The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  The officer was implying that Padma had been killed by her own family – that the reason for the murder wasn’t honour, as some believed, but to stop her inheritance from being transferred out of the family to the family of her future husband, whoever that may be.

  In 2005, when Padma was seven years old, the Hindu Succession Act was amended to give women the right, among other things, to inherit agricultural property from their parents and husband.112 But the law was one thing, and people’s lived experiences were another – the officer should have known this. As far as the villagers of Katra were concerned, land stayed in the bloodline. And to them the bloodline wasn’t represented by daughters, but by sons. Every woman in the village worked on the land but not a single one owned a piece of it. Across India, the situation was similarly lopsided in favour of sons.

  A 2013 report published by UN Women and the land rights advocacy group Landesa showed that despite the legal amendment, only 13 per cent of women surveyed in three large states inherited or hoped to inherit their parents’ land.113 Women were likely to inherit more land as widows, the report concluded, than as daughters.

  Jeevan Lal still hoped to have a boy. And if he didn’t, he would reach an understanding with his brothers. They had sons. No matter what, it was highly unlikely that Padma would have inherited his property.

  The investigation continued, and now the police brought in a forensic team. Several days had passed since the bodies had first been discovered, and it’s unclear what they hoped to find in an area that was being treated as a tourist attraction by people from far and wide. The police also put in a request for call-detail records of numerous villagers and the officers involved in the night’s events.

  When the Shakya family disclosed fears of facing retaliation from the Yadavs in Jati hamlet, the police sent over armed guards to protect them. One gun-toting officer was always by Nazru’s side, even when the young man resumed his night-time wanderings.

  Then the state government promised to run the case through a ‘fast-track’ court. Fast-track courts have existed in India since the early 2000s to expedite cases – more than 1,000 fast-track courts have disposed of more than 3 million cases in this way.114 In 2011 the courts were dissolved due to funding shortages, and then hastily revived in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi rape;115 six courts sprang up in the capital to deal with sexual assaults and nothing else. When rape cases went the usual route, the result could be devastating. In one instance, a teenager gang-raped in a car made more than three dozen court appearances, enduring not one, not two, but six trials.116 It took the court eleven years to deliver a verdict.

  More courts meant more judges, but here too lay a problem.

  The 120th report of the Law Commission in 1987 had recommended a judge-population ratio of at least 50 per million, which was the standard in developed countries.117 In 2010, there were still only 10.5 judges per million and 31.28 million cases pending across the country’s courts.118 A High Court judge guessed that it would take 320 years to clear the backlog.119

  Then, on 6 June, the state government announced a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to work the case. These highly trained officers could only be appointed by the Supreme Court, or by the state and central government. They were assigned investigations that were considered too complicated or sensitive for the local police – deadly riots, for example. They also investigated the role of influential people or public servants in crimes. Bypassing the usual protocols, they handed their findings directly to the court.

  With this latest gesture, the state government sent the message that they really did want justice served. But by then, they had already lost the trust of the villagers.

  Mukesh Kumar Saxena, the fearful circle officer who had asked to be escorted into the mango orchard on the day the girls were found, was appointed the head of the SIT. There had been allegations in recent years that SITs were open to political influence.120 To the villagers, Saxena’s nervy behaviour was confirmation of this.

  An officer who was a part of the SIT recalled that the first time he met the Shakya family, they declined to speak to him. They even refused to share their phone numbers. When he met them a second time, they told him to come back again. He faced similar resistance from the other villagers, virtually all of whom refused to answer his questions. It was utterly humiliating.

  By the end of day two, just one person – a neighbour of the family – gave a statement. On day three, another man spoke up. But when the officer asked Nazru to speak to a sketch artist, the Shakyas’ cousin refused. He was the one who had implicated Pappu in the girls’ disappearance, but now he insisted, ‘I didn’t see [the suspects’] faces; I can’t tell you what they looked like.’ This was such a blatant lie that the officer didn’t ask the question again.

  By rebuffing virtually all overtures of help, the family made it clear that they believed the system was flawed because of the Yadavs. A newspaper investigation had just revealed that in major districts of the state, ‘particularly those under the influence of the ruling family’, Yadav officers headed nearly 60 per cent of police stations.121 In the state capital of Lucknow, where Akhilesh lived, over 50 per cent of all station officers were Yadavs. And in Budaun, the district where Katra was located, this was true of sixteen out of twenty-two police stations. This included the station in Ushait, where Pappu Yadav was taken on the morning the girls were found.

  The Shakya family took such stories as further proof of the state’s complicity in covering up crimes. They refused to engage with the police investigation, and by extension, with the government. If they had something to say they said it to the TV cameras that continued to buzz around them as if they were on a reality show.

  The chief minister still hadn’t spoken to the family, not even over the phone. He spoke of them, obliquely, like he could have been talking about anyone at all. The bizarre stand-off, in which one of the most powerful men in India seemed to be fighting a family that represented some of the poorest people in India, came to be seen as a David-and-Goliath situation.

