NEW DELHI, Jan 4: In a damning evidence against Delhi’s less advertised but notoriously self-absorbed callousness, the male friend of the unnamed 23-year-old paramedical student who was gang-raped here on Dec 16, said on Friday that no-one came forward to help them for nearly an hour — not the people, not the police — though vehicles stopped to watch the two bleeding in their unspeakable state under a busy flyover.

The male friend of the woman who was beaten mercilessly when he tried to defend her against the six allegedly drunk men and who, like her, has not been named, told Zeenews TV channel that three police cars that converged at the spot where they lay bleeding haggled with each other for 30 potentially crucial minutes over which of the police districts the case belonged to.

“Instead of taking us to any of the nearby hospitals, they kept meandering through the city to eventually admit us in distant hospital...There, I remember shivering and pleading the hospital staff to give us something, even a curtain to protect from the cold. They looked away for as long as they could.”

The bus in which the two were assaulted tried to crush them to death when they were thrown out in the freezing cold after the 45-minute ordeal through packed lanes in Delhi, the bespectacled man who looked in his 20s and who had one leg in plaster, said. He spoke clearly and slowly in the interview with Zeenews.

“You asked me what would I suggest to bring about a change in the way we were treated,” the man told his questioner in Hindi. “I believe that had even one person been ready to intervene, the whole picture might have been different. We need to introspect.”

That was the most important message his dead friend would have wanted to send out, he said. “No one came forward to help us though several vehicles stopped to watch our trauma…Three police vans came to the spot but instead of rushing us to hospital they spent 30 minutes fighting over whose territory the incident had occurred in.”

There have been demands to identify the woman and even name a new supposedly more effective law against rape being considered after her. Her friend said she would have been happy if the future was made secure for Indian women.

“Incidents are still happening. Little seems to have changed. I believe the nationwide campaign (against sexual harassment of women) needs to continue till real change comes about — both within us, and in the system at large.”