The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

The men started shouting at him.

  Not once in his three-decade-long career had Ganga Singh faced such a situation. The decision – whether it came from the family or evolved out of public anger, he didn’t know then – startled him. Then the chaos of voices started to make sense. Let the district magistrate come! Call the chief minister! Where’s the prime minister? The crowd insisted that the most powerful people in the country see them.

  The Shakya women had put the lessons that everyone had learned in the aftermath of the Delhi bus rape to the test. By refusing to let the police touch their children, they had expressed their protest. Their family and friends built on this strategy. The police, they said, acted like they were the kings of Katra. And until yesterday that’s how they had been treated. But they were actually useless. They couldn’t be trusted to solve the disappearance of a goat. ‘If we bring down the bodies,’ a family member said, ‘the matter will end in the village.’ They would wait for the politicians to arrive.

  And with this, the Shakya family demonstrated their keen understanding of how India functions. The wheels of justice move only under pressure from the powerful.

  Ganga Singh sighed and called for reinforcements.

  The First Politician Arrives

  The first politician to reach the village on 28 May, between 8.30 and 8.45 a.m., was a man who had no real reason to be there.

  Bhagwan Singh didn’t represent Katra. He probably had to feed the address into his GPS. But he was a Shakya, which was why he’d been asked to come by friends of the family. The stout man with the tepee-shaped moustache didn’t warrant the villagers’ trust. The one time he had made the news was for harbouring a fugitive wanted for kidnap and murder. ‘He ran into my house,’ he had told the police, expecting them to believe him.34

  He was also an infamous ‘party-hopper’– someone who changed political parties often, and for whom principles were secondary to opportunity. The sometimes this, sometimes that man was now roosting with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

  Ganga Singh’s reinforcements had arrived and Katra village was brimming with testosterone and khaki. Like the farmers, the constables in flak jackets and bowl-shaped helmets carried heavy bamboo sticks in their hands. Unlike the farmers, they weren’t permitted anywhere near the girls. The crowd jeered and heckled. Stripped of what little power they had, the police remained apprehensive and unsure of their authority.

  The first person to approach the political arrival was Mukesh Kumar Saxena, a sixty-year-old circle officer in charge of several police stations. Like some of the men who would show up that day, Saxena had a reputation. He was said to be a ‘darpok type’, a timid man who craved neither attention nor much more responsibility, but kept his thoughts firmly on the time when he would collect his pension. He had been so intimidated by the crowd in the orchard that he had parked his car at a petrol pump several kilometres from the village. Then he had phoned a subordinate officer to demand an escort in.

  Saxena walked the politician to a chair placed for him under a leafy tree. Bhagwan Singh pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the beads of sweat rolling from his face. Then he waited for his supplicants.

  The Shakyas had other plans.

  After the initial shock, the family had split along the usual lines, defined by social decorum. Lalli’s father, Sohan Lal, didn’t seek out his wife. Whatever their relationship was in private, in public they followed the rules – and he didn’t give her a second glance now. From this point on, the family would act as one, and Sohan Lal would tell them what to do.

  He wasn’t really much of a talker, but he may have been held back by his lisp. His tongue sometimes protruded when he spoke, and when this happened, he smiled shyly, folding his hands together to show just how sorry he was. But as the patriarch of the family he was used to telling people what to do. And he was stubborn. Everyone in the village knew this about him, although they didn’t think that he would stand up to the police. They were wrong.

  Maan Singh Chauhan was the highest-ranking officer present that day. The superintendent of police was well educated, with a master’s degree in history. He spoke several languages and came across impressively in interviews to news channels. A sinewy man in his fifties, with rimless glasses and a khaki cap pulled down his receding hairline, he had observed the Shakya men from afar. Now he approached Lalli’s father.

  Rather than focusing on the potential criminal aspect of the deaths, as most were doing, Chauhan talked about the girls. He called Padma and Lalli ‘bachiyon’, little children, and offered his condolences. It was a terrible thing, he said, with a regretful expression.