  Almost everyone, of course, wanted David – the Shakyas – to win.

  But perhaps the real reason the family now despised the chief minister was because of his failure to address the tragedy in human terms. This was true of most politicians, but Akhilesh Yadav had refused to even look them in the face. He acted as though the hangings were a problem for him. By throwing more police, experts and committees at the case he had hoped to make the problem go away.

  But the death of a child wasn’t a problem. It was a catastrophe. It could not be fixed, it could not be undone and it should not be forgotten. This is what the Shakyas believed.

  What the Shakyas wanted was for the chief minister to address their loss. They had lost children! Why wouldn’t he just come out and say so? Was it because he believed that, as Shakyas, they felt things differently? Was it, as Siya Devi had said as she wept upon seeing the hanging body of her daughter, that the children of the poor mean nothing to the rich, to the powerful?

  But as Siya Devi could have told the chief minister, her daughter had meant something. To her mother, she was everything. Lalli was her mother’s whole heart.

  And although the police were working hard, they still weren’t getting it right. One of the suspects, former Constable Sarvesh, managed to run away, taking with him two others. They were brought back in a few hours from a bus stop, from where they had been hoping to flee the state. The fact that the police had let three suspects in a major case escape on their watch showed just how little could be expected of them – even at their best.

  It was in this environment that talk of bringing in the country’s top investigators gained traction.

  109 accused of gang rape, murder and criminal conspiracy: hindustantimes.com/india/Budaun-gang-rape- case-5-main-accused-arrested-two-still-at-large/story-cL8sbIqBKTlYfNALUpP54L.html

  110 a broken system was be
ing fixed: ndtv.com/india-news/66-ias-42-ips-officers-transferred-in-uttar-pradesh-after-spate-of-rapes-576203

  111 ‘not saying that this is the motive’: ibid.

  112 give women the right … to inherit: in 2017, the Supreme Court clarified that the amended position of law applied to daughters, irrespective of whether they were born before or after 5 September 2005 (i.e. the date on which the amended law came into effect). egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2005/E_45_2012_114.pdf

  113 only 13 per cent of women … inherited: s24756.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/hsaa-study-report.pdf

  114 fast-track courts: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20944633

  115 https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1137&context=yhrdlj

  116 enduring … six trials: washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/an-indian-gang-rape-victim-went-to-court-for-11-years-but-her-ordeal-continues/2016/08/15/c92075ce-5757-4073-b8c2-b0dc42f54ed0_story.html?postshare=2371471326459064&tid=ss_mail

  117 judge-population ratio: lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/101-169/Report120.pdf

  118 31.28 million cases pending: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Courts-will-take-320-years-to-clear-backlog-cases-Justice-Rao/articleshow/5651782.cms

  119 320 years to clear the backlog: ibid.

  120 allegations … that SITs were vulnerable to political influence: caravanmagazine.in/vantage/postings-cops-bureaucrats-sit-members-godhra-2002-investigation

  121 Yadav officers headed nearly 60 per cent of police stations: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Yadavisation-of-UP-cops-behind-anarchy/articleshow/36165826.cms

  Separate Milk From Water

  The Shakya brothers were later unable to recall with whom the idea originated. Like many people in Katra village, they didn’t watch TV or read the papers and they weren’t privy to the news that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was making for its handling of notorious cases.

  Sohan Lal’s eldest son would recall hearing of the agency in the context of the Aarushi Talwar mystery. Virender was living in Noida at the time when the teenaged girl was murdered in her bed one night, while on the cusp of turning fourteen, the same age as his sister when she died. The twists and turns in the investigation and the trial transfixed the nation.

  In any case, the Shakyas went from knowing very little about the CBI to being convinced that the agency alone could be trusted to deliver justice. ‘I want the CBI,’ Sohan Lal told cameras.122 He had heard that investigators could separate milk from water.

  The request was heartily endorsed by opposition politicians who were eager to continue to undermine the state government, but as it turned out the chief minister was just as keen. The state police had been publicly humiliated, the Special Investigation Team embarrassingly stonewalled. Akhilesh Yadav was himself marinating in a stew of bad press.

  And so, following his request to the central government, the agency stepped in on 12 June, entirely dislodging the state police from the investigation.

  It was now over a week since the girls had died, and the time lag was only the first challenge the incoming team had to surmount. Neither the police nor the SIT had thought to cordon off the orchard. It was still wide open. Many witnesses were still to record their statements. Pappu and his brothers were in jail, but their mother Jhalla Devi – who claimed to have overheard where the bodies were – was yet to be questioned.

  If these circumstances were unique to Katra, attributable to the location of the village, it would perhaps be understandable. But according to a former Special Director, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, ‘every second case’ that the CBI was called in to investigate was thus affected. A lack of training, resources and oversight at state police level meant that forensic and medical evidence was routinely contaminated, key witnesses disappeared and more time was spent fixing mistakes rather than making progress.

