Meet Mumbai’s Devika N. Rotawan, 8-year-old girl who helped seal Ajmal Kasab’s fate
It was considered the most clinching evidence in the entire trial of the Mumbai terror strikes of November 26, 2008 that ensured the noose for the sole surviving terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kasab, of the 10 who wreaked unprecedented mayhem in the country’s commercial capital for nearly 60 hours. The testimony was provided by a minor Mumbai girl Devika N. Rotawan, 8, (then) — who took a bullet in the leg when Kasab and his associate opened fire inside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus building that fateful night.
She, along with her father Natwarlal, was waiting to catch a train to Pune to meet her brother Bharat, 33.
“Suddenly, we heard some gunshots and loud booming sounds, people shrieking, crying, running helter-skelter. We were caught in the melee and the complete chaos… As we tried to escape, I stumbled, felt a numbing pain and blood oozing from my leg… I realized that I had been shot. I collapsed and was unconscious till the next day,” Devika, now 21, said recalling the chilling night of horror at the terminus.
Somehow, she was rushed to the Sir J.J. Hospital nearby where the next day, she underwent surgery to remove the AK-47 bullet lodged in her right leg.
Over the next six months, there were other surgeries on her leg and in the following three years it came to 6 operations which finally made her mobile and independent. “She was very small… I lost my wife Sarika in 2006, and have two other sons. We cared for her despite great odds and little help coming for her education or future,” Natwarlal Rotawan told IANS.
“Those three years were bad I initially shifted to my native Sumerpur village in Pali district (Rajasthan) where my father, brothers and other relatives cared for me. Soon, we had to return for the court cases,” Devika said.
Both daughter and father were not only the survivors of the 26/11 strikes but also the prime prosecution witnesses and it was finally their clinching evidence in their court sojourns in June 2009, that hammered the proverbial last nail in Kasab’s coffin’.
After exhausting all legal remedies under the Indian judicial system, Kasab was hanged (Nov. 21, 2012), but Devika had sacrificed her bubbly childhood, adolescence and next month will turn a 22-year-old woman, but still struggling on all fronts.
She somehow managed to complete her schooling from IES New English High School, Bandra East, limped her way to complete HSC from Siddharth College, Churchgate and is now pursuing her FYBA from Chetana College in Bandra.