  A muscular firmness then entered his voice.

  ‘It is time to take down the bodies.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Sohan Lal said. ‘Sorry, so sorry.’ He folded his hands in an apologetic namaskar.

  The officer was taken aback. He wasn’t some incompetent chowki policeman, or even poor Ganga Singh of whom it was said, ‘where Ganga goes scandal follows’. He was a top-ranking officer. He expected people to do as he said, and he had even asked politely.

  ‘Look,’ Sohan Lal told him, ‘even if I give the go-ahead, the crowd is worked up. They will stop you.’

  Chauhan then instructed his deputy to make it clear that they were nothing like the chowki policemen. ‘We’re not here to shield anyone,’ his deputy boomed into a megaphone.

  The crowd murmured with discontent.

  Chauhan’s face compressed into a grimace. ‘Where was the honour in keeping the girls hanging?’ he would later say. ‘It was a disgraceful thing.’ He called for a chair and sat next to Bhagwan Singh at the edge of the orchard like a guest waiting to be invited in.

  The politician interpreted the Shakya family’s position differently. They were simpletons. It was one thing to blame the police; it was another to antagonise them openly. It was his duty, he believed, to teach the brothers how to behave, to show them how to survive. ‘Hum tumhare saat hai,’ he said. I’m with you. ‘I’ll ensure justice.’ He urged them to allow the police to remove the bodies and even promised to supervise the process.

  At first it appeared as though he was getting through. When he grunted up from the chair and moved towards the laden mango tree, the police cautiously followed. Then Sohan Lal changed his mind.

  ‘Stop!’ he called frantically. ‘Stop!’

  The police switched tactics, using the relatable matter of honour to coerce him. ‘You asked Bhagwan Singh for help,’ they said. ‘You made him come all the way to the village. Now you won’t listen to him. Aren’t you offending his honour?’

  ‘In this way,’ Ganga Singh later said, ‘we tried to apply pressure on him. It didn’t make any difference.’ He laughed with admiration.

  With even this latest lot of officers stripped of authority, the orchard became a virtual free-for-all; contaminated by more than a hundred people in just the first few hours of the day.35 The spectators tramped in and out. They ate, smoked, spat tobacco, and later at night, some squatted.

  34 ‘He ran into my house’: archive.indianexpress.com/news/cong-leader-in-dock-for--sheltering--wanted-man/1012833/

  35 contaminated by more than a hundred people: youtube.com/watch?v=IvnTluEriQs

  The Matter Should Be Settled

  At lunchtime, some of the crowd started to eat their dal and roti, their appetite not spoiled by the sight of the dangling corpses. Constables yawned. A group of men sitting at the feet of the politician gossiped about the upcoming local elections. Then Lalli’s elder brother Virender arrived from Noida, took one look at the bodies and fainted.

  Chauhan, the superintendent of police, was still working out how to remove the bodies. It was the right course of action.

  Speaking to the family hadn’t worked; appealing to the crowd made no difference. He wasn’t above delivering a few cracking slaps. Later, he would be caught on camera striking rul
e-breaking motorcyclists across their faces.36 But in a situation where onlookers outnumbered his men, he wasn’t about to start a riot.

  He leaned back.

  Five years earlier, when he was posted to the city of Aligarh, his men discovered about a hundred skulls and other human remains languishing at the bottom of a pond. The officer tracked this discovery to a state-run mortuary whose doctors couldn’t be bothered to dispose of unclaimed bodies responsibly.37

  The year after that, in 2010, a professor of literature at the renowned Aligarh Muslim University was secretly filmed having sex with a rickshaw puller. The crew from the local television station who did the filming kept recording even once they were discovered. They went so far as to ask the professor, ‘Aap sharminda hain?’ Are you ashamed? Over and over again, the man pleaded, ‘Haan, main sharminda hoon. Ab mujhe jaane dijiye.’ Yes, I am ashamed. Now, please leave me alone.38

  The video was widely circulated on the conservative college campus and the publicly humiliated professor was outed. Then he was suspended on grounds of misconduct. The suspension was revoked but less than two months later, the professor was found dead in his flat. After the death was ruled suicide by poison, Chauhan considered the matter settled. He let go the people who had illegally filmed the professor and triggered the sequence of events that had led to his death.