  In the Aarushi mystery, for example, first responders didn’t find the second victim, the domestic help, until a day after the teenager was discovered. All that time his bludgeoned body was lying on the terrace of the flat, slowly cooking in the sun.

  The CBI had grown out of a colonial-era unit named the Special Police Establishment – which was formed by executive order in 1941 to probe bribery and corruption during World War II.123 It was considered necessary even after the war ended, and the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946 was put into force to give it legal power to investigate and prosecute cases.124 This Act was the genesis of the CBI, which was given its current name in 1963. In time it developed three investigative divisions: the Anti-Corruption Division pursued cases against public servants; the Economic Offences Division investigated financial crimes; and the Special Crimes Division, which threw the widest net, took on terrorism, bomb blasts, espionage, dowry deaths, sensational homicides and more. The agency also served as the official INTERPOL unit for India.

  Since 2011, the agency had worked out of an eleven-storey state-of-the-art building that was modelled on the headquarters of INTERPOL in Lyon, France.125 Built at an estimated cost of $39 million, it featured a lobby that was three floors high, a giant atrium, a gymnasium and marble floors. The price tag was a testimony to how highly the CBI’s service was valued, but also how desperately it was needed.

  In India it often seemed as though there was no transparency and no accountability. And that those who wanted to get rich quick could always find a way. This was certainly true in the 2000s when the economy was booming. Even as the majority stayed poor, a few took advantage of this golden opportunity to appropriate public funds into private hands. In 2014, 71.5 per cent of cases under examination by the agency were registered with the Anti-Corruption Division.126 It was India’s ‘season of scams’.

  The CBI was quickly outpaced. It could probe 700 cases a year,127 but the actual caseload was almost twice that. As trust in the police eroded, it didn’t take much for the public to demand that the agency get involved. The suicide of a Bollywood starlet, the assassination of a journalist, even the usual construction scam; ‘almost everyone wants every case to go to the CBI,’ moaned one former director.128 It was easier, after all, to throw everything at the agency than to engage with systemic issues. In May 2014, the agency was juggling 1,122 cases, or 60 per cent more work than it was equipped to handle.129 Of these they had been working on 11 cases for more than three years.

  The untenable workload struck at the heart of its reputation for efficiency. The CBI’s conviction rate started to dip. In 2014 it was at 69 per cent,130 a figure that would continue to steadily drop.

  Then vacancies started to mount. There were 1,000 posts left unfilled that year, against a sanctioned strength of 6,676.131 The vacancies started at the top, at the post of Special and Additional Director and included jobs for inspectors and technical officers – the people whose work involved building a case and leading it to a successful conclusion. Deposing before a parliamentary committee in 2016, the CBI director would say that unless problems were swiftly addressed, the agency would ‘collapse and fail’.132

  Although the CBI’s investigative skills had a mythic reputation in some quarters, its dependence on the government virtually guaranteed accusations of impropriety. The party in power at the centre provided the agency with personnel, resources and a budget. It could post officers to the CBI or transfer them out. And if the agency wanted to prosecute a government official – the reason why it had been created to begin with – it needed the authorisation of the ministry in which that very official worked.133

  When accusations against politicians from the ruling party failed to materialise in investigations, or opposition leaders were suddenly accused of having ‘disproportionate assets’, which was a euphemism for corruption, and their houses raided, it appeared as though the CBI was acting on outside orders.

  In 2013, the Supreme Court said the gove
rnment had meddled in a CBI investigation into a scam that involved coal-field leases that had cost the country about $30 billion in lost revenue.134‘The heart of the report was changed on suggestions of government officials,’ the court said.135The presiding judge lamented that India’s foremost investigative agency had been reduced to a ‘caged parrot speaking in its master’s voice’. In 2017, the CBI would be forced to file corruption charges against the man who had presided over the investigation into the coal scam – their own former director.136

  At least two former heads told Reuters that the force was subject to political influence ‘irrespective of which party happened to be in power at the time’.137‘The political class will never give independence to the CBI,’ said a former director, who alleged that he was forced out after refusing to back off from an investigation in the 1990s. According to an internal report, the agency’s conviction rate in corruption cases that often involved politicians and their cronies was 3.96 per cent.138

  Another former head argued that even if the agency was independent, politicians benefited from making it appear otherwise. ‘Every political party wants to accuse the political rival in power of misusing the CBI,’ he grumbled. ‘And, the cycle continues.’139

  Whatever the actual extent of influence, the agency seemed to do better when it worked on cases that didn’t implicate political leaders. Or when it wasn’t in the interest of politicians in power to fix a case. And there were many such cases, the majority of which didn’t make the headlines. Indeed, the ordinary public admired the agency’s investigators and thought of them as honest and professional.

  In contrast to the police, they were everything.

  So when a CBI team of about a dozen men, led by a well-regarded investigator, was dispatched to Uttar Pradesh, it was for many people – the Shakyas, the public and some politicians – a winning moment. Now surely, justice would prevail.