When she said to him, ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Sohan Lal gave up. He worked hard to keep a roof over his family’s head. He kept his wife and children fed and clothed, he paid for school and for weddings. Honour and duty alone were the guiding lights of his life.
‘No sir,’ he replied, truthfully.
The first set of questions related to the case were ones to which the agency already knew the answers.
‘Is it true, on being requested by the CBI to hand over the phone Padma used, that you instead broke it into small pieces?’
‘Yes.’
Did you destroy the phone’s SIM card?
‘Yes.’
‘Is it true that the girls were killed over a land dispute?’
‘No.’
So far, so clear. Then the polygraph recorded a lie.
The question Sohan Lal was asked was whether he was far away when he heard the news of the girls going missing.
‘Yes,’ he said.
And he was, as witnesses and call records would later show.
The test had recorded this falsely as a lie.
After the polygraph ended, the psychological assessment began. Sohan Lal was asked a question about Padma’s phone and encouraged to respond in his own words. He admitted to having broken it. The ‘details in the phone … might have hurt the honour of the family,’ he said. ‘Girls are honour of family.’
The voice recording of his daughter Lalli speaking to Pappu established that the teenagers knew each other, Srivastava said. ‘If the girls were alive, what step would you have taken for the honour of the family?’
‘We would have killed them,’ he replied.
Nazru came in that same day. The outcome of his various tests was a predictable disaster.
During his behavioural test, Nazru claimed that while he was able to recognise Pappu, he couldn’t tell who the others were. Pressed for details, he started ‘swallowing and had dry lips, asked for water’. ‘He was pretending to be emotional,’ Srivastava noted, ‘but timing and duration of emotional gestures and emotions are off … The display of emotion is delayed, stays for a few seconds and then stops suddenly.’
Again, he changed his story. Asked whether he saw Pappu taking the girls away, he said no, he had not.
Nazru made quite the impression. Five years, and dozens of cases later, it was him Srivastava remembered most clearly of all the people she had studied during that time. He was literally shivering as he sat before her, she recalled. He refused to make eye contact. He wasn’t scared, she said, he was being manipulative.
After he admitted to having been paid off by the Shakyas, he became so distraught that he started shouting.
Srivastava remembered his words.
‘I will return the money! I will return the money!’
Then he attempted to make a run for it.
DROWNED
The sky cracked open, soaking the thirsty earth and reviving everything to joyful life. As village children leapt into the flowing rivers for a celebratory swim, the regional Met director spoke of heavy to moderate rainfall but warned of ‘full force’ starting 11 July. The medical board from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi scheduled the exhumation of the bodies for 20 July – nearly eight weeks after the children were first found.
The doctors from Delhi asked for around-the-clock personal security while they were in Uttar Pradesh. An agency description of the shambolic state of the post-mortem house had rightly put them off, but rather than suggest an alternative, such as a hospital room, they wanted to conduct the exam on the banks of the river. They asked for an enclosure to be set up with a table, plastic sheets, masks, gowns, gloves and gumboots. They also asked for an assistant, specifically Lala Ram: ‘The sweeper of Budaun Mortuary who has helped the doctors in conducting post-mortem should be available, along with all the tools for opening all the cavities of the bodies, including head.’
The CBI had rubbished Lala Ram’s work on the post-mortem. He had used a ‘butcher’s knife’ they said, in a report. The knife, which Lala Ram had purchased from an ordinary shop in the bazaar, was indeed a kitchen knife for chopping meat. That the doctors still picked him and his tools suggested that what was standard procedure in a backward place like Budaun, was also standard procedure in Delhi.
Now, Lala Ram gathered an apron and a fresh pair of gloves and prepared to leave his staff quarters in the early hours of 20 July, a Sunday. He had been ordered to arrive before sunrise to avoid alerting the media.
On Saturday, the promised heavy rainfall commenced its lashing. The power clapped out and people rooted for torches, candles and lamp oil. The streets soon turned into roiling swamps.
A cluster of police officers stationed on the banks of the river, where the bodies were buried, informed their superiors that the water level was rising rapidly. It was already a foot above the graves. By the time television crews arrived, the graves were no longer even accessible by foot. A man who ventured in was submerged waist-deep.
When agency SUVs rolled in with the doctors from Delhi, all they could do was watch the drama from high up the river’s bank. The Shakya brothers stood nearby. ‘I went to the CBI with folded hands,’ Sohan Lal later recalled. ‘I said, “Please take out the bodies quickly.” ’ He couldn’t believe that investigators had taken on the Ganga, the mightiest and holiest river in India, with the expectation that they would win.
The agency then requested help from the state government’s flood department to start pumping out the water around the graves. As they awaited a response they rounded up fifty villagers, put them in a boat and dispatched them to find the graves. They chucked in sandbags to help keep some of the water out. Outlandish talk started to circulate: Bring in divers! Construct a bridge!
