I was always intrigued by this news since it managed to get quite some coverage and all for the wrong reasons.
In the beginning I thought it was good since it would manage to get speedy justice for the family but a couple of years down the line things are getting murkier and murkier and people who were demanding justice i.e. her parents are now defending themselves from all the accusations and allegations.
Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, a middle-class couple who employed a cook and a maid, the lack of knowledge about the people in their home was to destroy their lives—aided and exacerbated by the administrative chaos of the state of Uttar Pradesh. The Talwars lived in a second-floor apartment in a housing colony populated largely by naval and air force families in the ‘green city’ of Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. Aarushi’s parents were both successful dentists in their mid-forties, and had met and fallen in love at medical school. Her mother Nupur was an orthodontist, and her father Rajesh was a dental surgeon. Aarushi’s maternal grandparents lived nearby. In the family photographs and video clips that were shown by the media, they appeared to have been a particularly happy unit—the mother, father and only child.
Their daughter, Aarushi Talwar, was murdered in her bedroom on the night of 15 May 2008. She was a few days short of her fourteenth birthday, a star student at Delhi Public School in Noida, a talented dancer and a keen reader. She had suffered stab wounds to her head and neck. The story of what happened to Aarushi, as reported by a voracious media over the two days following her death, was presented as a salutary tale for every middle-class Indian parent. As television channels broadcast and rebroadcast their story, the Talwars looked like every family, the one that had suffered the inconceivable fate other families feared.
Initially it was presumed that her killer was Hemraj Banjade, a Nepali household servant who was drunk and had broken into Aarushi’s bedroom, assaulted and murdered her. He was missing, and a cash reward of Rs20,000 was offered for news leading to his capture. The killing was said to have been done with a khukri, a curved Gurkha knife. In the words of one report, the case was ‘an eye-opener to the vulnerability of Indian homes and the murderous tendencies of the domestic servants’. It listed examples of respectable families who had been attacked by their own staff: a child slain by a driver, an old woman killed by a greedy maid. The moral, according to the author of this article, was that police verification of a new servant’s identity was essential and that ‘domestic servants are exposed to temptation when the dwellers talk of money or jewellery or other financial secrets in their presence.’ The fact Hemraj came from Nepal was an additional lesson, since north India had many Nepalese household workers, and there was a porous border between the two countries.
Aarushi’s body was found by her parents on a Friday morning. ‘Rajesh started shouting and screaming,’ her mother Nupur said later. ‘The maid came and called some neighbours, and the police came. The police were fine then. They were so certain about what had happened that the senior officer said, “It’s an open-and-shut case. The servant has done this. Send a team to the housing colony where the Nepalis live, send a team to the railway station and send a team to Nepal to his village, to see if he’s gone there.”
The next afternoon, a retired police officer who lived nearby came to pay his condolences. In India, after a death, a house will fill with friends, neighbours, acquaintances and family, all come to pay their respects. Diyas—burning wicks floating in bowls of oil—will be set in front of garlanded pictures of the deceased. In this case, the officer appears to have been just plain curious, or ghoulish, since the Talwars did not know him and they were not at the apartment when he visited. He found his training taking over while he was there: he reconstructed the sequence of the crime, and noticed bloody marks in unexpected places. It seemed to him something was wrong. ‘I checked Hemraj’s room and the bathroom and then noticed the bloodstains on the stairs leading to the terrace,’ he said later. ‘When I reached the door, I saw that it was locked and then I broke open the door [with the assistance of the police] and found Hemraj’s body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He had a slit mark on his throat and many injury marks on his body. His body was severely decomposed.’ Hemraj Banjade, the servant, had been lying dead on the roof terrace in the scorching summer sun for almost two days, and the police had failed to notice.
Once again, reporters and film crews from Delhi were swarming around the property: a faithless servant had become a murder victim, and a tragedy had become a mystery. The country grew riveted by the case. It was a growing media obsession, and everyone became an expert, with their own explanation of the double homicide. Endless theories were constructed as to what might have happened. Since there was no sign of forced entry, the presumption was that Hemraj had known his killer or killers. There seemed two likely explanations. The first was that Hemraj had been trying to protect Aarushi, and been killed for his pains. The second was that Aarushi had seen somebody attacking Hemraj, and been killed as a witness.
The pressure on the Noida police to solve the case was intense. They had to find the murderer, and fast since it was their failure to investigate or even to secure the crime scene the previous day was a shocking demonstration of incompetence. It became known the police had allowed the media and even passers-by to enter the Talwars’ apartment after Aarushi’s body was found. All forensic evidence had been compromised and /or destroyed, leaving them with no leads whatsoever. They were assailed by questions: Why had they not bothered to check the terrace? How could they have bungled so badly? Although the city was next to Delhi, it fell in the jurisdiction of Uttar Pradesh, where police had a reputation for being criminals in uniform who did nothing unless they were paid a bribe.
