India, April 2 -- A 22-year-old woman was slapped, punched and kicked before being dumped by the roadside in Assam's Sribhumi after she fought off two men who tried to sexually assault her in a private bus, her father said on Wednesday.

The woman, a graduate studying to be a civil servant, told her family that she boarded the orange-coloured private bus to return home from Badarpur on Tuesday afternoon but tried to get off moments later because she felt unsafe. There were hardly any other passengers in the bus.

But they didn't let her, said her father.

"They tried to rape her and when she confronted, they started beating her. She was slapped, punched and kicked by the two men in the moving bus. They tried to strangle her and threw her ...