumar.
The convicts had fled after the crime, leaving the girl at Shah's room believing she was dead but the child was rescued 40 hours later.
She had received serious injuries and doctors found three candles and a hair-oil bottle shoved into her private parts. She underwent several surgeries at the AIIMS hospital.
As it happened even before people could recover from the shock of the December 2012 Nirbhaya case, it triggered massive protests in the national capital and the public anger spilled onto the streets.
Students and women staged demonstrations at India Gate, Police Headquarters and near the residences of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Holding placards, people also gathered at AIIMS, where the girl was undergoing treatment, and burnt the effigy of then Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar and demanded that he be sacked.
Prime Minister Singh said collective efforts were needed to root out such "depravity" from society. "The gruesome assault on a little child a few days back reminds us of the need to work collectively to root out this sort of depravity from our society," he said.
Unlike the Nirbhaya case where the rape survivor's family got help from political parties, this case was forgotten by the public soon.
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