The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  122 ‘I want the CBI’: youtube.com/watch?v=JDYGO506VNw

  123 Special Police Establishment: cbi.gov.in/history.php

  124 legal power to investigate: legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A1946-25.pdf

  125 state-of-the-art building: india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/inside-the-c-b-i-well-the-building-anyway/

  126 registered with the Anti-Corruption Division: Routledge Handbook of Corruption in Asia, edited by Ting Gong, Ian Scott (Routledge, 2017)

  127 It could probe 700 cases a year: livemint.com/Politics/1LYhKM5HP0aBFxmQH3VvGN/CBI-may-collapse-due-to-lack-of-staff-Anil-Sinha.html

  128 ‘everyone wants every case to go to the CBI’: old.tehelka.com/some-call-us-congress-bureau-of-investigation-but-also-ask-for-a-cbi-inquiry-ap-singh/

  129 60 per cent more work than it was equipped to handle: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/CBI-arrested-only-nine-persons-in-anti-graft-cases-in-2014/articleshow/38928682.cms; ndtv.com/india-news/cbi-may-collapse-due-to-lack-of-manpower-says-its-chief-anil-sinha-1399701

  130 it was at 69 per cent: economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/conviction-rate-of-cbi-dipped-in-last-3-years-govt/articleshow/58148427.cms

  131 1,000 posts left unfilled: persmin.gov.in/AnnualReport/AR2015_2016(Eng).pdf

  132 the agency would ‘collapse and fail’: ndtv.com/india-news/cbi-may-collapse-due-to-lack-of-manpower-says-its-chief-anil-sinha-1399701

  133 if the agency wanted to prosecute a government official: economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/not-easy-for-cbi-to-be-independent-agency/articleshow/19980389.cms

  134 a scam that involved coal field leases: Neha Thirani Bagri, ‘India’s Top Court Revokes Coal Leases’, New York Times, 25 September 2014, nytimes.com/2014/09/25/business/international/indias-supreme-court-revokes-hundreds-of-coal-concessions.html

  135 ‘The heart of the report was changed’: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/CBI-a-caged-parrot-heart-of-Coalgate-report-changed-Supreme-Court/articleshow/19952260.cms

  136 corruption charges against … their own former director: livemint.com/Politics/mspqgmEEizhIFGplsoiFqM/CBI-files-FIR-against-Ranjit-Sinha-in-a-coal-scam-case.html

  137 the force was subject to political influence: in.reuters.com/article/cbi-supreme-court-parrot-coal/a-caged-parrot-supreme-court-describes-cbi-idINDEE94901W20130510

  138 the agency’s conviction rate in corruption cases: hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/cbi-conviction-rate-stands-at-a-lowly-4-reveals-study/story-wfZ2GgFUuGIeH4M9SAwIjM.html

  139 ‘the cycle continues’: in.reuters.com/article/cbi-supreme-court-parrot-coal/a-caged-parrot-supreme-court-describes-cbi-idINDEE94901W20130510

  A Red Flag

  The investigating officer was a man who didn’t leave an impression. It wasn’t because of how he looked: tall, with broad shoulders, a walrus moustache and the domed forehead of a thinker. He had straight, even teeth. But he had mastered the habit of making himself small, smaller than the person he was talking to. He kept his voice low. His face gave nothing away.

  After he was gone, the Shakya brothers would struggle to describe him. He was much taller than them, heavier too, and well dressed in nice suits, gleaming shoes, an Apple watch. He had come and gone for months. But he had been so unobtrusive, unlike some others on his team, that the Shakyas’ memory of him was clouded.

  Already twenty years into the police force, Vijay Kumar Shukla, the 49-year-old deputy superintendent of police in the Special Crimes Division in Delhi, had taken the lead on more than fifty cases, several of which had made headlines. In one instance he had helped secure a conviction against a forger who became a millionaire in the 1990s by selling counterfeit stamp papers. He tracked down the Dubai-based terrorists behind the 2002 attack on an American cultural centre in Kolkata. And in 2005, he arrested the mastermind of a poaching ring that trafficked in big cat skins for clients in China. Investigators were judged by their convictions, and Shukla had many.

