Disfigured Victim’s Plea to Die Exposes India’s Acid Violence
Disfigured Victim’s Plea to Die Exposes India’s Acid Violence
They came in the dead of night, broke into her home as she slept and poured a cocktail of acids over her face — burning her skin, melting her eyelids, nose, mouth and ears, and leaving her partially deaf and almost blind.
Her crime? She had spurned their sexual advances.
Nine years on, Sonali Mukherjee, 27, is appealing to the government for medical support for skin reconstructive surgery as well as tougher penalties on her three assailants, who were released on bail after only three years in prison.
Either that, she says, or authorities should give her the right to kill herself. Euthanasia is illegal in India.
“For the last nine years, I am suffering … living without hope, without future. If I don’t have justice or my health, my only way out is to die,” she says, sitting on a bed in a sparsely furnished room above a Sikh temple in south Delhi.
“I don’t want to live half a life, with half a face.”