Aarushi

by Avirook Sen

  That day, the Talwars were also asked to come and identify a suspect. They followed a police vehicle in their car and were trailed all the way by a number of TV crews. Several kilometres on, they were suddenly asked to go home. They turned back and footage of this was captured. The next day, 23 May, the Noida police escorted Rajesh and Nupur Talwar to the police lines for questioning. At the police lines, Nupur and Rajesh were taken to different rooms. Rajesh was shown the footage from the previous day, which the police now claimed was proof that he was trying to flee. Shortly thereafter, under the heat and glare of the spotlights, Rajesh Talwar, dazed, dishevelled and screaming that he had been framed, was arrested for the murder of his daughter and servant.

  Gurdarshan Singh, inspector general of police (IGP), Meerut range, held a triumphant press conference the same day where he claimed the case had been solved. According to him, ‘Shruti’—this is what he kept calling Aarushi, though that was not even her nickname—had found out about Rajesh’s extramarital affair with her best friend’s mother, Anita Durrani, and had decided to have an affair of her own—with the manservant Hemraj.

  According to Singh’s theory, Rajesh got home after 11 that night and found Hemraj in Aarushi’s room in an ‘objectionable but not compromising’ position (Singh presumably couldn’t go further as the post-mortem and the pathology report hadn’t shown up any sign of sexual activity). The sequence of events was this: Rajesh Talwar takes Hemraj to the terrace, kills him, comes back down, has a few swigs of Ballantine’s Finest, and then kills his daughter to protect the honour of the family. And the murder weapons? A hammer and a scalpel. The non-recovery of which, according to the IGP, was a ‘big thing’.

  That there had been virtually no investigation did not stop Singh. Nor did the fact that the girl he was calling ‘characterless’ would have turned fourteen the day after his press conference.

  The Indian Premier League, with its mixture of glamour and games, had enthralled the country every evening in its debut season, but on 23 May more people watched Gurdarshan Singh tell his tale of murder and debauchery than Punjab playing Hyderabad. In ratings terms, this was astounding.

  There was an expected—and justifiable—uproar after the press conference. The Union Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Choudhury’s charge that the police had flouted Press Council guidelines and her outrage over the slander of the dead teenager and her family forced Gurdarshan Singh to make a small change to his theory, which he otherwise stuck to. He now said that Hemraj was merely comforting a distressed Aarushi.

  The press now turned wild, revelling in the story of the adulterous father and the sexually precocious daughter. The next day, the Times of India’s front page said: ‘Dad Killed Aarushi: Cops’. ‘Couldn’t Tolerate Her Objection to His Extramarital Affair with Fellow Dentist’. Acres of space was devoted over four pages inside. Some of the more notable headlines were: ‘Attack Showed Clinical Precision and Planning’ and ‘Dr Death and the House of Horror’.

  Television completely swallowed the line that the case had been ‘cracked’. On 25 May Zee News ran a fictional reconstruction of the police version of events of the night of 15–16 May that crossed over from news to lurid entertainment without any difficulty at all. Zee wasn’t the only television channel doing this. As the journalist Vir Sanghvi observed in his widely read column ‘Counterpoint’, a television anchor actually went on air after dipping his hands in red paint.

  Meanwhile, the Noida police leaked almost all of Aarushi’s personal communications, her text messages to friends, her social media pages, and an email to her father which they felt was particularly incriminating. In it, Aarushi had apologized to her dad for something he didn’t approve of. It wasn’t clear what she was apologizing for, but it was evident from the ‘LOLZ’ (laughing out loud) at the end of the mail that it couldn’t have been something earth-shattering. But the police built a story of loose moral behaviour around it, which fit in with Gurdarshan Singh’s assessment that she was ‘characterless’. It also buttressed the theory that her relations with her father were strained. Why send an email if you live under the same roof? One commentator pointed out that when Gandhi was about Aarushi’s age, he too had written a letter to his father. A far more explicit one, in which he had admitted to stealing money, smoking and eating meat.

