The girl was certainly killed, but whether she was raped too cannot be said for sure. If she was killed at the least, there must have been a killer or more. Who was that or who were those people? Not those accused, says the book, The Girl from Kathua, by academic-activist Madhu Purnima Kishwar. This is not a mere book but a shocking exposure of the deep state that runs the Indian administration including the provincial government, with tentacles spread as far and wide as the Bollywood entertainment industry and American news media.
Rasana in Kathua is a hamlet of 15 odd huts or tenements, from where the victim is said to have disappeared on January 10, 2018. On the 17th of that month, the girl is found dead. The Girl from Kathua mentions that there was no noise over the crime in those seven days when the victim was missing. And then all hell breaks loose, in what appears to be a globally coordinated move, on the 18th of the month when a Hindu boy is arrested and a confession to the crime extracted out of him.
While it was suspicious how everybody and their uncle was naming an alleged rape victim — a minor at that — with impunity, violating Indian as well as international laws, mere suspicion was getting the world nowhere near the truth other than getting an inkling that this was anti-Hindu and anti-Indian government propaganda. The academic-activist took it upon herself to dig out the facts as several aspects of the reports and tweets about the alleged gang rape and murder were amiss.
Beginning with the fact that the first three pages of the charge sheet against the accused told one story and the remaining pages gave quite a different account of what transpired with the girl — the reader will soon learn how both accounts lack credibility — every facet of the case the propagandists howled over ensured that the Hindu community earned a bad name and the Narendra Modi dispensation came out of the affair stinking of intolerance. Already, if that section of the news media is to be believed, Hindus had supposedly made the lives of Muslims hell since May 2014, a calumnious campaign that had been running with cherry-picked as well as false reports since the BJP government began its journey.
The first suspect is a boy called Shubham Sangra, poor at studies, putting up at the place of his mama (maternal uncle). The investigators initially find — they as much as note it down in the charge sheet — that the allegedly eight-year-old girl (she could actually be 12 when she died, a whole chapter on her age in the book establishes) never screams for help. Neither while she is being waylaid by the accused while she is looking for her horses gone astray nor while her legs are being tied up inside a cowshed with the nada (cummerbund) of her own salwar nor even while the boy helps her wash her private parts every time after she answers the nature’s call in captivity.
In the first story by the police, the boy suddenly decides to rape the victim on the sixth day of her captivity. Then, so as not to leave any trace of his crime, he kills her and bludgeons her face with heavy rocks. The girl never tries to escape to her house at a distance of barely 8 min from her ‘cage’ any time during the six days of her captivity — even when the two just wander around in the bushes with her limbs untied.
Meanwhile, Shubham cannot make head or tail of what he is officially being accused of, as the FIR is written in Urdu.
The spot of the crime nowhere mentions any temple in the first three pages of the charge sheet.
Following a second change in the probe team, the spot of the crime moves to the temple. It’s dedicated to a local deity, Baba Kali Veer, a semi-historical, legendary warrior chieftain that local Dogra Hindus revere. This one-room ‘temple’ happens to have three doors, the keys to which are in the custody of three different villagers. The temple has no place to hide as there is no opaque window pane but grills people can see through and a table measuring 2 feet in breadth and 3 feet in length, on which the gang-rape is said to have been executed!
The third SIT alleges in the second account in the charge sheet that Shubham’s uncle Sanji Ram, a local patwari, hatches the conspiracy to scare the Muslim Bakarwal community away from the village. Why the Hindu man would pick a minor orphan girl with foster parents to terrorise her whole community is left unexplained. The relationship of the girl with her stepparents is so tenuous that they sent the child instead of her able-bodied, young stepbrother to manage their horses.
The adoptive family — which made millions out of the tragedy, with money from sympathisers pouring in from across the world (pages 440-470) — comes across as all the more dubious when the viral image of the victim is considered. On the one hand, they tell Kishwar they never photographed the child because that would be anti-Islam; on the other, she is photographed only once two days before she goes missing and that is where one of the two images that went viral across the world on 18 January 2018 came from. The author asks for the second photo; the family refuses.