At 7 p.m., the graves were sunken, eight feet deep. Then the pumps ran out of diesel. There were obviously no divers, so five good swimmers stripped down to their underwear and hurled themselves into the swirling, mud-brown foam.
‘Was this a game?’ Sohan Lal thought.
A police officer instructed his men to stick a crimson-coloured flag in one of the sandbags, to be safe. Otherwise, when the water receded, they would be unable to tell the graves of the girls from the hundreds of others located up and down the riverbank.
Asked when he thought the examination might happen, the head of the medical board, Dr Adarsh Kumar, in his crisp, collared shirt, responded casually. ‘Maybe in the month of September or so.’ Four months after the girls had died.165
As Shukla, the investigating officer, glumly scanned the disaster zone, reporters in hearing distance placed the blame squarely on his team. ‘Budaun Botch-Up,’ they declared, using that favourite word again. The CBI was ‘publicly shamed’ for its ‘lazy attitude’ in arranging the exhumation.166 ‘DROWNED!’ blared a news channel.167 The flooding had ‘possibly [ended] all chances of a fair investigation’.
In fact, it wasn’t the agency that was to blame, but the medical board they had put in place. Correspondence between the two showed that the medical board was set up on 23 June. The team convened for the first time four days later but broke up without agreeing on when to visit the graves. That was left for their next meeting, which they scheduled for more than three weeks later, to accommodate vacation plans.
Then one of the board members backed out and a replacement had to be found.
In July, Shukla faxed the doctors, urging them to make up their minds. ‘Field reports as well as media reports indicate that due to increased water level in the River Ganga, the place where the bodies of the two victims have been buried may get submerged very soon.’ He asked the doctors to hold an ‘emergency meeting’ to pick a date. They had settled on 20 July.
There was no question of retrieving the bodies now, which meant there would be no second post-mortem.
The only option that was left, the ag
ency concluded, was for the doctors to watch the original post-mortem videos. This was also how Dr Ghyasuddin Khan at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Lucknow had given his opinion on how Padma and Lalli had died. He had determined that they were smothered and his conclusion – which differed from the post-mortem results – was one reason why the exhumation was considered necessary in the first place.
For context, the medical board was taken to Katra. The air was crisp, the smell was wet goats. The doctors picked their way cautiously through the fields where they were shown the tree on which the girls were found. Watching from a distance, their feet planted in the sodden earth, the Shakya villagers shook their head in amazement. In the monsoons, Gangaji’s waters swelled to such a height that she could be seen from every terrace in the village. You would think that the city folk would have come better prepared.
The CBI officers then took the medical board to the post-mortem house, presumably so they could understand the agency’s doubts over the exam results. They were given photographs, transcripts and all the forensic and medical reports that had come in so far.
Even once the board had everything they needed, they still couldn’t make time to meet. One meeting was cancelled because a team member was called away on an urgent assignment. Another was postponed for mysterious reasons, or it ‘could not be materialised’ – to use the board’s language.
‘Pl. keep following up,’ a desperate Shukla wrote to his deputies, delegating the onerous task of prodding the doctors. He reminded them that the agency had ninety days to file a chargesheet against the suspects.
If the CBI didn’t file a chargesheet within this time, the five men would be entitled to bail.
165 Four months after the girls had died: youtube.com/watch?v=3ygizX5AAQE
166 ‘lazy attitude’: youtube.com/watch?v=Y-p5KWhEoOU
167 ‘DROWNED!’: youtube.com/watch?v=whTAj0L0jAU
Results and Rumours
DNA analysis could take months, given the backlog that laboratories struggled under, but after a non-profit filed a public interest litigation, the High Court in Allahabad, which had jurisdiction over the whole state, started to monitor Shukla’s investigation. They asked for regular updates – and the investigating officer felt pressure to show results.
He fired off letters to the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) in Hyderabad, in Telengana state, describing the case as one of national importance. He urged the scientists to prioritise his requests. ‘The case involves sensitive issues which need to be investigated without any delay,’ he wrote in June. ‘It is therefore requested that the aforesaid exhibits may be processed on an urgent basis and a report provided to this office at the earliest.’
A few days later he asked that the scientists preserve the ‘dust/soil’ on the girls’ clothes. The post-mortem doctors had failed to note the condition of the salwar kameezes Padma and Lalli were wearing, and Shukla wanted to avoid the repetition of seemingly small, but potentially consequential mistakes. In another letter he reminded the CDFD, ‘The report is still awaited.’
The items for analysis included the girls’ underwear, kameezes, salwars and dupattas, as well as rings, hairbands and nose pins.
Some of these items did not yield DNA suitable for analysis. This was hardly surprising, given how the bodies had been treated. It’s very likely that they were contaminated at collection or en route to testing. It could also mean that the sample size was small. Other objects, however, did yield DNA profiles that could be compared with the genetic material extracted from the five suspects.
