Trials of Truth

by Pinky Anand

  After considering the evidence, the court held the accused guilty of both causing disappearance and destruction of evidence. The prosecution proved that Joseph killed the victim but the defence pleaded the first exception to murder, i.e., culpable homicide due to grave and sudden provocation. The court ruled out premeditation on the part of Joseph and maintained that he was under provocation. Both of the accused were charged under Section 201 for causing the disappearance of evidence, with a maximum penalty of three years. Joseph was charged under Section 304(1) of the IPC for culpable homicide not amounting to murder and was given ten years’ rigorous imprisonment as well as a fine for Rs 50,000. Maria was convicted under Section 201 of the IPC for destruction of evidence and was given three years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine for Rs 50,000. Joseph was also convicted under the same offence and given the same punishment, for which his sentence would run concurrently.

  In India, the process of trial by media is very prevalent. Right from the first bits of information it can find on the crime, the media tries to create its own chain of events, and often ends up creating a sensationalized version of the event. This incarnation of the media as a public court has damaged the very essence of judicial process and the fair and impartial ideals it stands for. The manhunt created by the media not only influences the mind of the judiciary but also corrupts public perception with useless sensationalism and half-baked facts. This results not only in the unfair victimization of the accused by the society but also in the harassment of their family and friends.

  In this case, the media demonized the accused without looking at the hard facts, and even after the courts released Maria Susairaj on the basis of the facts placed before it, the media did not stop its persecution. In some reports, she was deemed ‘characterless’ and labelled not worthy of being a woman. The actual chain of events reveal the story of a woman who got caught in the middle of a crime, tried to stop it, was brutalized and raped, and was then forcibly made to destroy the evidence, for which she was penalized.

  The difference between an accused and a convict is lost on laymen, and the media creates a situation where an accused becomes a convict even before the conviction. The idea that there was a woman involved in the crime created a huge furore, probably worse than if it had only been men. A woman accused of chopping up a body into pieces fanned our mindsets to feverish proportions and the media lapped it all up. This is a classic case of a media witch-hunt, which we as a civilized and educated society should avoid.

  Phoolan Devi: The Making of an Outlaw

  I never intended to become this . . . I was just so angry. Rich men would beat me up for daring to raise my eyes . . . My father would weep over injustices but he was helpless . . . I don’t consider myself a lawbreaker.

  —Phoolan Devi

  The life of the Bandit Queen of India, Phoolan Devi, has by now passed into folklore; she is often touted as a killer and a murderer, and remembered as one of the most notorious outlaws in India. Accused of crimes ranging from dacoity to murder, Phoolan herself believed that she was innocent and that all the crimes she had committed were justified. The question then arises in the minds of observers: Does a hard life full of poverty, class difference and subjugation give a woman the right to commit mass murder? Was society or the law so impotent that she had to take matters in her own hands and kill and loot as an act of rebellion against the atrocities meted out to her as a young girl?

  Although there is no correct answer to this, maybe we can better understand if we examine the life of this ordinary girl who rose into notoriety and passed into urban legend. The life of rejection and condemnation that she experienced in her childhood and teenage years offers a perspective into why she turned into the ‘Bandit Queen’—something she is remembered for even today.

  Even as a young girl, Phoolan showed a streak of rebellion and gumption that she would later become notorious for. Born to a poor fishing family, Phoolan was married off at the age of eleven. Apart from the obvious problem of being a child-bride, the marriage proved to be hellish for the young girl as she was mercilessly beaten by her husband. Phoolan managed to escape from the torture thus inflicted on her by running away. However, being a mere child in the deep hinterlands of India, she soon found herself in trouble. Phoolan got embroiled in a land dispute and found herself behind bars for a short while. After she was released, she travelled to the small village of Bhemai in Uttar Pradesh. It was here that a gang of upper-caste men brutally gang-raped her.

  Sadly, for women of the lower Mallah caste, such treatment is not unusual. Many victims tend to absorb the pain of such incidents and do not speak up. Phoolan, however, was driven to a murderous rage and refused to just meekly accept the atrocities meted out to her. She joined a gang of bandits and rose as their leader.

  Soon after, this young girl travelled with her gang to the same village where she had been gang-raped. She lined up all her twenty-two perpetrators and shot them dead in broad daylight. It is a wonder how Phoolan Devi managed to commit this crime—not only because it was unusual for a so-called lower-caste person, or even a woman, to kill the ones who wronged her, but because it took place in the heart of Uttar Pradesh, a state deeply divided by caste and class. However, the question remains: Was murder the solution or an answer to how the world had treated her?

  The massacre caused unprecedented public anger, particularly because the subversive idea of caste superiority had been threatened—by a woman no less. Phoolan went into hiding in the deep forests near the border between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

  Two years later, Phoolan surrendered herself as part of an amnesty deal with the authorities. She spent eleven years in Gwalior Central Jail, without trial, before finally being released on parole in 1994. Thereafter, in a move that shocked many people, the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh withdrew all charges filed against Phoolan. She was then seen as a modern-day Robin Hood, a messiah who had stood up against the rigid caste system, a leader of the oppressed masses. She went on to become a member of Parliament under the aegis of the Samajwadi Party in the eleventh Lok Sabha. However, the case against four of Phoolan’s gang members in the Bhemai massacre is still pending, more than thirty years after the act.