  The news television coverage had inspired India’s undisputed queen of the ‘family drama’, Ekta Kapoor, to base an episode of her hit serial Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki on the murders. Star Plus lapped up the idea. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) objected, and asked the Union minister for information and broadcasting, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, to step in. Dasmunsi spoke to channel officials personally, extracting an assurance that the episode would not be aired.

  The Hindustan Times reported that his ministry had already issued notices to some television channels over their coverage of the double murders, and Dasmunsi told students at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi: ‘Unhealthy competition among media companies is threatening all journalistic norms and values.’

  The police had advised the Talwars not to speak to the media, but Nupur Talwar went ahead and on 25 May gave an interview to the English news channel NDTV. The television interview was meant to counter Gurdarshan Singh and his narrative of the Talwars’ deviance. The decision to do the interview was preceded by conflicting advice from friends, well-wishers and lawyers. So far, there had been no mention of Nupur Talwar’s involvement in the crime, just the odd question about what she might have been doing while her daughter was being slaughtered. It was Rajesh who was arrested. But the circumstances of the crime—parents in the room adjoining the scene of their daughter’s murder—cast her as a defendant.

  She put herself on the stand, so to speak, before the largest jury imaginable. A jury she couldn’t see, but one that could watch her as closely as it wished. What she said would be important, of course, but how she behaved—her conduct—that is what would settle matters.

  Just as Gurdarshan Singh’s press conference provided the first chapter of the prosecution’s narrative, over the years to follow, Nupur Talwar’s interview, intended to compete with that narrative, ended up complementing it.

  Nupur Talwar’s face showed many of the signs of stress that one would expect from the sleepless nights that had followed her daughter’s murder and her husband’s arrest. There were moments when she looked close to breaking down, but she did not, could not—or would not—cry.

  The effect this had on the audience can still be seen in the comments sections of any story related to the murders. The overwhelming sentiment is that Nupur Talwar was cold, emotionless, a fake.

  From the investigations through the trial, Nupur Talwar’s ‘coldness’ was probably the one factor that weighed down the Talwars’ case the most. The second unspoken factor that played consistently against the Talwars was their ‘poshness’, especially Nupur’s. The Talwars may have lived in a middle-class environment, but it was easy for those who met her or saw her on television to place her a few notches higher.

  Not every viewer was anti-Talwar. The case polarized—and continues to—people. Aarushi’s classmates held a march protesting her character assassination. A host of prominent people also voiced their outrage. The NCPCR issued a notice to the UP police asking it to explain the basis of the allegations against the child victim. It seemed to me the case was taking a political turn.

  Uttar Pradesh was ruled at the time by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and Chief Minister Mayawati’s relations with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre were strained. Law and order is a state subject. Mayawati, to whom the Noida police was ultimately answerable, objected strongly to the notice from a central body. ‘More heinous crimes are being committed in Congress-ruled states’, the Hindustan Times quoted her as saying. She was tentative about the investigation, however, saying it wouldn’t be ‘dignified’ to reveal some of the ‘grave’ facts that her force had unearthed
.

  Mayawati floated the idea of transferring the case to the CBI. A branch of the CBI investigates ‘special crimes’, and the state government can initiate the process by sending a request to the department of personnel and training (under the Prime Minister’s Office, PMO) at the Centre. Mayawati said she had made several requests in the recent past that had been turned down. In this case, the Union home minister (who technically does not oversee the CBI) weighed in to say there was no need for a CBI investigation.

  Perhaps it was about exacting a price from the fiery UP chief minister. Mayawati was being asked to say, in some way, that she had lost faith in her police force, and required the Centre to help out. This would, of course, be used against her politically, and she was well aware of this.

  But by the following week the voices against Gurdarshan Singh only grew louder, sharper. Sanghvi wrote:

  Most worrying of all is the IGP’s obsession with sex. Every possible motive leads back to sex. First, there was the extraordinary statement that Rajesh Talwar found his daughter in an objectionable position with Hemraj, the servant. As Aarushi and Hemraj are dead, and Rajesh Talwar denies the incident how could the IGP possibly have known about the incident? Then there’s the suggestion that Rajesh Talwar was having an affair with a colleague and that his daughter objected; off the record, the police have painted the parents as orgy goers and wife swappers. And now, the cops are claiming that the father was motivated by Aarushi’s relations with various boyfriends.

