The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  As Akhilesh Yadav’s food and supplies minister had famously said: ‘What do poor people really need? What the people need is someone to intercede for them when they get into trouble with the police; someone to speak on their behalf to government babus and get their work done. Someone to solve their problems.’52

  This someone was a politician like Sinod Kumar – who pressed his calling card with his personal mobile phone number into voters’ hands, insisting they call him at the first sign of trouble. They should use his nickname, Deepu bhaiya, he said.

  When his voters took him up on his offer and called to ask if he would put in a word with so-and-so, he did so promptly – or, his aides did. They conjured jobs, school admissions, hospital appointments, even police investigations. The concept of instant justice worked so well in states like Uttar Pradesh because politicians made it clear – and the people they served accepted – that nothing would really change. The people could either wait for the education system to be overhauled, for example, or they could just get their own child into a good school.

  Kumar’s Yadav constituents, it goes without saying, didn’t have the same access to his influence – and they were fine with this. When one of their people won, the position would be reversed. A popular saying in the district was, ‘Aaj police tumhari sunti hai, kal meri sunegi.’ Today the police are with you; tomorrow they will be with me.

  The Shakya voters were happy to let their leaders live well, just as long as they didn’t forget who they owed. And Sinod Kumar hadn’t. Although his party wasn’t in power – the Yadav-run Samajwadi party was – he responded promptly to complaints. On one occasion, he had even helped the Shakya family take a neighbour to court over a land dispute.

  What they were now hoping for was far bigger. Their children had died. He must protect them and support them for as long as it took to deliver justice.

  39 they too viewed secularism as inimical: nytimes.com/2019/12/20/world/asia/india-muslims-citizenship.html; ft.com/content/8e5bf5a2-1c34-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4

  40 ‘thinker, poet & a social reformer’: twitter.com/narendramodi/status/471512748119957504?lang=en

  41 ‘encouraged further violence’: hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/india#d91ede

  42 a Dalit boy was lynched: indianexpress.com/article/india/crime/dalit-youth-killed-for-talking-to-upper-caste-girl-in-pune/

  43 another was set on fire: theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/19/lynching-boy-underlines-curse-caste-still-blights-india

  44 accused of being a witch: news.trust.org/item/20140813124950-sxqal

  45 a disproportionate amount of this time settling scores: economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/sp-bsp-slugfest-getting-worse-by-the-day/articleshow/3229721.cms

  46 The going rate … ‘roughly $250,000’: wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08NEWDELHI2783_a.html

  47 She denied the claims: ndtv.com/wikileak/assange-belongs-in-mental-asylum-says-angry-mayawati-466799

  48 low literacy … especially among women: rchiips.org/nfhs/FCTS/UP/UP_Factsheet_149_Budaun.pdf

  49 Dataganj was electrified in 1960: Balwant Singh, Gazetteer of India, Uttar Pradesh (Govt. of Uttar Pradesh, Dept. of District Gazetteers, 1986)

  50 total assets worth 9 lakh rupees: myneta.info/up2007/candidate.php?candidate_id=59

  51 now worth 3 crore rupees: myneta.info/compare_profile.php?group_id=eRi9a25Kv2APZQSeuJQ8

  52 ‘Someone to solve their problems’: rediff.com/election/2002/feb/20_upr_prem_spe_1.htm

  The Politician’s Aide

  Sinod Kumar was hours away in Lucknow, still in bed. His trusted aide asked his driver to wake him.

  ‘Do the needful,’ Kumar replied. He didn’t know what needed doing. Whatever it was, his aide would do it, dispatching the matter out of the orbit of Kumar’s responsibilities. The aide did the work, the politician took the credit; such was the axis on which the relationship between politics and the public moved.

  With a broad smile and stoic eyes, Shareef Ahmed Ansari had an easy manner with high and low, making him the perfect ambassador for such a job. He usually passed mornings in the courtyard of Kumar’s majestic, white-walled, high-ceilinged home in Dataganj, sipping strong tea in tiny white cups as he heard out a procession of complainants who had arrived on the backs of motorcycles, lugging folders full of documents to support their claims.

