by Avirook Sen
Kaul came into the case in September 2009, a little more than a year after the CBI took over. His boss, Neelabh Kishore, who was officially in charge of the case, was based in Dehradun. Kishore in turn reported to Javed Ahmed in Lucknow. But for all practical purposes, Kaul led the investigation. Kaul was in his early fifties, a balding man of average height with a rather large belly, which became even more substantial through the investigation. (The Ghaziabad regulars would greet him saying ‘Healthy lag rahe ho, Kaul sahab.’)
The superintendent had the air of a man who knew everything about everything, and then some. Part of this may have been because of the way some journalists pandered to him, nodding vigorously as he gave his short, low-decibel, briefings. Kaul was selective about who he briefed, but he seldom said much. He did, however, unfailingly give the impression that he knew a lot more—a tiny twisted smile would appear on his face at times, as if to say ‘We have this thing tied up, the sensational stuff you’re looking for will be revealed shortly.’ Sometimes, after having been briefed this way, reporter colleagues would tell me, ‘Just sit down one day with Kaul sahab, he will tell you everything.’
CBI officers could be assigned one of three branches in the organization: anti-corruption (against public servants, such as the investigation into the fodder or coal scams), economic offences (that result in losses to the national exchequer, such as major tax evasion/fraud, for example, the fake stamp paper racket run by Abdul Karim Telgi) or special crimes. Major crimes such as the Rajiv Gandhi assassination or various terror attacks come under the last category. So do dowry deaths involving the families of politicians, murders that may have a political angle to them—and therefore the possibility of abuse of influence—and murders of ordinary citizens that make too many headlines.
But special crimes investigations do not always have a high profile; in fact, most cases never make it to the papers in any significant way.
Most CBI officers will tell you that anti-corruption and economic offences are the preferred postings: the sensitivity and scale of the investigations undertaken make for much more interesting work. The darker side to this is that it offers CBI officers inclined that way much greater opportunities for making money or influence-peddling.
A special crimes position isn’t, therefore, exactly prized. A direct recruit into the force, Kaul was in the economic offences wing in his early years. There, a departmental inquiry was held against him on a corruption charge, of which he was later cleared.
Arun Kumar was too senior to be Kaul’s immediate boss, but he had upbraided Kaul both privately and publicly when Kaul was under his charge: Kumar had information that Kaul had been trying to extort money from people implicated in a dowry death case.
As his superior, Kumar was also privy to a list that the CBI guards with zeal. This is the ODI list: Officers of Doubtful Integrity. He told me Kaul was consistently on it. It’s fair to ask why Kumar didn’t just sack Kaul. But that’s not how governments work: the government servant is too well protected for that—not just by the law, but by other colleagues who watch each other’s back. The worst that happens is a transfer or a denial of promotion. Kaul was due to make the rank of superintendent earlier than he did, but was superseded.
Working within the system, the easy way out for Kumar was to avoid assigning Kaul to sensitive cases or ones in which he would need to interact with Kaul regularly. For instance, in the Nithari investigation, of which he was in charge, Kumar gave Kaul only a bit part. In the Aarushi–Hemraj investigation, no part at all. I learned from various people in the CBI that Kaul’s reputation within the CBI had another facet: not everyone approved of his methods, but he was also seen as someone who got the job done—at a cost.
Kaul had for example in the past used the sex angle in a case effectively. The infusion of sex into a story worked very well in the media; it focused public opinion not on the facts of the case, but on the character of the suspects. In the notorious killing of the human rights activist Shehla Masood in Bhopal, which he had investigated, the media was supplied lurid excerpts from a somewhat dubious diary that Zahida Parvez, the alleged mastermind, maintained. Parvez’s motive in arranging the hit on the activist was jealousy. She purportedly suspected Masood of having an affair with a politician she herself was involved with. Within two days of Kaul taking over as investigating officer, the contents of the diary were all over the press.
