The Good Girls Page 8

  But it was the way the brothers had reacted to the sight of the bodies that convinced Ram Vilas that his hunch was accurate. It wasn’t so much about what they did wrong. Indeed, they had acted just right.

  He assessed the pair with distaste. Padma’s father and Lalli’s father were still sobbing.

  ‘They killed them,’ he told himself. ‘They hanged them.’

  The Poster Child for a New India

  In the remote parts of the district, important information was still broadcast on a loudspeaker. But all the men here had a phone. Rooted to the orchard, they shared the news with everyone they could think of. They took photos of the girls, they recorded videos. The digital souvenirs were sent around via the social network WhatsApp and soon caught the attention of farmers dozens of kilometres away. It was a pivotal time in the harvest, but the opportunity to look death in the face was a ‘naya tamasha’, an exciting new spectacle, as one man observed.

  The road to Katra was soon jammed with horse carts, motorbikes and tractors. The farmers brought their wives, their wives toted children, and some even carried guns. The visitors gazed up at the girls. ‘Ladkiyan tangi!’ Girls hanging!

  The crowd staked their positions around the tree, just behind the Shakya family. Women sat cross-legged on the bare ground with their faces covered to ensure modesty. ‘When they cannot control us, they kill us,’ they agreed.

  Behind them, older men sat on their haunches with their cotton dhotis pulled up to their knees, beedis clutched in their fists. The younger ones strolled about in their trousers and loose-fitting, Western-style shirts, clicking pictures. As temperatures soared, they stripped down to their vests. Some teenagers climbed to the tops of trees for a bird’s-eye view.

  Everyone believed Padma and Lalli had been killed. They were children who were found hanging in a public place. The hangings, people said, were meant to serve as a reminder of the powerlessness of the poor. No one was safe from the better-off castes, not even tiny girls.

  Shocking events were hardly a novelty in the district. The previous year, in 2013, two members of a family in a nearby village had died by suicide, an aunt and nephew allegedly in an illicit love affair. That same year, the police beat a young man to death because his sister had married outside their caste.

  And the year before that a teenaged boy from the district was among those arrested, and later convicted, in the appalling crime that haunted the nation – the Delhi bus rape.

  One cold December night in 2012, a twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy intern and her male friend were returning home after watching the movie Life of Pi in an upscale Delhi mall. It was around 9.30 p.m., but the streets were brightly lit and crowded. The roads thundered with fast-moving traffic. After they had boarded what seemed to be a passenger bus, the men inside took hold of the young woman. Six of them gang-raped her and tortured her, shoving a metal rod up to her diaphragm. Then they threw the couple from the vehicle. They tried to run them over. When the victim was brought into the hospital, she was alive, but her intestines were spilling out of her body.

  The victim, the daughter of an airport porter – whose name and identity was withheld as per the requirements of Indian law – was the first in her family to go to college. Her parents had glimpsed her potential early on. ‘Boys cry when you send them to school,’ her father Badri Singh said. ‘But she would cry if you didn’t let her go to school.’27

  He sold most of his land to educate her, and when that wasn’t enough, he took on debt and double shifts. This was more than most would do for a girl.

  The victim might have been the poster child for a new India – the porter’s daughter who went on to become a doctor, fulfilling the highest aspiration of every educated Indian. Instead, the ease with which she was captured, raped and then murdered – in the national capital no less – was a klaxon: listen, there is something very wrong with this place.

  When the victim died in a hospital bed in Singapore, Indians responded with the largest demonstration against sexual assault the country had ever witnessed. The victim was widely known as Nirbhaya, meaning fearless, and her struggle and death became a symbol of women’s resistance to rape around the world. The six culprits had been quickly apprehended and would stand trial in record time, but the protests reflected the fact that too many victims of sexual violence never saw justice.

  The protests were so forceful that police employed tear gas and enforced curfews. Eventually, the government had to respond. They launched public awareness campaigns, helplines and women’s shelters. They strengthened existing laws: the definition of the word ‘rape’ was expanded to include any object being inserted into any part of the body – this was in recognition of the fact that the victim’s rapists had tortured her with a metal rod. And for the first time ever, acid attacks, intent to disrobe a woman, voyeurism and stalking were each made an offence.

  The minimum punishment for anyone convicted of gang rape was raised to twenty years, rape that led to death was punishable with the death penalty. And the age of consent was raised from sixteen to eighteen. The changes to these laws would have a powerful impact on the rape cases that did make it to trial. In 2019, four of the six men convicted in the Delhi bus rape case were hanged.28

  The lesson that many ordinary Indians took from the aftermath of the Delhi bus rape was that protests mattered. They forced the hand of power. The villagers of Katra had also understood this. And, as far as they were concerned, the deaths of Padma and Lalli were more disturbing even than the attack in Delhi. The way they saw it, the children hadn’t died in a city far away, pushing their boundaries and asserting their independence. They hadn’t died watching an English film with a boy, then taking public transport at night. They hadn’t died doing something that girls like them should never have thought to do. They had died where they were born. They had died pissing in the fields.