  This is not a sex crime. So why is the Noida police going on and on about sex, ruining the reputations of the dead and the living without a shred of evidence?

  My guess is that they are not just incompetent, they are also sex starved. Perhaps the IGP needs professional help.

  On 1 June 2008 Mayawati was forced to transfer Gurdarshan Singh and two of his subordinates and hand over the case to the CBI. But even this was handled politically: the chief minister said she had transferred the officers not for botching up the probe, but because her government did not want to be accused of causing problems for the CBI or of projecting that the line the UP police had taken was correct.

  The lines of politics were redrawing the lines of investigation. Within days of the CBI taking over, headlines such as ‘Noida Police Theory Trashed’ began appearing in the press. Those who held the view that the UP police was in serious error may have had good reason to do so, but for the average media consumer, it looked less like investigation, more like politics.

  The Talwars neither approached nor knew any of the politicians who publicly or otherwise intervened, but an impression was formed that they must have had an inside line to them. Why else would such powerful people speak up on their behalf, transfer officers, and so on?

  A rumour that Nupur Talwar was Mayawati’s dentist began circulating in the cesspool of chatter in Delhi’s upper circles. Nupur assisted her senior Dr Sidharth Mehta at his Khan Market clinic, and he did indeed treat Mayawati. But she had never even seen the chief minister, whose appointments were specially fixed and never during regular clinic hours.

  Earlier in the investigation the UP police had found on Rajesh the prominent lawyer Pinaki Misra’s visiting card. This was seen as a sign of guilt. Who else but the guilty would carry a hotshot lawyer’s card around? It went even further. Misra was interested in the case, and expressed outrage at the Talwars’ victimization. So now a rumour gained ground that Misra was Nupur Talwar’s uncle. In no time, this became the ‘truth’. In fact, Pinaki Misra was Rajesh Talwar’s patient. But he wasn’t Nupur’s uncle.

  What were people thinking? A Hindustan Times-C-Fore survey published on 1 June polled people in six major Indian cities and found that 41 per cent now ‘feared’ being harmed by friends or family. But two-thirds, or 66 per cent, thought the police would never find the killers.

  Another survey in the same publication in the second week of June gives us an idea of what people thought of the media coverage. Nine out of ten people felt the media was ‘obsessed’ by the case. Three-fourths of the respondents said they were following the coverage very closely. Three-fourths also felt that the media had already pronounced Rajesh Talwar guilty; 64 per cent felt that the coverage would bias both the investigation and the courts.

  Inside a month of the murders, with an investigation that wasn’t worth a cheap magnifying glass, the damage had been done. Rajesh Talwar passed multiple lie detector tests. But the public didn’t believe him. It preferred to believe the policemen and the press instead.

  The planting of stories in the media didn’t stop even after the CBI had taken over the case. Perhaps the most scurrilous story that was put in circulation was one meant to cement the Talwars’ image as orgy-goers. The story went that on the night of the murders the couple took part in a major orgy. Mumbai’s Mid-Day, in the last week of June, quoted unnamed sources saying that a wife-swapping ring which was under investigation since February that year had led them to the Talwars in Sector 25. The report quoted sources as saying neighbours of the Talwars felt that they were in some sort of ‘club’, and that when the members of the club met Aarushi would be locked in the room while the club’s activities were arranged around the flat.

  Zee News ran it; so did Headlines Today, Aaj Tak and Mail Today. The story claimed the CBI as the source, and was based on the ‘information’ that Rajesh Talwar had booked a dozen rooms at a Delhi hotel and the couple spent three or four hours there. It went on to say that Hemraj was blackmailing Aarushi. There was not one line of confirmation from the CBI, the hotel or its staff. The Talwars were never asked for a version.

  This was in early July 2008; Rajesh Talwar was still in jail. Nupur wrote to Arun Kumar, in charge of the CBI team, in despair. The CBI issued an official denial. And the channels? Not a word of the story was recanted. No apology was offered.

