I defy you to read Avirook Sen’s book Aarushi, and not feel sick. That’s not because the author has written a terrible book — in fact, Sen’s book is as fine an investigative piece of non-fiction as you will get to read — but because of what Aarushi tells you about our police, about the Central Bureau of Investigation, about our media and about our judicial system. And how, at their worst, they are rotten beyond imagination.
The CBI, particularly, comes off as the villain of the piece. It has been called the Congress Bureau of Investigation in the past, but it has shown in the present (as in its failure to appeal when Amit Shah was acquitted in the fake encounter case in Gujarat) that its loyalty can quickly change sides: it should be more aptly called the Changeable Bureau of Investigation, or the Convenient Bureau of Investigation.
That’s why the news, just a few days old, that the Maharashtra government has transferred the Sheena Bora murder case in Mumbai, to the CBI, is so very baffling. Here was a case being personally investigated by one of the state’s most able cops (Rakesh Maria), and then under the new police commissioner, the universally admired Ahmed Javed.
We won’t go into their strange exchange of posts — that’s the subject of another article. The case seemed to be making striking progress — the murderers had been identified, the murder — timelines, method, crime scene, etc., all completely revealed, the principals had even confessed… All that remained was for the motive (clearly money) to be fully unravelled. The money trail was complex, and would obviously need time to be fully understood and exposed but, then, the investigation was on for less than a month!
Yet the Maharashtra government suddenly transferred the case to the CBI, prompting many observers to wonder if there’s somebody of great influence who wants the whole thing to become part of the CBI’s collection of unsolved cases. (Over 9,000 at the last count.) There may not be a grain of truth in it, but it says something of the CBI’s reputation that many are willing to believe this kind of speculation.
To return to the Aarushi case: the details of the murder of the 14-year-old Delhi schoolgirl and the old family retainer Hemraj are too well known to be repeated. All we need to know is that Aarushi’s parents, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, both well-known dentists are lodged in jail for the double murder, murders which Sen’s book clearly tells you they did not commit. Sen does not speculate as to who the killers were, because Aarushi is a book that deals only with verifiable facts, does not quote unnamed sources, and as he says “there’s not a single line in the book which I can’t point to a source”.
That’s quite a contrast to our media. As the book shows, first the police, then the CBI, leaked salacious bits of misinformation right through the investigation and the trial, to make the Talwars look bad. CBI’s A.G.L. Kaul, the chief investigator, was a man on the CBI’s officers of doubtful integrity (ODI) list. Apart from that dubious record, he also routinely sexualised every case he worked on. That’s why he floated the theory (shamefully latched on by the media, especially television) that the Talwars indulged in orgies! The book also brings out the class distinctions between the police force and upper middle-class urban India, because of which Aarushi’s innocent diary jottings of “sleepovers” with friends was seen as proof of her promiscuity.
A girl of 14! Incidentally, in the Sheena Bora case, the same media frenzy was fed by police leaks on a daily basis. When I deplored these leaks on Times Now’s News Hour, Arnab Goswami bristled and said, “We have our own sources, Mr Dharker. We don’t rely on police leaks.” Amazing how the “sources” dried up when Mr Javed clamped down on the leaks!
Aarushi describes a whole number of bizarre happenings in the handling of the case which should shame any investigation agency worth its name. Soon after Aarushi’s body was discovered, relatives, friends, curious neighbours, media personnel and policemen milled around the place, with no effort to cordon it off, with the result that the chance of finding incriminating evidence or fingerprints was virtually reduced to zero. There was the unbelievable fact that the police did not bother to open a locked door behind which lay Hemraj’s body for a full 24 hours!
Then there was the fact of Kaul sending email queries to the Talwars, not from the official CBI email address, but from a deliberately created ID hemraj.julvayuvihar@gmail.com, a constant reminder of their dead servant. There were the even more cruel autopsy reports of Aarushi. The first, immediately after her death, was conducted by Dr Sunil Dohre.
He said that “nothing abnormal” was detected in her sexual organs (i.e., there was no evidence of rape or intercourse). The same doctor, 16 months later, changes his testimony saying Aarushi’s “vaginal opening was prominently wide open and even the cervix was visible”. By then, of course, the body had been cremated a long time earlier. Not just that, but the report was “buttressed” by the “medical opinion” of two sweepers in Dr Dohre’s lab!
Similarly, there’s Dr Naresh Raj who conducted the post-mortem on the body of Hemraj 44 hours after his murder. Dr Raj said Hemraj’s penis was swollen, which according to the doctor, meant that Hemraj was having sex when he was killed. When the defence said that swollen organs (including the penis) were the normal state in a corpse, and asked him why he was attributing this to sex, Dr Raj said that his observations were based on the “experience of my marriage”.
There is more: a crucial piece of evidence — a pillow cover with Hemraj’s DNA — was found in the room of Krishna, a servant who was an early suspect, but this evidence was actually switched in court! Not just the Ghaziabad district court but the Allahabad high court ignored this serious fraud even when pointed out by the defence. And speaking of courts, the trial court judge, a gentleman called Shyam Lal had a record of never having acquitted a single person in his career. Aarushi’s was his last case and it is presumed he wanted to go in a blaze of glory. In a startling revelation, Sen found that Mr Lal had begun writing his judgment well before the defence had even begun its final arguments, and that part of the judgement had been written by his daughter-in-law!
All this sounds like the perfervid imagination of a novelist working out a Kafkaesque scenario. But it’s happening in real life before our very eyes. The Talwars have not only lost their daughter, but their reputation, their practice and their liberty. The servants who are the likely killers have disappeared, probably in Nepal. And all this is due to the incompetence and machinations of our very sick system. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
The writer is a senior journalist