  But Delhi, where the high-profile rape had taken place, where the most powerful politicians lived, where the media conglomerates had their air-conditioned offices, was hundreds of kilometres away. The villagers couldn’t go to them.

  Would they come to the village?

  27 ‘she would cry if you didn’t let her go to school’: spiegel.de/international/world/exploring-the-lives-of-the-rape-victim-and-suspects-in-india-a-879187.html

  28 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/world/asia/india-bus-rape-convicts-hanged.html

  A Reporter’s Big Break

  The morning birds had only just begun their chorus when Ankur Chaturvedi, a reporter with Aaj Tak – one of India’s most popular Hindi-language news channels – started to receive calls from Katra.

  The twenty-seven-year-old had reported from western Uttar Pradesh for several years. He circulated his mobile phone number liberally and encouraged sources to call him night or day. They phoned in news of gang rapes, acid attacks and randua pratha, when family members killed single men for their ancestral property. They called when nilgai stampeded, laying crops to waste, or when a child slipped and fell headlong into a well.

  Chaturvedi didn’t always follow through. In Uttar Pradesh, where bad news was commonplace, he was under pressure to find stories that would bring light relief.

  Aaj Tak’s more than 100 million viewers liked to watch news that boosted their self-esteem. The middle class, particularly, wanted to hear of the India that had survived the worldwide economic recession virtually unscathed, the India whose economy was now the third-largest in Asia. They enjoyed news about cricket and Bollywood. And they relished global lists featuring Indian names, because these reiterated the country’s growing place in the world.

  On 28 May, the day the girls were found, Forbes magazine published its list of the world’s most powerful women. It included five Indian and Indian-origin women – among them, the chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco and the newly appointed chairperson of the State Bank of India.29 A few months later, Fo
rtune published its list of the most powerful women in the Asia Pacific, in which eight Indians made the cut.30

  To many Indians these lists were evidence that the country was on track to become an economic superpower. The promise was implicit in Prime Minister Modi’s speeches – ‘good days are coming soon,’ he had said, over and over.

  India had been poor for so long; but now, rather than being dismissed as a lumbering elephant, it was a tiger, and its economy measured favourably alongside China’s. As people’s vanities were stoked, their appetite for news stories about girls like Padma and Lalli shrank. While monitoring six major national newspapers over a two-month period later that year, Delhi’s Centre for Media Studies found that coverage of rural India made up only 0.23 per cent of the news.31 The world was watching India, but no one was more bewitched by the transformation than Indians themselves.

  The largely ignored parts of the rural countryside, where 70 per cent of the population lived, were also witnessing change. Here, people were eating fewer nutrients than were required to stay healthy, as compared to forty years ago.32 The number of farmers who had died by suicide over farm-related debt had crossed 290,000. And as more people lost their land, a vast new underclass emerged – one that was forced to leave their ancestral village and to migrate to towns and cities where they had no choice but to serve better-off Indians as nannies, gardeners, dog walkers, cooks and cleaners.

  The richest 1 per cent owned 53 per cent of the country’s wealth, according to Credit Suisse. The top 10 per cent owned 76.3 per cent. That left, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the poor – with a mere 4.1 per cent of national wealth.33

  Chaturvedi knew that his boss could not care less about Padma and Lalli. The thing about India, he would say, was that there were a lot of people. And this was an ordinary killing, just two girls in some village.

  He forgot about the calls and went on with his day. He slipped on his spectacles and perched his laptop on his belly to post a lament on Facebook about wanting someone to love. He drank some tea. The post had accumulated fifteen likes by the time a police officer called.

  Did Chaturvedi know that the girls’ parents were refusing to allow the bodies to come down?

  No, he did not.

  They had created quite the scene. The crowd was a seething mob.

  A fatal crime was more of the usual. But the same report with the victims still in the frame was so unusual, even in these parts, it would definitely be telecast. The clip might make its way to Facebook.

  Chaturvedi followed up with other sources. ‘It had all the elements,’ he said later. ‘The accused were Yadavs, the state government was Yadav, and the police were Yadavs.’ It was a crime of caste, he said, and it confirmed popular, negative stereotypes about Yadavs. He could just see his audience tut-tutting as they chewed on their breakfast sabzi parantha.

  Grabbing his dinged-up laptop, Chaturvedi phoned a cameraman colleague and arranged to meet him. With one hand on the steering wheel of his zippy little car, he plugged in his Bluetooth headphones and called his boss to relay the news.

  ‘Send me the clip immediately,’ his boss ordered.

  As Chaturvedi sped forward, he saw a man a few feet ahead lying in the middle of the road, his open eyes looking up at the sky. He was very likely drunk but perhaps he was dead, and Chaturvedi swerved to avoid hitting him.

  ‘I can get a great shot,’ he promised his boss.