The list of items collected from the suspects, on the other hand, was dismayingly incomplete. A bundle of Pappu’s clothes contained a white shirt with a red spot and his underwear ‘with somewhat white spots’. But where were the trousers he’d slipped on to accompany the police to the chowki in the early hours of 28 May? It was very likely the same pair he had worn for his meeting with the girls. And he almost certainly wore footwear when he went out at night to a field that was usually infested with snakes.
His eldest brother, Avdesh, was undoubtedly wearing more than just underwear and a shirt.
It was the state police that had collected samples from the suspects. They took blood, nail and hair samples as well as penile swabs from each of the Yadav brothers. They only took blood samples from the two police suspects – they would probably argue that since all cells in the body contain the same DNA this really didn’t matter. Even so, it’s difficult to understand why they didn’t submit every item of clothing that the five men had worn on the night of 27 May and the morning of 28 May.
The DNA results from the clothing, samples and swabs of the five suspects showed no female DNA. Then, rather miraculously, given how Lala Ram had handled the girls’ bodies, the vaginal slides he had taken of the girls showed two separate sets of female DNA. The DNA from Padma’s slide corresponded with the DNA extracted from her dupatta. Lalli’s DNA found a match on her salwar. There was no male DNA present in any of the tested samples that belonged to the girls.
The post-mortem doctors had told the agency that their original assessment about the girls having been raped was wrong. The DNA evidence now supported this fact.
‘Big news!’
‘A twist!’
‘A U-turn!’
‘The latest forensic tests do not establish the presence of the five accused at the scene of crime, and in fact the needle of suspicion at this point is towards the victims’ family. The family, of course, unhappy with this says they will go back to the same tree and hang themselves to death if justice is not served.’168
Just as agency investigators had suspected, this latest breaking news drew an incredulous reaction. The idea that the girls were raped didn’t need to be proved. This, on the other hand, was unbelievable to many people who had followed the case on the news. It was also unacceptable to the girls’ family members. ‘Pappu admitted to being with the girls,’ Sohan Lal told a reporter.
He wondered if the CBI had sent someone else’s clothes for DNA testing. ‘They could have been anybody’s. I have no proof that they were my daughter and her cousin’s clothes.’169 The strand of hair and the stained leaves from the orchard hadn’t revealed any useful information either, which Sohan Lal also found odd.
It was difficult to know how much Lalli’s father believed what he said. Did he believe the girls were raped, despite what the evidence showed? And if so, did he want the five men punished for it, or did he want someone punished for the fact that his children were dead? And did these five men most closely fit the profile of the sort of goondas, thugs, who would do such a thing? His own actions provided a clue.
The morning that Padma and Lalli were found, Nazru had confided in his friend: ‘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 Constable Sarvesh 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!’
And that same day Sohan Lal told a friend of his, ‘Nazru saw three or four men. He couldn’t identify them, so why not just say they were the Yadav brothers? They probably were.’
And anyone looking to side with him agreed.
Lalli’s father was well established with television viewers as a sympathetic and believable figure. When he said, ‘I’ll fight for justice until my last breath’ – and then went further still, saying, ‘I’m willing to lay down my life’ – he was every Indian who had struggled with every fibre of his being to be treated justly. Even scientific fact couldn’t dislodge what people felt, seemingly in their bones. And it was easy to point to earlier acts of grave malfeasance – by police officers, even the prime minister170 – to show that in India anything was possible, and nothing was what it seemed.
‘If the CBI was from outside the state,’ S
ohan Lal said, getting confused, ‘the investigation would have had integrity. They were under pressure from the state government.’
This wasn’t true. The investigating officer, his supervisor, and almost the entire team was from out of state. If the agency’s independence was ever compromised in the past, it wasn’t from proximity to state governments, who had no control over them, but, as the Supreme Court had declared in 2013,171 by coercion from the centre.
Shukla, the investigating officer, may have known how things went. He had earlier worked a case in which border security forces were accused of shooting dead more than fifty-five people and burning down hundreds of houses and shops as collective punishment for the murder of one of their men by a separatist terror outfit. Senior Indian officials had admitted to the rampage, calling it ‘shameful’172 but Shukla had closed the case without making any arrests.
The killings had taken place in the northern region of Jammu and Kashmir, home to a long-running independence movement that had resulted in the deaths of more than 70,000 people since the 1980s. The army, which was permanently posted there, was in constant conflict with civilians. Two highly controversial laws gave soldiers the unchecked power to arrest, shoot and even kill civilians without facing disciplinary action. Investigators of the CBI were repeatedly unsuccessful in taking army officers to court.
This particular crime took place in the 1990s, when violence was at its peak, and the forces – perhaps with the support of the central government – appear to have used the pretext of a court martial to get the CBI to close the case without making any arrests.
The deaths in Katra were an entirely different matter. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had no influence over the CBI. The prime minister may have, but Narendra Modi had no reason to protect Yadavs. His antagonism towards Akhilesh, who belonged to a different party with a conflicting ideology, was well known. They had spent the entirety of the recently concluded general election trading barbs. Uttar Pradesh, said Modi, was infamous for ‘atrocities against women’.173
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