By the way, readers will recall that the photo that went viral had remarkable clarity. It couldn’t have been taken by an ordinary camera in possession of a poor Bakarwal family. The stepbrother tells Kishwar somebody had lent an advanced smartphone for the purpose.
Curiously, throughout this sordid affair, the biological parents of the victim are nowhere seen or heard of.
In the second story, the police say the accused group uses Manar, a tobacco-based laxative, and Epitril, a drug for epilepsy of negligible potency — not a sleeping pill — to sedate the victim before raping her. Is that even possible medically? The police say the potency of Epitril was 0.05, which is non-existent.
On the first day of holding the girl hostage, according to the second police story, the accused also manage to get some accomplices to the spot of the heinous act of gang rape that they commit two days later. This is where the police introduce another accused, Vishal Jangotra, Shubham’s cousin who lives in western Uttar Pradesh, at the time pursuing BSc in agriculture from Akanksha College, Meeranpur, Muzaffarnagar. Vishal is Sanji Ram’s younger son.
How Vishal manages to leave the examination centre near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and reach the remote village in Jammu hundreds of miles away the next morning is another intrigue in the second police story. The police say the prime accused called him “telephonically” — neither the caller nor the recipient of the call has a phone, though — in the evening for an opportunity to “satisfy his lust”. How does the poor boy manage to be in the spot of crime within hours? Was a special plane with subsidised airfare arranged to fly him between non-existent airports in his UP village that lies between Meerut and Muzaffarnagar at one end and Rasana in Jammu at the other?
Actually, Vishal was not in the spot of crime at all on the day the police say the gang rape happened. But the police refuse to acknowledge his attendance at the exam centre, his answer sheet of the day, his college principal’s statement, his call records, his train ticket of another day, or the witness of his landlady in the UP village. The prosecution here mischievously hides the proof from the court that it was impossible for Vishal to have been present at the spot of the said crime on the day the crime is reported to have been committed. But then, the defence proves its mettle here, furnishes relevant CCTV footage, and secures his acquittal.
The ‘criminals’, after gang-raping the poor girl, push her under the table and cover it with a rug. She is still alive, mind you.
Throughout the odyssey, neither daily visitors to the temple nor Lohri (13 January) or Makar Sankranti (14 January) celebrators who had gathered in large numbers in the temple locate the girl hidden under the small table!
Even her foster parents are at the temple once but they can’t see her. In this second account that begins in the fourth page of the charge sheet, the victim does not raise an alarm even when she should see her parents close by in the temple where she was raped and is going to be killed later! A devil’s advocate could say she was unconscious under the effect of the drug (Manar or Epitril or both), but how do you hide an 8 or 12-year-old girl under a 2×3 table and manage to keep her sedated all the while, not letting her be awakened by any noise inside a busy temple for six consecutive days?
Anyway, two days after Sankranti, the accused are supposed to have realised that more rituals are to follow, and then they decide to kill her. In between, there is confusion among the eight accused — including four local cops — over how to get rid of the girl but they do it somehow on January 16, 2018, a day before the body is discovered.
The crude joke or juvenile fantasy of whoever drafted the charge sheet does not end there. The ‘evidence’ above notwithstanding, the police neither seal off the entrance to the temple nor take the table in their custody after their shocking discoveries.
It was after April 10 that year that the second charge sheet was filed by a third Special Investigation Team. Why the sleuths had to be changed so rapidly is a question that disturbed no higher authority. All this while, other than a bunch of local Hindus who made videos of the temple to claim the alleged crime was impossible to have been committed at that spot — and uploaded the videos on Facebook and Twitter — the Hindu community, by and large, condemn the crime as vehemently as Bollywood celebrities, American and European media.