Kaul was also known to have settled on a quarry and then coerced the suspect’s friends/close associates to testify against them. The 2003 murder of Ram Avtar Jaggi, a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) politician in Chhattisgarh, was one such. Kaul’s theory at the time was that a political rival had bumped off Jaggi. He decided the culprit was Amit Jogi, son of the Congressman and former Chhattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi.
The conspiracy to murder Jaggi was hatched in a hotel room in Raipur, with Amit Jogi as its mastermind, said the investigator. Kaul then got a man who had known Jogi for decades to say under oath that the chief minister’s son was the chief conspirator and director of operations. The scene described by the witness defied credulity. He claimed there were more than a dozen people present in the hotel room at one point or another; some were called, some came, some went, and some stayed, as Jogi hatched his plan. Along with Amit Jogi, dozens were arrested on the basis of this and other similar statements.
Jogi was acquitted in 2007 after spending nearly a year in jail because Kaul had been careless. It turned out that on the night in question one of Jogi’s close friends whom his star witness had named hadn’t been in the Raipur hotel at all. He was in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t just him. Two other people whom the CBI claimed were in the hotel were also in the UK. A fourth was in Patna. Those who were out of the country produced their passports and immigration records. Kaul promptly had these seized for ‘verification’. The CBI kept the passports for over a year, Amit Jogi told me, leaving the affected people running around trying to put together UK immigration records, passenger manifests of the flights they took, hotel reservations and records of credit card transactions.
The CBI’s image is built upon the notion that it is more competent and more neutral than the police (it reports to the central vigilance commission and the department of personnel, Government of India; the police report to their respective state governments). That the CBI’s recruits are largely from the same pool as the police is somehow forgotten.
The announcement that the CBI has taken over an investigation is routinely treated as good news. It comes with the suggestion that there is intent to get to the bottom of whatever the matter is. With this comes expectation. In the Aarushi case, for instance, the magistrate who sent the case for trial reflected the general belief that the CBI had disappointed not just her, but the country, by saying that it didn’t have enough evidence to convict anyone when it submitted its closure report.
This faith that the CBI has the ability to crack every case, nail every culprit, isn’t rooted in reality. It recalls, without irony, those 1970s’ films starring the legendary Raaj Kumar as the CBI officer zipping down to a crime scene in an Ambassador Mark 2, with his assistant—a terrified German shepherd struggling to maintain balance on its roof—and solving mysteries by simply looking at the suspects as he smoked a cigarette. The reality is different. What does the CBI do in cases where winning a conviction seems difficult? The Jogi case reported in the press is instructive.
Firoz Siddiqui is at once a journalist, a detective and a murder conspirator out on bail. He has also wet his beak in Raipur’s political soup, and is seen as an Amit Jogi follower.
In line with his strategy, Kaul summoned Siddiqui and asked him to record a statement under Section 164 saying that he knew of Amit Jogi’s plan to get rid of his rival Ram Avtar Jaggi, and that it was hatched at a particular location.
‘I told him I knew nothing about this. How could I just make it up?’ Siddiqui told me. Kaul first tried to coax Siddiqui, and when this failed, told him that he was asking for tro
uble if he didn’t comply. ‘He said he would arrest me, but I refused to give a 164,’ said Siddiqui.
Then, late one night, Kaul summoned Siddiqui to a guest house in Raipur saying he needed assistance with the identification of some people in photographs related to the case. When Siddiqui reached there, he was told that his visit had nothing to do with any photographs. He was there only to record his 164, failing which he would be arrested.
Over the next several hours, Siddiqui kept insisting he could not make up a story. At 4 a.m., Kaul woke up Siddiqui’s brother Raees and summoned him to the guest house. ‘He told Raees, “Try and drill some sense into your brother—does your family need all this hassle?”’
In the end, Siddiqui was arrested. In CBI custody for the next fortnight, he says he thought up a plan. He began to pretend that he was ready to spit out his 164. The arrest, the effect it was having on his family and his financial situation were all too much for him to take.
