Delhi bus rapist: 'girls are more responsible for rape than boys'

Mukesh Singh, convicted in the December 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder that shook the nation, showed no remorse in a jailhouse interview for the BBC documentary India's Daughter — instead blaming the victim, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student who was attacked on a moving bus while returning home after watching Life of Pi.

"You can't clap with one hand — it takes two hands," Singh told filmmaker Leslee Udwin. "A decent girl won't roam around at nine o'clock at night. A girl is more responsible for rape than a boy... About 20 per cent of girls are good."

He went further, insisting boys and girls are not equal: "Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes." Singh was appealing his death sentence at the time.

Jyoti's father called the comments "perverse and derogatory," saying he hoped "these devils are hanged soon and not housed safely in jail." The interview ignited a firestorm in India — the government moved to ban the documentary's broadcast, a decision that itself became a global free-speech controversy.

Mukesh Singh's views are his own, and despicable. But in a country where reported rapes were then running at roughly one every 20 minutes, the interview forced an uncomfortable question about how many share the attitudes he voiced — and what it will take to change them.