MUMBAI (Web Desk) – Aruna Shanbaug, an Indian nurse who was in a vegetative state for 42 years after being raped by a hospital ward attendant while on duty has died. She was 68.
Aruna Shanbaug was left with severe brain damage and paralysed after her rape in a Mumbai hospital in 1973. She was kept alive by being fed through her nose but developed pneumonia six days ago, a hospital spokesman told the BBC.
Ms Shanbaug was in the Intensive Care Unit of Mumbai’s state-run King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital. Doctors had said a few days ago that Ms Shanbaug was suffering from pneumonia and was on ventilator support.
She was 26 years old and a junior nurse at the hospital when Ms Shanbaug was brutally assaulted and raped by a ward boy and cleaner named Sohanlal Bharta Valmiki, who she had scolded for stealing food that was meant for stray animals adopted by the hospital.
She had just finished her shift, and was in the basement of the hospital changing before leaving for home. Her attacker had been lying in wait. He sodomised her and then strangled her with a dog chain, cutting supply of oxygen to her brain, which resulted in irreversible damage.
She was discovered in the basement 11 hours after she was attacked, blinded and paralysed and with the iron chain around her neck.
From that day on, Aruna became a resident of the hospital. So thorough was the care she got over the four decades that she was bed-ridden, that Ms Shanbaug did not get bed sores, a fact noted by the Supreme Court in its landmark judgement of 2011, rejecting a petition to stop force feeding her.
Her case sparked a debate in India about its euthanasia laws.
”I was associated with her care for almost 10 years when I was working for KEM. Nurses would clean, feed, change her clothes, not mechanically. They would talk her… While trying to clean her mouth, by chance she would bite a finger,” recalls Dr Pragna Pai, former Dean at KEM Hospital.
Aruna, she said, loved fish and mangoes.
The petition by author Pinky Virani, who wrote the book ‘Aruna’s Story,’ to stop force-feeding her sparked a national debate on euthanasia. Former and present staff members and nurses at KEM Hospital strongly opposed it.
They were the family that Aruna had no more. As she lay in hospital without sight or memory or even the ability to move, her family abandoned her. All but an older sister, Shanta Nayak, who too could not sustain visits to the hospital as the years went by.
“Ms Shanbaug died at 08:30am on Monday. She was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on ventilator support,” a spokesman at Mumabi’s KEM hospital said.
“My broken, battered baby bird finally flew away. And she gave India a passive euthanasia law before doing so,” journalist and author Pinki Virani, who wrote Aruna’s Story, a book on the nurse’s plight, told the BBC.