  In a sad end to her story, Phoolan was assassinated in 2001 outside her residence in Delhi by a group of three men.

  Phoolan Devi was a regular Indian girl from a casteist society who found herself on the wrong side of the law because of her refusal to suffer injustice silently. Her actions could be seen as wrong or unlawful but were undoubtedly an act of rebellion owing to the circumstances of her life. Women are generally seen in an extremely limiting light, as the caregivers of a community, the loving maternal figures who look after the children and hold the men of the community together. This is especially true in a patriarchal society like India where independent women are often seen as rebellious. In this context, Phoolan Devi’s story is the complete antithesis of what a stereotypical Indian woman is supposed to be like. However, behind the popular acts of her rebellion was a woman hardened into violent action due to her situation in life.

  Living a life of poverty in a remote corner of India, Phoolan Devi found herself destined to a life of servitude to her family, but she had the courage to desire something more from her life. The mental scarring a little girl would experience at first being married against her will and then being treated as a pariah by her own people is not easy to imagine. Naturally, she wanted to get away from this social exclusion and she found solace in the community offered to her by the gang of dacoits she joined.

  Cyanide Mallika

  In our quest to understand the motivations of serial killers, we cannot possibly ignore the motive of greed. K.D. Kempamma, India’s first female serial killer, was one such person, motivated purely by greed and the desire for better material comfort.

  Kempamma, a forty-five-year-old at the time of her arrest, was given the moniker ‘Cyanide Mallika’ as she killed multiple people in and around
Bangalore in cold blood using potassium cyanide.

  Mallika preyed on vulnerable women, souls seeking peace in the city’s temples. Often, these women were childless or facing marital problems, and were deeply religious, looking towards the divine for help. In a cruel twist of fate, their deliverance came in the form of death, dealt by the hand of a kindly looking, middle-aged woman who promised them that she could give them what they sought; she would claim to be skilled in the art of performing pujas and that she could make possible the miracles these desperate women were hoping for. After gaining the victims’ confidence, Mallika would ask them to come dressed in expensive clothes and jewellery for the alleged rituals. The victim would then be taken to a desolate spot near the temple. Once there, Mallika would start the puja; she would ask her victims to close their eyes, forcibly pushing cyanide powder mixed with either food or drink into their mouths. Mallika carried out several such cold-blooded murders over the course of nine years in temples across Bangalore.

  When Mallika was finally nabbed at a bus stand, she was in possession of cash and jewellery taken from some of the deceased. She also admitted to being guilty when her plea was recorded.

  Cyanide Mallika is still a mystery. While we often try to justify the cruel nature of crimes by looking into the past to find something that went woefully wrong during the killers’ formative years, the early life of Cyanide Mallika provides no clues, as there is little or no information about that time. However, on a bare reading of the facts surrounding the murders, one would think that the motivation for her committing the crimes was nothing but money. She asked her victims to come dressed in their best clothes and jewellery, which she would pocket after killing them and fleeing the crime scene. Even the police stated in Mallika’s trial that she had committed the murders for the purpose of robbery and had no psychopathic tendencies.

  As a young girl, Mallika was married to a tailor of modest means, but a simple life was apparently not her cup of tea. Deeply ambitious, she craved the luxuries of money and in her own words wanted a ‘better life and material wealth’.

  Even if Mallika’s motive for committing the murders might have been the lure of wealth, her genesis as a criminal may lie in the early part of her life. Prior to the killings, Mallika had a chit fund that failed after a short while, after which she left her family and worked several low-paying jobs as a domestic help and an assistant to a goldsmith. It was probably during this time that she realized that crime was a way into wealth. The economic difficulty of her situation might be construed to be a reason for her criminal acts.

  Her last victim, Nagaveni, proved to be her undoing; the police went after the mysterious killer who was preying on women around temples, little realizing that that killer was a harmless-looking forty-five-year-old woman.

  This case was in direct contrast to our traditional thinking that women resort to gruesome crimes only when forced to, or under extreme circumstances that deeply affected the psyche. These cases seem to defy the traditional gender roles and the way we perceive them. The idea that women can kill seems to be a difficult one to digest for our conscience, but a mere look at these instances proves the opposite.

  3

  A TWIST OF FATE: THE YOUNG ONES

  One of the most infamous cases of offence against children is the Billa–Ranga case of the late 1970s.

  The case involved the kidnapping, abduction, rape and murder of two siblings. The nation watched closely, with bated breath, how the events unfurled after the discovery of the two dead bodies. It touched the right chord in every person and there was a lot of interest in the case till the murderers were brought to book and hanged. In today’s times, it is the Nithari killings and the Aarushi murder case that have resonated with the public in a similar way.

  The Billa–Ranga Case1

  There are several landmark cases that establish, modify or repeal certain legal provisions. However, some cases, especially criminal ones, become landmarks because they represent a watershed moment in the sociolegal realm. The combined effect of the public shock and outcry, media pressure and the diligent investigation, albeit belated, surrounding these heinous crimes targeting the weaker members of society are often what make a case stand out in public memory. The case of the kidnapping and murder of Geeta and Sanjay Chopra is one such example.