Kaul was pleased, and told Siddiqui he would grant him a second chance. Just before the statement was recorded, Siddiqui requested Kaul to talk to his brother Raees and explain things, reassure him that no harm would come to the family. Kaul agreed. What he did not know was that Raees was recording the conversation and several more that were to follow. In them, Kaul is heard saying that he cooked up the charge sheet; that the court was under his control, at least in the matter of granting reprieves; that the Siddiqui family would be taken care of financially.
He promised Raees a fleet of Innova cars to start a taxi service, and said he had already sent some money to the Siddiquis. (Siddiqui told me that his family received Rs 25,000, and that they accepted it since it was part of the sting operation to nab a crooked cop.) The tapes went straight to the media of course, causing a storm in Raipur. They were also submitted in court. But Kaul simply denied that it was his voice. The court asked if the officer would be willing to offer a voice sample for matching. Kaul refused. (By law, you need not give evidence against yourself.)
Jogi spent ten months in jail, before eventually being acquitted. Four years after his 2007 acquittal, the CBI challenged it and the matter is now in the Supreme Court. As for Siddiqui, the lower court convicted him, along with dozens of others, but in the light of the quality of evidence, he was granted bail by the high court.
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In the Aarushi–Hemraj case, Kaul’s groundwork had been done by the UP policeman Gurdarshan Singh. The media had already been given a sniff of sex; it was more a question of serving a spiced-up version of what Singh had said at the time.
Within two weeks of Javed Ahmed, Neelabh Kishore and A.G.L. Kaul taking over, the first steps for coming up with a ‘new’ theory were taken. The process was formally started on 25 September 2009, with an email from Ahmed to the director of the Forensic Science Laboratory, Gandhinagar. The email made a specific request that Dr M.S. Dahiya, then a deputy director at the lab, be asked to conduct a ‘crime scene reconstruction’.
Why Dahiya? On the professional front, there was his work on the 2002 Godhra train burning incident to be considered. Dahiya’s services (or, more accurately, the services of forensic scientists) were requested two months after the incident, in which 59 Hindu activists were burnt alive in a compartment of the Sabarmati Express. By the time Dahiya and Co. reached the scene, almost all physical evidence had been seriously compromised. So Dahiya conducted a crime scene reconstruction, simulating the throwing of fuel from outside the train carriage using water. He argued that this wasn’t how the train was set alight.
What he suggested instead became controversial: that the fire was started inside the compartment, by miscreants who had boarded the train. Some people interpreted Dahiya’s report to mean the culprits were already on board. Although there have been convictions in the Godhra case—and in the cases of the riots that followed the incident—the issue has never quite been settled. A crime scene reconstruction is, after all, just a theory.
The Aarushi case required a theory, and Kaul turned to Dahiya. Within days of the first contact with Dahiya, things began moving at a frenetic pace. Within a fortnight, the whole complexion of the investigation would change, even though the available material remained exactly the same. Not much could be done about the material. But what about people? People, as it turned out, could change.
I put myself in Kaul’s shoes and considered the challenge before him as he took over the investigation. At times it appeared that his brief was to look at new angles and wrap up the case. But here was a set of documents—the servants’ scientific test results—that suggested the earlier investigation may have been in the right direction. If they stood the test of further investigation, they could also point to the direction the investigation could take.
Within two days of his taking over as investigating officer, the CBI claimed it had recovered Aarushi’s cellphone with the help of the Delhi police. It was also around this time that Hemraj’s cellphone was found to be ‘active’ in Punjab. Arun Kumar’s team had gone on the basis of the narco and other tests on the servants who admitted to knowing how the phones were disposed of, but they had failed to recover anything. Kaul had made one recovery, and didn’t pursue the ‘active in Punjab’ lead at all. But with the recovery of Aarushi’s phone the servants’ narco revelations—which said they had destroyed the phones—stood discredited. It could now be argued that the tests weren’t dependable. They were simply kept on file, and away from the courts and the media.
