Aruna Shanbaug: Brain-damaged India nurse dies 42 years after rape

An Indian nurse who spent 42 years in a persistent vegetative state after being raped and strangled has died.
Aruna Shanbaug was left with severe brain damage and paralysed after the 1973 attack by a ward attendant in the Mumbai hospital where she worked.
She was fed through the nose to keep her alive but developed pneumonia six days ago, the hospital told the BBC.
Her case sparked a debate about India’s euthanasia laws. The Supreme Court had rejected a plea to allow her to die.
“Ms Shanbaug died at 08:30am on Monday. She was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on ventilator support,” a spokesman at Mumbai’s KEM hospital said.
The nurse was 25 years old when she was sodomised by a KEM hospital cleaner who strangled her with metal chains and left her to die on 27 November 1973.
She survived, but spent the rest of her life in hospital, force fed twice a day.
“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.

There is an outpouring of sympathy for Aruna Shanbaug on Twitter. Many feel that she “should have been allowed to go much earlier”. Most Twitter users also agree that the absence of the “right to die” in India’s legal system compounded her misery.
One Twitter user says Shanbaug’s case “represents everything that is wrong with India’s society”.
Others highlight that she was brutally raped and then had to live in a vegetative state for 42 years because several campaigns in support of euthanasia “just fell on deaf ears”.
Some say that her ordeal “will always shame India”, while others are hopeful that her story will once again reignite the debate on euthanasia.
“Have mostly been ambivalent about euthanasia. But Aruna Shanbaug’s case makes me want to take a stand. Misery should not last four decades,” this tweet very much sums up the impact her story is likely to have on India’s thinking on “right to die”.