  ***

  Vijay Shanker, the CBI director, had been watching the circus keenly, and he was horrified. When the case was handed over to his agency, he told me, he felt duty-bound to bring some sanity back: ‘If the CBI doesn’t investigate this, who will?’

  As the head of the CBI team that took over from the UP police, Arun Kumar’s first job was to make an inventory of the investigative blunders that had occurred over the two weeks since the incident. He immediately noted something that any experienced investigator would. This was the delay in the discovery of the second body. As the UP police fumbled along, Hemraj’s body lay for a whole day on the roof, just one locked door away from discovery.

  Kumar thought it was impossible that the murderer(s) would make the assumption that the police would not find the body on the first day. ‘No killer would think that, especially when the body was in the same building,’ he said. The Talwars, an educated, intelligent couple, were the least likely people to make this assumption, he thought. It was simply too risky. There was no way they could have prevented every policeman on the scene from looking behind the bloodstained terrace door. In fact, Mahesh Mishra, the superintendent of police (SP) who arrived on the scene on the morning of 16 May, had left instructions with subordinates to break the lock.

  Yet the UP police announced that the Talwars had tried to hide the body. Kumar found this claim illogical. He also learned that Krishna Thadarai, the Talwars’ clinic employee who lived just a few apartments away in the same block, in L-14 Jalvayu Vihar, had been picked up by the UP police on the first day. Hemraj was assumed missing, and the police thought that Krishna, a fellow Nepali who also worked for the Talwars and knew Hemraj well, perhaps knew his whereabouts.

  Krishna was a 22-year-old who had come to India from his village in western Nepal about ten years ago for medical treatment, but had stayed back. He was keen to educate himself and had just appeared for his 12th grade exams from an open school. He had been working for Rajesh Talwar for two years.

  The young Nepali was confined and questioned for about ten days by the Noida police, who shifted him from station to station in the area, as hapless relatives tried to rea
ch him with food. The confinement was illegal, and investigators never mention it, but this is just how the system works for his class of people. Arun Kumar had watched Gurdarshan Singh’s press conference, and something struck him as he read Krishna’s account in the case diary: ‘The version given by Singh was exactly what Krishna had told the police, almost verbatim.’

  It was Krishna who had successfully seeded the idea in the police that Rajesh Talwar was an adulterer and debauch, who was having an affair with his friend and colleague Dr Anita Durrani; that Aarushi was anguished when she discovered this and sought comfort in Hemraj’s arms; that Rajesh was deeply suspicious of Hemraj.

  Then there were details which had been extracted from the Talwars’ routine: that on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when Nupur Talwar went to work in Dr Sidharth Mehta’s Khan Market clinic, Dr Durrani and Dr Talwar would close the Noida clinic early and head for the L-32 flat. (They did this because they often went together to pick up Aarushi and Dr Durrani’s daughter Vidushi from school; this was Nupur’s responsibility on other days.)

  Krishna also said he was always told to take the day off early on those days, and that he never actually saw Talwar and Durrani together. When asked about this, he said that Hemraj had seen the two in the Talwars’ flat. Arun Kumar wryly noted that, with Hemraj dead, this was an unverified piece of hearsay.

  As Arun Kumar went through the case diary in the first week of June, what became clear to him was that the theory floated by the UP police wasn’t a result of any investigation. It was what one man had told them, sans corroboration.

  In the meantime, the CBI and forensic teams from the CBI’s forensic lab, Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), began collecting whatever evidence was left at the crime scene. In a statement made to CBI investigators on 1 July 2008, K.K. Gautam said he had done a ‘formal inspection’ of Hemraj’s room and that he had concluded from the depressions on the mattress that three people may have sat on it. He had also observed three glasses, two of them containing some amounts of liquor, and a bottle of whisky which was a quarter full. He had inspected the toilet too and deduced that more than one person had recently used it. His statement suggested the presence of outsiders on the night of the murders. Kumar decided that Krishna would need to be interrogated again.