  29 It included five Indian and Indian-origin women: indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/sbis-arundhati-bhattacharya-icicis-chanda-kochhar-among-forbes-most-powerful-women/

  30 eight Indians made the cut: ndtv.com/photos/business/fortunes-list-of-most-powerful-women-in-asia-pacific-has-8-indians-18511#photo-238490

  31 coverage of rural India … 0.23 per cent of the news: https://cpj.org/reports/2016/08/dangerous-pursuit-india-corruption-journalists-killed-impunity-Foreword-Sainath/

  32 fewer nutrients than were required to stay healthy: Ellen Barry and Harsha Vadlamani, ‘After Farmers Commit Suicide, Debts Fall on Families in India’, New York Times, 23 February 2014. nytimes.com/2014/02/23/world/asia/after-farmers-commit-suicide-debts-fall-on-families-in-india.html

  33 the poor … 4.1 per cent of national wealth: livemint.com/Money/VL5yuBxydKzZHMetfC97HL/Richest-1-own-53-of-Indias-wealth.html

  ‘The Matter Will End’

  The object glinting in Padma’s clothing was clearly a mobile phone, and Ram Vilas was eager to have it. It would offer clues to the case, which would redeem him in the eyes of his superiors. On the other hand, if the crowd caught him rifling through the teenager’s bra, they would kill him.

  It was foolish for a police officer to even contemplate collecting evidence with his bare hands, but the idea at least showed initiative. So far, Ram Vilas had behaved more like a spectator, except that actual spectators had been far more useful at documenting the event by capturing images and videos. He would later be unable even to recall what time he had arrived at the orchard.

  It was true that the police weren’t adequately trained or equipped to do their job. An acceptable method of securing a crime scene, for example, was by chasing away onlookers like they were pigeons. There was no question of protecting the area from encroachment or procuring evidence, even though the scene of a crime is one of three resources investigators rely on to interpret events. Another is the body of the deceased, which is why criminal investigations develop around post-mortems. A third vital resource is the body of the culprit. Pappu Yadav was on his way to the police station, but his family, who had rather mysteriously called in with news of the bodies, had been all but forgotten.

  ‘Bheed kafi hai,’ Ram Vilas muttered, digging into his pocket for his phone. There’s quite a crowd.

  Better to let someone else take over.

  In the nearby town of Ushait, Ram Vilas’s immediate superior was in a deep sleep. It was 5.37 a.m. He listened with groggy irritation as the caller stammered his way through a greeting. ‘Is someone else around?’ Inspector Ganga Singh demanded in his hoarse voice. He couldn’t follow a word.

  Ram Vilas handed the phone to a colleague who swiftly summarised the events of the past few hours. He was in Katra village, explained Constable Raghunandan. Two girls, having attended a play the previous evening, had failed to return home. This morning they were found hanged from a tree.

  Raghunandan had got the first part wrong. The girls had, of course, returned home; they disappeared much later.

  Ganga Singh wasn’t sure he had heard right. ‘If a man is woken up and told that two girls were found hanged,’ he later remembered, ‘wouldn’t he be taken aback?’

  Raghunandan piped up again. A father of three – his youngest, a boy in the fifth class – the officer had reacted to the sight before him with predictable shock. But he was first and foremost a policeman; it was all he knew to do since he had joined the force some twenty years ago. There was an aspect of the scene that he found so striking he had to mention it right away.

  Two pairs of footwear stood at the base of the tree almost immediately beneath Padma’s gently dangling feet. The sky-blue slippers were hers. Lalli had owned the black ones with the distinctive red straps. The slippers might have been expected to slide off the girls’ feet after they’d been hanged, but in that case, they would surely have been strewn on the ground.

  Instead, here they were, side by side against the tree, as upright as stems of wheat. The precise and delicate placement baffled Raghunandan.

  He then told Ganga Singh that a crowd had gathered. ‘Like cattle let out of the pen,’ he whispered.

  The grim pallor of the early morning sky appeared to reflect the mood of the crowd. The officer was eager to be off. ‘Come quickly,’ he begged.

  ‘Theek hai,’ replied Ganga Singh. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘I didn’t do Colgate,’ he would
recall. In the interest of saving time, he splashed cold water on his face but skipped brushing his teeth. He pulled on his uniform, calling on four of his men to wait by his car.

  The officer had spent the previous day, 27 May, overseeing security arrangements for a nearby fair commemorating the life of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the iconic Dalit leader who had drafted India’s Constitution. It wasn’t really part of his job – but like most police officers, he spent more time patrolling religious, social and political processions than he did investigating crimes. By the time he returned to the station it was 5.30 p.m. He attended to some paperwork and then set off again on his daily patrol through the nearby villages. He was back only at midnight, at which time he hurriedly swallowed his dinner.

  Ganga Singh was a career policeman, accustomed to the long hours and lousy food that went with his line of work. Some days, though, the collision between age and sleep deprivation was a body slam. This morning he felt as though weights had been strapped to his ankles.

  When he arrived in Katra, shortly after 6 a.m., the road was blocked by a tractor trolley. The villagers had placed it there, possibly to prevent visitors from driving their vehicles into the orchard. A public bus attempting to get past had also been forced to adjourn. The curious passengers pressed their faces against the grime-smeared windows but stayed in their seats.

  The orchard was about 150 metres away, and Ganga Singh was striding towards it when some village men charged forward to intercept his advance.

  ‘You won’t go there,’ they warned, waggling their fingers at him.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘The bodies will not come down.’

  ‘Why not, don’t we need to investigate the case? What about the post-mortem?’