  What the policeman now wanted was for this case to follow something along those lines. The girls were dead. The matter should be settled.

  The politician Bhagwan Singh was also stirring with annoyance. It wasn’t the scene in the orchard that was on his mind, although he was put off by Virender taking pictures of his dead sister with his mobile phone. It had been hours since he’d arrived, and the Shakyas were still ignoring him. He didn’t understand what he had done to cause offence but he didn’t want to look a fool.

  By 12.30 p.m. the politician was overheated, out of patience, and covered in a thin film of dust. Grunting his goodbyes, he heaved back out through the fields and drove off. Already, his mind was on other matters.

  36 striking rule-breaking motorcyclists: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/meerut/outgoing-meerut-sp-caught-in-video-beating-commuters-protesters-at-demolition/articleshow/63886903.cms

  37 a state-run mortuary: edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/25/india.skulls/?iref=nextin

  38 Now, please leave me alone: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/agra/Five-years-after-gay-AMU-profs-death-lover-breaks-silence-on-affair/articleshow/50224046.cms

  Someone to Solve Their Problems

  It wasn’t the politician; it was the party. Bhagwan Singh was a low-caste Shakya, but he belonged to a party that favoured upper-caste people. The Shakya family had no illusions of where they stood on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s list of priorities.

  The new prime minister, Narendra Modi, was the first national leader to use social networks rather than mainstream media to express his views. On Twitter, his followers numbered upwards of 45 million. He tweeted incessantly. As part of his agenda to position himself as a global leader, in keeping with the destiny he promised India, he also tweeted at heads of state. He expressed condolences when disasters took lives in other countries. And he wished celebrities – in Bollywood and beyond – a happy birthday.

  The Katra hangings were the most high-profile crime to take place in India since Modi had come to power just days earlier. It was natural to assume that he would reach out to the Shakyas on his favourite social media platform.

  On 28 May, however, when the hangings made the news, Modi tweeted about Vinayak Savarkar, the early twentieth-century Hindu supremacist who had been in thrall to Hitler. An associate of his, named Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who was inspired by Savarkar’s view that Gandhi was responsible for the Partition of India because he had a soft spot for minorities, had shot the Mahatma at point-blank range. Savarkar was also arrested, but subsequently acquitted, for his role in the plot to kill Gandhi.

  Hindu nationalists like Modi admired Savarkar. Like their hero, they too viewed secularism as inimical to their idea of India.39 They wanted to transform secular India, by whatever means necessary, into a Hindu state. In his tweets, Modi rehabilitated Savarkar as ‘a prolific writer, thinker, poet & a social reformer’.40

  The Shakyas hadn’t voted for Modi’s party. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe his promise of ‘achhe din’, good days. They just didn’t think it extended to people like them. The upper castes had mistreated them for so long that even Modi, the son of a tea vendor, who belonged to a low caste, was seen as lacking moral authority because of the people he worked with. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party marginalised groups were subject to increased discrimination and violence. ‘Some senior BJP leaders publicly supported perpetrators of such crimes, made inflammatory speeches against minority communities, and promoted Hindu supremacy and ultra-nationalism, which encouraged further violence,’ said Human Rights Watch.41

  Across India, but particularly in caste-ridden Uttar Pradesh, it was said, people didn’t ‘cast their vote, they voted their caste’. The Shakya family voted with religious enthusiasm – in elections for the farmers’ union, the village council, the legislative assembly and Lok Sabha, the House of the People – and they always followed the same principle. Their clan was large, with around 300 people, of which 70 adults were eligible to vote. This number made them a voting bloc, and they voted as such.