The servants’ narco reports out of the way, Kaul turned to what he could try and cull out from the scientific tests done on the Talwars during Arun Kumar’s time. Rajesh and Nupur had undergone multiple polygraph tests and the reports indicated their innocence. There was also the January 2009 brain-mapping and polygraph reports from FSL Gandhinagar.
These reports too were very clear. In her comprehensive forensic analysis report, Dr Vaya wrote that there was ‘no indication suggesting that they either directly or indirectly participated in the murder of Aarushi or Hemraj’. The lab’s findings only indicated ‘that both of them are victims of the circumstances of the ghastly murders of Aarushi and Hemraj’.
This was not how Kaul saw it at all. He enlisted Dr Dahiya’s help in reinterpreting the reports. Between them, they prepared an unofficial two-page summary with their own version, picking out indicators of the Talwars having hidden Aarushi’s cellphone and of Rajesh striking Hemraj on the head.
The previous year, Dr Vaya and her team of scientists had been so convinced by the tests they had conducted on Rajesh and Nupur that they found narco analysis unnecessary. Kaul and Dahiya now went to her with their own interpretation—and argued the case for subjecting the Talwars to narco tests.
Dr Vaya was incensed. She pointed out to them that specific findings in these kinds of tests couldn’t be cherry-picked to suit a hypothesis. That conclusions could only be drawn from comprehensive analysis that supports a logical sequence of events. She also told them that the tests on the servants both in her lab and in others consistently pointed to their involvement. If the Nupur and Rajesh reports suggested they had hidden Aarushi’s phone, the same indications were there in the tests conducted on the servants. Surely, argued Dr Vaya, all of them could not have hidden Aarushi’s phone. Finally, she let Kaul and Dahiya know that neither of them were behavioural scientists. This was her area of expertise, not theirs.
Kaul and Dahiya did not want to stand down. They insisted on narco analysis being done on the Talwars. Dr Vaya told them that she had no problems conducting the tests as long as there was consent, and a court order. Kaul set about getting both, but that would take some months.
To establish that there was a new, viable line of investigation two things needed attention: the weapon(s) and the motive. The khukri was now out, but a scalpel seemed suspicious enough when wielded by a surgeon—even a dentist. For the motive, Kaul and Dahiya could fall back on Gurdarshan Singh’s earlier statements. But this would require leavening and kneading the dough again. The ce
ntral theme in the new theory relied heavily on the personal details of the Talwars: their profession, lifestyle, their relationship with their daughter—and, crucially, her relationships with boys.
To accomplish this, Kaul turned his attention to, and there isn’t a more delicate way to put this, Aarushi’s vagina. He returned to the post-mortem report, and to Dr Sunil Dohare, the man who had conducted it. In his post-mortem report, Dr Dohare had detected nothing abnormal with regard to Aarushi’s genitals. He had mentioned a whitish discharge from both the uterus and the vagina, but this wasn’t unusual in girls Aarushi’s age.
Dohare had sat on an eight-man AIIMS expert committee which submitted its report in September 2008. Dr Naresh Raj, the doctor who conducted Hemraj’s post-mortem, was also on the committee. The AIIMS committee deliberated over the facts for a good two months and submitted what it described as its ‘considered opinion’, an opinion endorsed on every page by Dr Dohare and Dr Raj. There was ‘nothing abnormal detected’ with regard to Aarushi’s sexual organs.
But a month later, in October 2008, the CBI recorded a second statement from Dr Dohare. (His first, after the post-mortem, was recorded a few months earlier.) On the bottom of the first page was the line: ‘During post-mortem examination I observed that the vaginal cavity of the deceased was dilated.’ This was not a finding but an observation. Perhaps Dohare was explaining why he obtained vaginal swabs. Had it been anything more, the doctor was surely bound to record it in his report. He hadn’t, but Kaul seized upon the line.