  Later in the day, he would drive around in one of his boss’s five SUVs, visiting village leaders to gauge the mood.

  This western part of Uttar Pradesh was more prone to trouble than the rest of the state. But Budaun district, in which Kumar’s constituency was located, wasn’t particularly volatile. The last major riot had taken place twenty-five years ago, in 1989, when the area’s Hindus protested a proposal to introduce Urdu as the state’s second official language after Hindi. They had fired from rooftops and mobbed a train, killing nearly thirty people,53 but the bill had been passed.

  Religious riots were most likely to break out in areas where there was, among other things, population parity between Hindus and Muslims. This heightened competition for opportunities, at least in the eyes of the perpetrators. But in Budaun 78 per cent of the population of just over 3.6 million people was Hindu.54 It wasn’t religion that sparked troubles, but inter-caste rivalries.

  Ansari went to Katra with his boss’s brother. While the brother chit-chatted with the police, the aide threaded his way to the family. The culprit, according to most people he spoke to, was definitely Pappu. He had kidnapped the girls, people said, but after news of the disappearances had spread, filling the fields, Pappu panicked. He killed the girls so they couldn’t identify him. Then he made it appear as though they had hanged themselves.

  Others told Ansari that Pappu had the help of the police, particularly Constable Sarvesh.

  The real culprits, argued someone else, were a gang of men who were right this minute sitting on the banks of the Ganga River, laughing and smoking beedis.

  Ansari wasn’t convinced by the most popular theory – the one that involved Pappu and Pappu alone. The idea that one man could kidnap and then hang two girls stretched the imagination. But he listened carefully. His boss would demand a report, which meant knowing what people believed, rather than just accepting what the police said.

  And the police clearly weren’t doing their jobs because the bodies were still hanging from the tree. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked a constable.

  The Shakyas were being very unreasonable, the constable complained. Would he like to give it a try?

  Ansari did his best, assuring Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal that their leader was on the way. The brothers accepted this explanation and said they would wait.

  In fact, Ansari wasn’t at all sure that his boss would show up. And if he did, it wouldn’t be for many hours. The thought of the bodies’ condition by then made him shudder. When he reported the Shakyas’ response to Chauhan, the superintendent of police briefly shut his eyes. ‘What do they want?’ he said.

  Ansari promised to take the question back to the family, but he didn’t really, because he knew the answer already. Instead he told the Shakya men, ‘Look, there’s a lot of pressure.’ He urged them to change their minds. ‘By the time the girls are down, their bodies wrapped and sealed, boss will arrive.’

  The brothers refused, forcing Ansari to shuffle embarrassedly before the police officer who sent him back to the Shakyas. Back and forth Ansari went, carrying proposals and rejections like a marriage broker.

  The family’s stubbornness might have offended another man, but not Ansari. His background was modest. He had trained as a mechanical fitter but was unable to find steady work. He then started a tailoring service, but it didn’t take off. Then he opened a car rental service, which was also plagued with ill luck – until, with a wife and children to
support, he turned to salaried jobs. His quest ended at Sinod Kumar’s doorstep.

  Although he didn’t earn very much, Ansari’s proximity to power made him appear powerful to some. And he hadn’t forgotten how it felt to be dismissed. A person’s worth was judged by factors out of their control. Ansari was a Muslim, so in his case, religion was that factor; in the case of the Hindu Shakyas, it was caste.

  And the Shakyas, clearly, had been judged lacking by all the powerful people who had so far entered the orchard. But here they were, just look at them, won’t you, Ansari thought. In the ashes of their lives they had found the courage of mighty warriors.

  None of this made Ansari’s job easier. He called his boss to ask him to intervene. From Lucknow, Kumar phoned Lalli’s father. ‘I told him to allow the police to remove the bodies,’ he later claimed. ‘But he was determined to wait for me.’ Sohan Lal, he said, was convinced that without the politician present, the police would find a way to damage the bodies, by either removing or planting evidence and thereby protecting Pappu Yadav.

