News - Aruna, the nurse who stayed in vegetative state for 42 years passes away!

Aruna Shanbaug died aged 67 on Monday four decades after attack

She was sodomised and strangled with a dog chain by Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki, then 25, in November 1973 at KEM hospital in Mumbai

After doing his time in prison he was allowed to disappear while his victim lived the rest of her life often in howling pain bent double on a bed

Journalist Pinki Virani fought to get euthanasia legalised in India so Aruna could die and says she is 'relieved' now 'all the evil' is over for her 

It is the heartbreaking scandal which gripped India of a nurse who spent 42 years in a brain dead coma brought on after she was brutally raped and strangled with a dog chain.

Aruna Shanbaug finally passed away from pneumonia on Monday aged 67 more than four decades after the horrific night of November 27, 1973, when she was viciously attacked by a sweeper at the KEM hospital in Mumbai.

Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki wrapped the chain round Aruna's neck as he sodomised her in a vacant canine experiment room where she had gone to change.

After doing his time in prison he was allowed to change his name and disappear while his victim lived the rest of her life often in howling pain bent double on a bed. 

Journalist and author Pinki Virani took up Aruna's cause and managed to get euthanasia made legal in India in rare cases - though in a bitter irony, the Supreme Court denied Aruna had a right to have her life ended in its 2011 judgement.

In 2009 she published 'Aruna's Story' which brought the chilling tale of the nurse's plight to the world. 

Ms Virani told a magazine: ‘All the evil congregated around her. Everything bad that could possibly happen to different people happened to this one, five foot nothing, lovely girl. 

‘When the man, the sweeper, attacked her he used a dog chain. He was sodomising her at the time.

‘He pushed her down on all fours. In the twisting of the dog chain he cut off the blood to her brain and knocked out 90 per cent of its function – her sight, her speech, all her vital functions.

‘After she was attacked in the basement of the hospital he left her for dead with the chain around her neck and she was found that way the next morning.'

When Ms Virani was a young trainee reporter in Mumbai in the early 1980s her mother, to 'stop [her] from being irresponsible', told her what happened to Aruna as a 'cautionary tale'. 

‘I said "it’s bulls**t, how can anybody be like that?"' said Ms Virani. ‘I went to see her for myself and I went back, and I went back and I went back. 

‘She was pretty much catatonic all the time. Her head would flop up and down because she had lost control.

‘Her eyes slowly would open but they were unseeing.

‘There were some days when her head would loll from side to side when she was in some pain.

‘When she would menstruate she would just scream in pain.

‘There were days when she would just whimper; days when she would laugh manically and suddenly it would switch to howling manically.

‘I organized for her teeth to be looked at because they were rotting and falling out on the bed and she once swallowed one.

‘She hadn’t been treated properly in the area where she was sodomised.

‘She had bad malaria one time.

‘She hadn’t been a person since that night but in the last few years she was less and less and less there.' 

As well fighting to end Aruna's torment by getting the law changed, Ms Virani tried to track down the man responsible for leaving her in a permanent vegetative state. 

She found out Walmiki had not even been charged with rape to 'protect his victim's modesty' but had been convicted of attempted murder and robbery because he had stolen a watch and Aruna's earrings.

The then 25-year-old had apparently attacked her because she had accused him of stealing the food of the dogs used in medical experiments and threatened to report him 

Worse than that, after serving just seven years in prison Walmiki had apparently changed his name and moved to Delhi to work in another hospital.

Ms Virani said: 'The guy's photo wasn't on file anywhere. I was quite hysterical, I couldn't believe that such a man was walking the face of the earth.

'The police said "if we don't have a photo, what can we do?" And that was it.' 

Aruna, born in 1948 in the village of Haldipur in the southern state of Karnataka, was from a poor family who tried to get some compensation for what had happened to her.

They couldn't support her themselves and after a time, according to Ms Virani, family members who came to visit her in hospital were simply told to 'go away' by staff. 

'My feelings are not mixed at all, I’m very relieved', she said. ‘There is no point in pretending I’m sad for Aruna. 

'She is no longer in pain. It is pain she has endured since that night in November 1973. If there is a hell, she was in it.' 

Hundreds gathered to bid a tearful farewell to Aruna on Monday during her funeral at the Bhoiwada Crematorium in south Mumbai, according to Mid Day. 

The dean of KEM hospital and Aruna's nephew together lit the funeral pyre.

Dozens of grieving nurses, including many who had personally cared for her, joined the procession to the funeral venue.

Prior to the funeral, her body was kept for public viewing as thousands of nurses, political leaders, commoners and others paid homage to her.

India's rural development minister Pankaja Munde visited the hospital and paid tribute to Aruna.

And Maharashtra governor C Vidyasagar Rao said: 'The news of the demise of Aruna Shanbaug is extremely painful. One feels as if one has lost a family member. 

'The incident of the brutal attack on Aruna Shanbaug that forced her to live in a vegetative state for all these years was heart wrenching for the entire society. May her soul rest in eternal peace.'