Under pressure from above, poorly trained and badly paid officers fell back on methods they could get away with, and applied them in Noida. Their investigation was haphazard, absurd and defamatory, targeting those who were closest to the murder scene. They informed the press now that the killing of both victims had been done not with a khukri or a knife, but with ‘a sharp-edged surgical instrument’, suggesting it might be the handiwork of a medical professional. Next, a police officer went on the record: ‘The way in which the throat of Aarushi was cut points out that it is the work of some professional who could be a doctor or a butcher.’ The family were unaware of this statement, and its implication since TV was banned in the Talwar house due to the media frenzy this murder had created.
You have rights as a citizen of India,’ said Dr. Talwar, speaking calmly but passionately, ‘but in certain places like UP and Bihar, unless you are a politician or a very rich person, you have no protection at all. We have suffered at the hands of the institutions that are there to protect you. We thought India was a good place to live, but there is so much of incompetence everywhere that people don’t know what they are doing.’
The cops made life miserable for her parents and that is a tragedy to add to the already tragic circumstances prevailing in the Talwar household. Suddenly all the interrogation was aimed at the parents and they were put to pure hell. In an interview with Dr. Rajesh Talwar he said: ‘I had lost my beloved child, so why were they doing this to me?’ he asked. ‘The cops thought we were an “immoral” family because Aarushi made 300 calls a month to her friends and went on Orkut and Facebook. These people are backward. They are not fit to do their job. They said I did an honour killing because she was having an inter-caste relationship with the servant. My wife and I had an inter-community marriage, so how on earth would I think of doing what they call an honour killing? I told them Aarushi was reading two books, Shantaram and Chetan Bhagat’s 3 Mistakes of My Life. So the police say, “Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What are the three mistakes?”
‘They found an email she had sent me a year before,’ said her father, ‘apologizing and saying she had just wanted to try out something with her friends. So the police take it and flash it on TV. All the channels are asking, “What was Aarushi going to try out? Why did she say it wouldn’t happen again? Why does a daughter send an email to a father?” Well, she didn’t send emails to me, it just happened one evening when she was twelve years old, and Aarushi wanted to go to the cinema in the mall to watch Namaste London with a group of friends—just the girls together. We didn’t want her going without an adult, but in the end we gave our consent and dropped her off and collected her from the cinema. It was peer pressure that made us agree, because her friends were allowed to go. Aarushi knew we weren’t happy about it and that’s why she sent me the email. She had a very sensitive nature. Not even once did I have to raise my voice to her. If there had been an occasion, I would have raised it.”
This endless looking down the wrong alley continued for months on end and then years. The cry for Justice still not being heeded.
On Sunday evening, 30 January 2011, the biggest assembly yet of citizens gathered near Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to protest the CBI’s failure to solve the Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjade murder case. Most were school and college kids who’d heard about the meet through Facebook and SMS. They lit candles, they marched, they signed statements. There were also placards and shouts of “We Want Justice!” “We Want Touch DNA!” A heedless CBI has refused to deploy Touch DNA technology in the case, believed by many to be a fool-proof way to finally crack who did it. In between breathless chants, a small group of college girls whispered to each other, “I’m sure the father did it. Or at least he had something to do with it.” What they didn’t know is that it’s the same father, Dr Rajesh Talwar, who’s been agitating the CBI for the last year-and-a-half to use Touch DNA testing.
Five days before the Sunday meet, Aarushi’s parents filed a petition protesting the CBI’s attempt to close the case even as it still claimed that Rajesh Talwar remained the only suspect. They’d like the investigation to continue and the culprits punished. In the Ghaziabad court, the CBI asked for some time to examine the petition and the court took a break. Rajesh headed out of the building to the notary. Nupur was still upstairs at the court with some of the lawyers when they heard an uproar downstairs. Someone told Nupur not to look down since commotions are a regular affair at the court. Rajesh had just stepped out when he was attacked by a 29-year-old man with a meat cleaver. Utsav Sharma slashed Rajesh’s right temple and then took long heavy swipes from his right ear down his cheek with the blade, slicing a critical artery. Rajesh instinctively put up his hands and Utsav hacked at both his hands as well till one finger was dangling by the skin. All this happened in moments before Utsav was overpowered and handed over to the police. Nobody from the recording television crews offered help. By then Rajesh had begun bleeding profusely from his mutilated arteries and muscles. He was rushed to a nearby hospital where the doctors were nonplussed beyond applying some bandages, so he was then rushed to Delhi’s Apollo hospital. In the ambulance, his BP sinking fast and struggling to speak through his bleeding face, Rajesh told his brother Dinesh, “I don’t want to take this further. I’m done. If I go, take care of Nupur.” This was the fate of the man who was seeking justice for his daughter’s murder.
So what have we been told by our media about Aarushi and her parents? Incest, underage sex, extra-marital affairs with family friends, hotel rooms for swinger parties, wife-swapping, influence-mongering. A newspaper presented a comic strip with Aarushi and Hemraj kissing. A television channel showed footage morphed to look like the 14-year-old taking her clothes off. One reenacted the murders in a flat in the Talwars’ colony. Not to be outdone, another reconstructed how the victims’ throats might have been sliced. Yet another beamed an MMS of a girl claimed to be Aarushi. One channel even said that the Talwars were so well-connected they often hosted high-profile soirees with famous media editors! The State often finds the media to be a natural ally when it wants to wage a proxy war from the shadows. In this case the state used the media to heighten the hysteria. Two weeks after the murders, the press was inundated by leaks of email transcripts from Aarushi’s computer. Her exchanges with three boys and a year-old exchange with her parents were salaciously, and deliberately, presented to project her as a promiscuous teenager.
