IANS/Kolkata

A Kolkata court yesterday convicted three men of gang-raping an Anglo-Indian woman on Kolkata’s Park Street in 2012.
The woman - then 40 years old, a divorcee and mother of two - was beaten up and gang-raped at gun-point inside a moving car and then thrown off the vehicle near an intersection on the night of February 5, 2012, after she had come out of a night club on the fashionable Park Street.
She died in March this year of encephalitis.
Additional Sessions Judge Chiranjib Bhattacharya of the City Sessions Court will sentence Ruman Khan, Naser Khan and Sumit Bajaj today.
The three men were found guilty of gang-rape, criminal conspiracy, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation and common intention, under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code.
However, the main accused, Kader Khan and a co-accused Ali are still absconding.
The courageous and gutsy woman, who came forward and revealed her identity and even urged the world to call her a “rape survivor” and not as the “Park Street rape victim”, grittily fought her case for three years against heavy odds.
Days after she filed the complaint on February 9, 2012, ignoring disparaging comments and initial reluctance of Park Street police station personnel, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee called it a “cooked up case” and alleged that the woman was trying to malign the state government.
Banerjee’s remarks were widely criticised by the civil society and the public, but that was no end to the woman’s ordeal.
Trinamool MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar called the entire episode “a sex deal gone wrong”, while then minister Madan Mitra questioned what she was doing at a night club so late in the night and dubbed the rape allegation a “fabricated complaint meant to extort money”.
However, the rape survivor soldiered on and not only fought her case, but also took part in protest rallies against various incidents of rape.
Instead of cowering, she walked with her head held high, amid comparisons with the Delhi gang-rape victim, and the ‘bad victim versus good victim’ debate.
Unlike the Delhi gang-rape victim, the Park Street rape survivor had all the qualifications for being the proverbial bad girl.
She never finished college, was a smoker, used to drink and couldn’t hold on to a regular job.
But that didn’t deter her from living life to the fullest, a message she passed on to her two children.
Over the years, she almost became a symbol of women’s fight against atrocities, oppression and injustice.
In the 2014 edition of the Kolkata ‘slutwalk’, she had said: “We want a humane society where women are respected and not looked down upon.”
She did not live to see her moment of victory that coincided with the Human Rights Day. On March 13 this year, she died of multi-organ failure after being diagnosed with encephalitis.