  A highly regarded former Special Director of the CBI, who was often asked to examine cold cases by the Supreme Court, had invited Shukla to investigate a triple murder outside of office hours. He found the officer impressive. ‘He is a man of integrity,’ he said, when asked for an assessment. This meant that Shukla wasn’t corrupt. He couldn’t be bought, and nor could he be influenced by superior officers with somewhat less integrity. ‘He’s hard-working,’ the director added, which was to say that he dug deep. And he had a ‘scientific temper’ which should have been a given but wasn’t, in fact, something that the police were known for.

  Shukla would have to be all of these things, for Katra was a ‘hot case’, one of the most famous of recent times and still featuring in the headlines days after the fact.

  Having set up a field office at a guest house in Budaun, Shukla and his men swarmed Katra village in their distinctive sleeveless blue jackets, which were emblazoned with the agency’s initials. It was 13 June, a day after the state police had handed over the case.

  ‘You just have to tell the truth,’ Shukla said to the Shakya brothers – Sohan Lal, Jeevan Lal and Ram Babu. ‘We’ll take care of everything else.’

  In their complaint to the police the Shakya family had named two eyewitnesses to the alleged kidnapping of Padma and Lalli. These were Nazru, their cousin, and Ram Babu.

  As members of the agency’s Central Forensic Science Laboratory started filming, Nazru walked the team through the fields, retracing his movements from that night.

  At around 9 or 9.30 p.m. on 27 May, he said, he had been heading towards his plot when he saw two girls. With them were four men. It was very dark, but he was carrying a torch, which he aimed at the group. He recognised Pappu immediately and they launched into a fight, but then Pappu pulled out a gun. As he waved it threateningly in Nazru’s face, the other men took off with the girls. Nazru had raced back to the village. ‘There are badmash in the fields,’ he shouted to Ram Babu. Bad men in the fields. ‘They have a gun!’

  The two men rushed to inform the rest of the Shakyas, who in turn told them that their girls were missing. ‘I slapped my forehead and said there were two girls with the men. It had never occurred to me that they might be Padma and Lalli.’

  At their field office, the investigators went through the reports of the two key witnesses. Nazru claimed that he’d bumped into Ram Babu after the girls were taken. But Ram Babu’s statement, which was recorded right afterwards, told a different story.

  On the night of 27 May, Ram Babu said, looking straight into the camera, he was with Nazru. It was around 8 or 8.30 p.m. They were in the fields when they came across Pappu with some girls. It was too dark to tell who they were. Ram Babu flashed his torch, Pappu remonstrated at the interruption, but the girls cried out, so Nazru threw himself on the Yadav boy. But as the boy was armed, the Shakya men quickly retreated. Pappu then took off with the girls.

  Shukla went through the recordings a few times. Although he was baffled, he wasn’t mistaken. The eyewitnesses were telling two different stories. The ‘major contradictions’, he would later say, were a ‘red flag’.

  The Villagers Talk

  Three days later, six men in lab coats congregated in the mango orchard to prepare the crime scene report. The forensic scientists relied on a CBI manual listing physical and biological materials to look for. These included fingerprints, footprints, blood, semen, saliva, urine, vomit, faecal matter, hair, fibre, tissues, teeth and bite marks, skeletal remains, nails, trace evidence such as soil, as well as medicines or firearms or food. The list ran on for three pages.

  The girls had gone missing on 27 May.

  Today was 16 June.

  That morning the team found a strand of hair on the branch from which Lalli was hanging, as well as some leaves that were stained with tobacco juic
e or blood, they couldn’t say. Over the next few days, the officers would enlist forensic scientists in three different states – Uttar Pradesh, Telengana and Gujarat – to review this and other material.

  Investigators had drawn up address lists, and they started to call in dozens of people for interviews: Shakyas, Yadavs, members of the search parties, police officers and many others. In all, they would talk to more than 200 people, from Katra and beyond. Two people were interrogated more than ten times. One was Pappu Yadav, the key accused, who was in jail. The other was the eyewitness Nazru.