  The family had every reason to be wary of the police. But it was in Sinod Kumar’s best interest to let the brothers obstruct procedure. The police answered to the state government. By making them appear incompetent, unable even to deliver bodies for a post-mortem, the Shakyas made the party in power – the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav – look foolish.

  Later, when he was asked why the state government should be blamed for something that had happened in his constituency, Kumar was at a loss. ‘From the time the FIR was written to the post-mortem to the final rites, it was I alone among the politicians present who did anything,’ he said.

  But politicians didn’t think it was their job to make life better. It was enough to just show up.

  53 fired from rooftops and mobbed a train: sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/hindu-muslim-communal-riots-india-ii-1986-2011

  54 78 per cent of the population … was Hindu: census2011.co.in/census/district/520-budaun.html

  ‘Liars, Thieves and Fucking Scum’

  The police station in the town of Ushait was a tidy building in a breezy, tree-filled compound. With many officers now in Katra village, there was no one senior enough to attend to Pappu.

  Constable Sarvesh and Head Constable Gangwar wandered about with their suspect dragging his feet miserably behind them. The older man decided to borrow a motorcycle and return to the village to help control the situation there. Sarvesh, who had gauged the mood, refused.

  Gangwar was taken aback by the thronging crowd on the road leading into the village. As he nosed his motorcycle past, some people recognised him. They blocked his way, demanding to know where his colleague was. ‘I’m here aren’t I?’ Gangwar replied. ‘Tell me the problem.’

  Then Ganga Singh, the inspector from Ushait, walked over. ‘They’re very angry,’ he warned. ‘You should leave.’ He ordered Gangwar to return to the police station. Gangwar nodded dutifully but went straight to the flat that he shared with his wife and five children. He had been wrong to poke his nose in this business, now he would lie low.

  After a lifetime of repeated transfers – a standard tactic to keep police officers honest in a notoriously corrupt state – Gangwar had landed in obscure Katra only two years ago. When he first arrived, he was taken aback by the state of the chowki. It looked like a cowshed. The courtyard was choking with weeds. At the water tap, an elderly cook sat on his haunches, rotating a metal scrubber on dirty utensils.

  When he had looked for the staff quarters so that he might refresh himself, Gangwar realised there were none. His new colleagues were sitting around yawning. They told him he would have to make his own arrangements. One officer spent the nights in the government nursery school opposite the chowki. Another made do in the health centre. Gangwar would take to the open courtyard. In the hottest weather, the others joined him, bringing over their charpoys to partake of the breeze.

  The lack of resources was felt in more important ways. Although it wasn’t a ‘reporting’ chowki – that is, the police weren’t empowered to file the First Information Reports required to start investigations – they still had to respond to disturbances. These often involved stolen cattle. In instances of grave complaints such as assault, however, the officers didn’t have any equipment to move things along. They didn’t have phones. They didn’t have computers. Their travel allowance extended to the use of a bicycle. If they had to contact the police station, they used WhatsApp on their personal devices.

  In this way the team of first four, then five, men policed Katra and as many as forty-six other villages.

  ‘Government kuch nahin karti!’ The government does nothing for us, they moaned, flinging open their shirts, sticking their legs out on chairs and drinking on duty. The outpost came to be known as an adda of alcoholics. One day, the fed-up cook ran away, and no one could be convinced to take his place.

  Gangwar liked the chowki. It was as close as he had ever been to his family, who were now only an hour away. And the work was straightforward. Taking along his Lee-Enfield, he got on his motorcycle whenever the mood struck and toured the nearby constellation of villages. ‘Baatcheet se samjhata tha,’ he said. I would counsel in chit-chat. ‘Fighting is futile. File a case and you’ll only end up making the rounds of the court.’ Actually, since filing a complaint forced the police to open an investigation, by advising villagers to avoid such procedures what Gangwar was really doing was saving his colleagues hours of work.