Presuming the crime happened exactly as the media claimed it had happened, everybody found it indefensible. That is quite unlike Islamists and their agony uncles and aunts in the media making a statement of condolence that terrorist Burhan Wani was born to a humble schoolmaster!
In the meantime, the chief minister of what is still a state, Mehbooba Mufti, unleashes such a reign of persecution that many Hindu villagers flee their respective villages in Kathua and put up on the streets. Rajauri, Poonch, Doda, or any other part of Kashmir where there has been a remarkable demographic change from a Hindu skew to a Muslim majority does not prod people to see a pattern, indicating that the strategically located Rasana village — its significance is explained in Chapter 8 of the book — was the next episode in the Mufti family’s religious cleansing project. Kishwar argues that Sanji Ram was targeted because he was a patwari in the irrigation department who was disturbed by the land deals that clearly showed how the demographics of his area were changing. Co-accused Deepak Khajuria and Tilak Raj, both policemen, are targeted after they are identified from “a few scuffles” with Bakarwals, of which the police have no proof. The cops were active in tracing and catching cattle smugglers.
The process of cleansing Hindus from what was then a state had begun under the then-chief minister’s father, Mufti Mohammed Saeed. But why blame Muslims when several Hindus — chiefly journalists and celebrities but also a so-called Hindutva party — collaborate in the persecution of fellow Hindus? Except the lawyers who smell a rat in the fantastic charge sheet.
Many members of the Bar Association of Jammu go on strike. Interestingly, the head of the bar, BS Slathia, who joins the protests, is a Congress activist, by no stretch linked to the Sangh Parivar or a fan of Prime Minister Modi. But the media is not interested even in Congress leader and lawyer Slathia. As though the media bias was not enough, the Supreme Court threatens to cancel irrevocably the lawyering licence of Jammu advocates for life and then the bar association distances itself from the protests.
Meanwhile, the careers of two BJP politicians — Chaudhary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga — who join the lawyers’ protests is damaged for demanding as vociferously as the striking lawyers a CBI probe into the rape-and-murder charge. Singh continues protesting under a new forum floated overnight, the Hindu Ekta Manch. He sensitises people in several villages to the case. By another month, he has mobilised about 50,000 people in his rallies, who are marching with him in the heat of May. While the CBI probe into the alleged rape and death of the Kathua girl never materialises, the self-styled pro-Hindu BJP government in New Delhi unleashes the same agency on their own member. Exasperated, Singh leaves the party.
Around this time in television studios situated in Delhi, Kishwar tries to put across the point that the claims being made about the case are mutually conflicting. She is heckled by a famous anchor who claims the nation wants to know whatever he wants to know. Worse, even a well-known Kashmiri Pandit journalist in print throws her weight behind the Islamists. That is when Kishwar decides that the facts of the case that had reached her in Delhi need to be studied on ground zero. Her probe that starts culminates in a few years in the book released in March this year.
Since this book must be read and hence sold widely and wildly, I stop short of mentioning the questionable replacement of the Jammu investigation team with Kashmiri cops by the Mufti administration early during the probe and the horrendous miscarriage of justice by the trail judge — Tejwinder Singh of the Pathankot District & Sessions Court — later. It is not kosher in mainstream media to accuse fellow journalists, so nobody from the profession has been named in this review, but all usual suspects are found in Section II of the book. And then, of course, how can an opportunity for propaganda miss foreign-funded lawyer Indira Jaising? The generous donations Jaising receives from the West for defending disruptive elements in India is tabulated on page 359 and explained contextually in Chapter 17.
The propagandists’ shamelessness continues. After the book was released, it was expectedly panned by the Leftist-Islamist cabal, the clique that neither went to Kathua to confirm what they had been learning about the case from distant Delhi and Mumbai nor read the book beyond the title and the name of the author. Their problem, funny as it may be, is that they hate Madhu Kishwar’s strident human rights advocacy on Twitter and the rare indiscretion of believing in a few messages received via WhatsApp!
The author is a senior journalist and writer. Views expressed are personal.
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