Aruna Shanbaug, the former King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital nurse who was raped by one of the staff member of a hospital in which she was working as a nurse who has been lying in a vegetative state for the past 42 years, passed away at 9.40AM on Monday.
She was raped in the year 1973. Doctors at KEM Hospital said that she had been fighting pneumonia for the last six days. KEM Hospital Dean Dr Avinash Supe said Aruna was recently diagnosed with a pneumatic patch and put on ventilator support. She was diagnosed with the lung infection after a series of diagnostic tests. She was fed through tubes.
Aruna was a junior nurse at a hospital when she was 26 Years old brutally raped by contract sweeper Sohanlal B Walmiki on November 27, 1973 who was working in the same hospital. While raping Aruna, Sohanlal choked her with a dog leash that snapped oxygen supply to her brain, resulting in severe injuries to the brain stem and cervical chord that left her in the vegetative state.
Sohanlal Bharta Walmiki was subsequently arrested and convicted to serve two concurrent seven-year sentences. He was later set free and is believed to be settled in Delhi since. Aruna Shanbaug’s former teacher, Anant Gaitonde remembers her as “a very intelligent nursing student” in the early 1970s at the KEM Nursing College. Aruna was in the state of coma for the four decades from that day she was in vegetative state in the hospital and was taken care by the hospital.
Florence Nightingale Award in memory of Nurse Aruna Shanbaug.First awardees:Nursing staff of KEM Hospital – for 42 years of selfless care.
— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) May 18, 2015
In January 2011, the Supreme Court rejected a petition by author Pinki Virani to stop staff at the hospital where Shanbaug was cared for from force-feeding her. Virani also argued for legal euthanasia for Shanbaug. Though the Supreme Court turned down Virani’s petition in March 2011, in a landmark decision, it permitted ‘passive euthanisia’ in India. Virani had narrated the harrowing experience of Aruna in her 1998 non-fiction book called ‘Aruna’s Story’.