  As half-heartedly as he did his job, he came to be known as a ‘good man’. The villagers called him ‘daddu’, grandfather.

  Around this time, another officer had moved into the chowki. Sarvesh Yadav was a college boy with a bachelor’s degree. He came from a farming village in Etah, a district that was roughly three hours’ drive away. He gave the impression that he was well connected and, therefore, above the rules. One of his brothers was in the army. Another held a factory job. This information came out in dribs and drabs, for Sarvesh liked to keep to himself.

  The other officers didn’t probe. ‘If you don’t want to talk,’ one said, ‘why should I?’

  Sarvesh had been transferred from a chowki in a village named Bhoora Bhadraul. The relatively well-off farmers there had donated some temple land for the policeman’s quarters. They warned Sarvesh against consuming alcohol and meat. If he wanted those things, which pious Hindus considered sinful, he was to leave the chowki and attend to his needs unobtrusively.

  Often the only fights in the village involved the pint-sized, brown-backed monkeys, who descended on the apples and bananas that temple-goers deposited as offerings at the shrine. When the shrieking animals made off with a handbag, Sarvesh chased them down.

  With this experience, he arrived in Katra where he was tasked with keeping an eye on the sand mafia.

  While differing vastly in age and temperament, the two newcomers, Gangwar and Sarvesh, exhibited extreme behaviour. The men were all drinkers, but Gangwar was a sodden drunk. They all lolled about, but to get lazy Sarvesh out of bed you had to slam the chowki gate a few times. And his behaviour towards the villagers was something else. He made it clear that it was beneath his dignity to talk to them. He described the men who dared to walk into the chowki as ‘liars’, ‘thieves’ and ‘fucking scum’.

  Another colleague, Constable Raghunandan, didn’t think that Sarvesh was influenced by caste. ‘We are Yadavs!’ he exclaimed. By this he meant that as low-caste people they weren’t in a position to look down on anyone else. Sarvesh’s problem, he believed, was that he trusted no one. People had to prove themselves to win his confidence. ‘I would often tell him to change his ways. To get to know someone before judging them.’

  But the villagers weren’t obliged to prove their integrity to Sarvesh. Rather, he was obliged to serve them.

  The day the girls went missing, 27 May, hadn’t started o
ff in quite the usual fashion at the chowki. The men usually woke up when they wanted, then groaned and wilted through the day’s high temperatures. That morning, however, they had received a tip-off about a cache of illegal liquor in a nearby village. After they were done recovering the goods there, Sarvesh and Gangwar were instructed to keep an eye on the movement of some buses. This was a matter of routine to ensure the security of passengers in areas that were usually targeted by bandits.

  As they waited for the buses, the men decided to drink. They toasted Gangwar’s promotion to head constable. The alcohol unstoppered Sarvesh who grumbled about a leave application being rejected. When would he see his brothers, he said. They had a meal and more whisky. Gangwar revealed that his promotion didn’t come with a pay rise. He wouldn’t bother treating the others to mithai. This made the men cackle and they drank some more. The buses were all but forgotten.

  When they stumbled through the chowki gate it was still early, around 5 p.m. They were on duty, but it was too hot to work. They drank some more and chatted. The other policemen joined in. When they ran out of things to say to one another they drunk-dialled friends.

  At about 11 p.m., the five chowki policemen pulled out their charpoys, muttered their good nights, and collapsed into sleep.

  Cable Wars in the Katra Fields

  When the reporter Ankur Chaturvedi arrived in Katra village, the sun was high, the sky enormous and the fields glittered with heat. Some female constables were now present. They had been summoned from the women’s police stations in Budaun, Bareilly and elsewhere to keep an eye on the mothers sitting at the foot of the mango tree – but they were outnumbered by the visitors streaming in. As it was, there were only around 7,000 policewomen in Uttar Pradesh, making up less than 5 per cent of the state force.55