  The villagers of Katra had stonewalled the police and the state-appointed Special Investigation Team in solidarity with the Shakya family, but they were eager to talk to the investigators. These were serious men, they agreed. They didn’t hang around with alcohol on their breath. They weren’t here for handouts. More than anything, the villagers wanted to clear Katra of the smear by which it was now defined, as some place where girls were killed. As long as the rumour circulated no one would marry their boys. It was time to sow the kharif crops, but hard to focus when their character was in question.

  The consequences for women and girls were naturally more severe. As some said, ‘boys will be boys, but girls can’t be wayward.’ They had gone to the fields in ones and twos before; now they had to galvanise a group. A basic human need suddenly required advance planning and mobilisation.

  In many homes the movement of phones, previously regarded as common property, was now closely tracked. There was no question, any more, of a girl of Padma’s age picking up a phone and going off with it, not even to a different corner of the house. The small outings she had once enjoyed – grazing the goats, climbing trees, plucking mangoes – were no longer permitted. The door to the outside had been open by a crack, now it was pulled firmly shut. The women were to stay in at all times, they weren’t to be seen. Outside, the village men lay awake, night after night, gazing up at the sky.

  The villagers meant the Shakyas no harm, but by speaking honestly, they revealed things the family had hoped to keep hidden.

  The brothers had known that Pappu was with the girls but didn’t share this vital piece of information right away. They had kept it to themselves for several hours when it should have been clear that the children were in danger. They had chaotically attempted to find them, chasing down random motorcycles, but failing to search the fields or the orchard fully. At the police chowki, they refused to allow Nazru – who was the only one with real information at hand – to be questioned.

  But it was a friend of Nazru’s, Umesh Shakya, who gave the most damning evidence. The two young men often passed the evenings drinking and smoking weed in each other’s company. On the morning the bodies were discovered, Umesh had made straight for the orchard, same as everyone else. There he saw Nazru sweating profusely. Umesh took his friend by the arm and walked him somewhere quiet, a mint field about forty feet away from the orchard.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  He was returning home from checking in on his buffalo, Nazru told him, when he heard some khusar phusar, whispers. ‘I shined my torch in the direction of the sounds and saw Pappu with Sohan and Jeevan’s daughters. I was furious to see our girls with him.’ When the girls saw Nazru, their faces turned ashen, he said. ‘I thrashed Pappu. He lashed out at me as well, which made me even angrier, but before I could retaliate, he broke out of my grasp.’

  The girls started crying and running away. Nazru assumed they were going home.

  Umesh leaned in, wanting to know more. Just then, as he told investigators, some villagers took hold of Nazru. ‘Listen,’ Umesh overhead them say, ‘it was Pappu, his brothers and the police who raped and killed the girls.’

  Some hours later, when the Shakyas were arguing over the contents of the police complaint, Umesh again took Nazru to one side. ‘Now what?’ he said.

  ‘Brother, don’t ask me!’ Nazru cried, clutching his head. ‘Sohan and Jeevan tell me to say one thing, then they say another. First they told me to say that the Yadav brothers kidnapped the girls, then they said it was their father and Sarvesh sipahi who did it. They’re just saying and doing anything, and I don’t know who to listen to any more. I’m going mad!’

  A second villager confirmed to investigators that Sohan Lal had knowingly falsified his written complaint to the police. ‘Nazru saw three or four men,’ Sohan Lal had told this villager. ‘He couldn’t identify them, so why not just say they were the Yadav brothers? They probably were.’

  Like the crowd in the orchard that had called for Sarvesh to be hanged, Lalli’s father had no evidence of wrongdoing. Nazru had seen Pappu with the girls, but he hadn’t witnessed a crime. And he hadn’t mentioned the Yadav brothers in his account, which was, in any case, sketchy and one of several that he had told on the night the girls went missing.

  But the Shakyas didn’t have faith in the system. Sarvesh might not have killed the girls, and Pappu’s brothers might be innocent of involvement in the hangings, but they were guilty of something.