  Shakya politicians courted them and sometimes the family even put forward their own candidates. In the last election for village head an uncle had lost, and the winner – who had secured the appointment by a mere forty votes – punished the family by uprooting some electricity wires in the vicinity of their home. (The wires weren’t for their use; the new village head was simply making a point.)

  Overall, the Shakya family’s allegiance was with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and their national president, Mayawati Prabhu Das, the only politician in whom they saw themselves. Mayawati, who used one name, wasn’t a Shakya; she was Dalit. Her father was a clerk in the postal system and her mother couldn’t read.

  Even now, violence against Dalits – once classified as so polluting they were treated as outcasts and declared ‘untouchable’ – was widespread. This violence was in fact a systematic attempt by some upper-caste groups to maintain status and power.

  In the same year as the hangings, a Dalit boy was lynched for talking to an upper-caste girl,42 while another was set on fire for letting his goats stray into land owned by an upper-caste family.43 A Dalit woman was accused of being a witch and force-fed faeces.44 And these were not isolated incidents.

  And yet, Mayawati was such a singular individual that she had become chief minister of the state four times.

  Opposition leaders alleged that she spent a disproportionate amount of this time settling scores.45 And she had actively pursued financial gain, even raffling election tickets to the highest bidder. The going rate, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, was ‘roughly $250,000’.46 The cables claimed that as chief minister Mayawati had nine cooks, two food tasters and once sent her private jet to Mumbai to buy her preferred brand of sandals. She denied the claims.47 The state, meanwhile, slid deeper into a development black hole.

  So what if she was corrupt, her loyalists said, she was a politician. As a Dalit and a woman, she was simply scrutinised more than all her male, upper-caste colleagues put together.

  The Shakyas’ love for Mayawati actually went beyond a feeling of identification. As chief minister she passed an informal order that her voters would never forget. She insisted that police stations register complaints by lower-caste people as soon as they were received. This was obviously a basic right, and she wasn’t doing anyone a favour. But like the idea of a Dalit wielding power, the idea of fairness was such a foreign thing in these parts, it was startling to behold and impossible to forget. Investigations, when they took place, were hardly less shoddy
, and incidents of crime remained high, but the memory of this tiny correction burned like a fire in the hearts of the people who benefited from it.

  In 2007, when Mayawati’s partyman Sinod Kumar, then only thirty years old, stood for election in Budaun’s Dataganj assembly constituency, where Katra was located, it was inevitable that he would win. He had her blessings after all.

  There was low literacy in Budaun especially among women, only 40 per cent of whom were literate.48Around the same percentage of women were also married before the age of eighteen. The new mothers were often anaemic, a condition linked to poverty and poor sanitation, and so were their children, only slightly over half of whom were fully immunised. While Dataganj was electrified in 196049 – on paper, certainly – in 2014 Katra still had areas of darkness. The majority of households in the village practised open defecation.

  These were staggering problems, but there is no indication to suggest that Sinod Kumar even attempted to make a dent in them. The villagers’ one link to the state machinery didn’t speak up on their behalf in the legislative assembly. He didn’t alert the media to the problems that overwhelmed them.

  Furthermore, while his constituents remained poor, his fortunes soared. In 2007, he declared total assets worth 9 lakh rupees.50 By 2012, his assets had grown considerably. He was now worth 3 crore rupees.51 And yet, when he stood for re-election that year, he won handily.

  Sinod Kumar’s success came down to the practice of small corrections, a trick he’d picked up from his boss.

  India’s often fabulously rich politicians were far removed from the poor people they represented – but the government was linked to this same group, certainly in rural areas, via the enormous tentacles of an endless number of state programmes that provided education, employment and food. Despite their promise, these institutions weren’t always able or even willing to serve everyone fairly. It helped to have someone with pull to nudge them along.