  Fate was unkind to these teenagers. It was an unfortunate series of incidents that took them to the Delhi Ridge (a portion of scrubland in the city), which was the scene of the murder. Generally, crimes consist of specific targets, but this was not one of those cases. The murderers were looking to pounce on any unsuspecting victim.

  The siblings were seventeen and fifteen years old when life was mercilessly snatched away from them. Geeta was a second-year student of Jesus & Mary College, while Sanjay was studying in the tenth standard of Modern School. They were teenagers, about to enter the prime of their lives.

  This was one of the first cases in India that involved positive public intervention and was covered by the media right from the commission of offence till the sentence was delivered.

  Cruel Fate

  It all happened on 26 August 1978, an otherwise pleasant evening. Sanjay and Geeta left their residence at about 6.15 p.m. to take part in Yuvvani, an All India Radio (AIR) programme airing at 8 p.m. I can mentally trace their footsteps and imagine what they would have experienced had they actually made it to the show, as I used to regularly compère Yuvvani back in college. The children’s father, navy captain Madan Mohan Chopra, was supposed to pick them up from the venue at about 9 p.m.

  On the same day, Billa (given name, Jasbir Singh) and Ranga Khus (given name, Kuljeet Singh), two hardened criminals who had been released from Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) some time earlier, were prowling around the city of Delhi in a stolen mustard-coloured Fiat, looking for unsuspecting victims. Their plan was to kidnap children and extort money from their parents. The sister–brother duo had decided to hitch-hike to their destination—a very normal thing to do at the time—and were waiting near the Dhaula Kuan Ridge to find some transport to the AIR building on Parliament Street. It was raining when a doctor passing by saw the two children. He offered them a ride till the Gole Dak Khana, a landmark close to their destination. The children boarded the doctor’s car and got off safely at the pre-decided point. While they were waiting to find their way to the AIR building, Ranga and Billa chanced upon the two innocent children. They had been skulking around, looking for hapless victims, and offered to give the teenagers a ride.

  Billa and Ranga had planned the abduction beforehand. They had tampered with the inside door handles of the car, so that once closed, they would not turn and the victims would be locked inside. Geeta and Sanjay, in their urgency to reach the radio station, boarded the car. However, they soon realized the nefarious intentions of Billa and Ranga and started struggling to get out. At around the same time, one Mr Bhagwan Dass was exiting Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, a stone’s throw from Gole Dak Khana, and proceeding towards North Avenue, which led to Rashtrapati Bhawan. It was about 6.30 p.m. when he noticed Billa and Ranga’s Fiat parked near the entry gate of the Yog Ashram near Gole Dak Khana. Dass heard some noises issuing from inside the car. He tried to inquire into the reason for the noise, and saw a boy and a girl seated at the back, quarrelling with two men sitting in the front. Dass tried to reach the car but it sped away in the direction of Willingdon Hospital (now known as Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital). Dass immediately called the police control room to report the incident, stating that he had heard a woman shouting ‘Bachao! Bachao! [Help! Help!]’ from inside the Fiat. The call was recorded at 6.44 p.m., within minutes of the incident taking place.

  As the car sped away, another concerned citizen, one Mr Inderjeet Singh, chased the car for some distance on his scooter after hearing the shrieks of a girl from within the car. But the Fiat pulled away and disappeared from his sight. He alerted the Rajinder Nagar police station at around 6.45 p.m. Despite two complaints, no action was tak
en by the police. Instead of registering the second complaint, the police cited technical difficulties: that the alleged offence was a non-cognizable offence (one where the police cannot act without a court order) and that the scene of the alleged crime was outside their territorial jurisdiction. To be exact, it was at 7.40 p.m. when the duty officer at the police station relayed Singh’s report to the police control room. With this, the Rajinder Nagar police washed their hands of the case. Eventually, at around 10.40 p.m., the police registered a complaint due to multiple eyewitnesses coming forward to report what they saw. However, no action was taken for an entire hour after the complaint had been registered.

  The children, in the meanwhile, were putting up a brave fight against the criminals. Billa and Ranga had by now realized that the father of the children was an ordinary government servant who would not be able to pay a fat ransom. As a result, at about 9.30 p.m., they killed Sanjay and Geeta in the Upper Ridge Road jungle, in a place between Buddha Jayanti Park and Shankar Road, near the Upper Ridge Road roundabout. It is worth wondering, had adequate search efforts been put into operation, it is a possibility the children may have been saved.

  Meanwhile, in the evening, the Chopra household, in Officers Enclave, was buzzing with activity. It was a moment of pride. The children were going to be featured on All India Radio. It was matter of great pride for the family. As the clock struck eight, the scheduled broadcast time, Captain Chopra tuned into the radio station. However, to the Chopras’ utter surprise, the female voice on the radio was not their daughter’s but someone else’s. The Chopras rationalized the situation by presuming that either the programme had changed or they had not tuned into the right station.