  The constable had abused his power. The Yadav family had fed and nurtured a venomous snake, Pappu, who had seduced their children. At the very least they were Yadavs. And everyone, they said, knew that Yadavs hurt people.

  The False Eyewitness

  When investigators went looking to clarify matters with Nazru, they didn’t find him at home. Her son was now living with the Shakya family, his mother said.

  Sohan Lal warmly welcomed the men in the suits and dark glasses, with their polished shoes and the little white towels they waved around in the heat. Standing in his courtyard in bare feet, his undershirt ripped, and trousers held together with safety pins, he told them that he had invited his cousin to move in for a few days as a gesture of goodwill. The media attention was extreme, he said, and he wanted to shield the boy.

  Investigators were not convinced. It was the Shakya house that was overrun with reporters. There were several even just then.

  On 18 June, an amount of 75,000 rupees appeared in Nazru’s bank account, which had earlier held only 502 rupees. Investigators would learn that the amount was a part of a larger payment of 1 lakh rupees. This was more money than Nazru had earned in many years. A few days earlier the same amount had appeared in Ram Babu’s account. The only people who now had that kind of money in the village, and were also close to Nazru and Ram Babu, were the Shakya brothers.

  Sohan Lal admitted that he had been behind the payments, but again, he said that he was just being thoughtful. The media attention had made it impossible for the men to work. The money was a form of recompense.

  Shukla, the investigating officer, wasn’t having it. The two men were the eyewitnesses to the alleged kidnapping of Sohan Lal’s daughter and niece – why was he giving them money?

  Sensing his scepticism, Sohan Lal then claimed that his brother had asked for money. His cousin had then made the same request. The Shakyas’ political ally, the person they trusted most outside the family, agreed that this was indeed the case. Sinod Kumar told investigators that Nazru was upset that visiting politicians hadn’t thought to give him anything. All the money went to Padma and Lalli’s parents. The family was now in a position to expand their house and even buy a motorcycle. Nazru was where he had always been, in the middle of the fields with his buffalo. As far as he knew, said the politician, the Shakyas gave their cousin money to console him.

  This didn’t explain the money in Ram Babu’s account.

  Nazru repeated his story to the CBI. That on the night that Padma and Lalli disappeared, he came across two girls with four men, or ‘boys’ as he called them, in the fields. Sensing that the girls were in trouble, he ran towards Pappu, who was the only member of the group that he recognised. They were fighting when the Yadav boy whipped out a gun. In the meanwhile, the other boys took off with the girls.

  Nazru didn’t say that Pappu’s brothers were involved, or the police
, for that matter. He didn’t even say that he recognised the girls. He had the outline of a story, but the details, as before, were fuzzy. And, he made no mention of the fact that there was someone with him – a second eyewitness.

  Investigators, who were by now getting rather tired of the back and forth, called Ram Babu in for questioning again. And perhaps he was tired of the whole thing too, because this time he told the truth. He had children of his own – seven boys and girls. And they too had reputations to protect.

  Ram Babu admitted that he had lied about having seen Pappu in the fields. He didn’t see him, he said – he was at home at the time, relaxing after dinner. It was his older brother, Sohan Lal, who came up with the idea of manufacturing a second eyewitness. ‘Look at Nazru,’ he said. And they had. ‘Who will believe him?’

  At first the task was delegated to a family friend. He readily agreed on the condition that he could implicate someone he strongly disliked in the kidnapping. ‘That will teach him a lesson.’

  ‘We did not agree to this,’ Ram Babu told investigators.

  Then someone suggested that Lalli’s elder brother could play the role. Virender was amenable, but he remembered just in time that he wasn’t in the village the night the girls went missing. He had arrived the morning after.

  Finally, they settled on Ram Babu. He was friendly, with a likeable face. He was intelligent. And he stayed calm.

  ‘I was afraid of saying no,’ Ram Babu told investigators. If he refused, he said, he would damage his relationship with his brothers. And the grieving family could not withstand further turmoil.