The grieving, bewildered middle-class doctor couple proved inept at handling the conspiracy theories and titillating fabrications produced by the media. Many in the public began wondering how the parents could have possibly slept through such a night of mayhem. The press kept suggesting from newly ‘leaked’, ‘exclusive’ gossip, such as how the Talwars were in a wife-swapping party on the night of the murder, how Rajesh was actually in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, how Aarushi was not the Talwars’ biological daughter, how the Talwars were suspected of buying out the police, the CBI, the postmortem doctor, the judges. No evidence emerged for these claims. Partial pieces of information were constructed into innuendos, such as how the parents kept Aarushi under lock and key in her room. After years of hectic rumours, many became certain that with so much smoke, there must be fire. Everyone became convinced Rajesh and Nupur must be shady people, even if nobody was quite sure exactly what they’d done. The media has parroted and invented and insinuated and alleged, but relied more on an original imagination and information ‘leaks’ rather than on proof. The State’s soft war on the Talwars has succeeded, and the media, in this case at least, has worked its charm of mass hypnosis and mass hysteria very well.
Shobhaa De ranted on her blog: “The conduct displayed by Mr and Mrs Talwar appears a bit too calculated, even cold blooded to viewers… For a mother of a dead girl to project such steely determination during what must have been the most harrowing time of her life, seems a bit unnatural… Their faces are stony, their eyes, strangely devoid of any emotion... Did [Aarushi] stumble across a dark and dirty family secret? Had she become an ‘inconvenience’ to her own parents?... The crime has been committed by skilled, educated, clever people — that much is obvious… Even if the culprit is eventually found, and the Talwars get off the hook, the country will continue to be stupefied by their stellar performances on television night after night. No tears, no sorrow. Just icy arguments proclaiming their own innocence.” On what grounds and with what authority is she making these statements when the law is still running its course. Innocent till proven guilty remains just another proverb.
Not only do you lose your daughter, you stumble upon her bloodied and cut open body in your home. Not only do the police not chase leads, they theorise idly about your daughter having sex, about you having extramarital affairs, about you murdering your daughter. Not only are you not left in peace to grieve, you get pre-emptively thrown into a hell-hole prison without any evidence brought to bear against you. Not only does the country’s premier investigative agency still not chase the leads the police missed, it backtracks on the few leads some of its officers do come up with. Not only does the court not let you examine the bumbling CBI’s defamatory investigation, a vigilante attacker slashes your face and hands with a meat cleaver and leaves you at the door of death. Not only does the court not challenge the CBI’s contradictory closure report, it asks the CBI to file a chargesheet against you for murder. And the media rolls in glee and TRPs. It’s as if someone designed the perfect and most cruel punishment for a parent in modern India. A punishment that continues till date, almost three years later.
On 29 December 2010, the CBI finally threw in the towel and filed a closure report for the case, stating that it strongly suspects Rajesh Talwar committed the murders but doesn’t have sufficient evidence to chargesheet him. Some media outlets promptly exaggerated some of the statements in the closure report and pronounced further sexual innuendos about Aarushi. The Talwars have responded by filing a protest petition to counter the insinuations in the closure report and to plead for the investigation to continue.
The CBI has a host of flimsy reasons to suspect the Talwars. That the Talwars slept through the double murders. That the Talwars ‘dressed up’ the crime scene after committing the murders. That they diverted the police on a false lead of chasing Hemraj for Aarushi’s murder. That Rajesh refused to provide keys for the terrace where Hemraj was found and then refused to identify his body. That the family tried to influence the postmortem report. That they withheld the suspicious golf club from the CBI. Most of these claims seem to emerge from thin air, as we will see later on.
Today, the south Delhi home the Talwars moved to in 2009 is covered with large photographs of Aarushi. As Rajesh Talwar recovers slowly from the attack and the subsequent surgeries, the couple are at their most exhausted and yet still don’t accuse the servants outright since they don’t finally know what happened that night. Rajesh deduces that someone came into their home that night, which means Hemraj must have let someone in after they went to sleep. But before the Talwars can even get to establishing who killed their daughter, they must somehow fight the invisible enemy, the cloud of guilt cast by the CBI as its parting shot.
The Talwars have been pulled through some of our society’s darkest anxieties. They never got a chance to finish the formal grieving period after Aarushi’s death since the police threw Rajesh in jail. Do they dare look outward to find hope again? In 2010, the Talwar family and their friends started Aarushi’s Legacy (www.theaarushilegacy.org), a social initiative to provide medical relief to sick and underprivileged children, support parents affected by crime against their children and to reduce crime against the girl child. So far, they’ve done two health check-up camps in Delhi for a few hundred children.
And yet. How to make life sonorous again? What black mourning bows, what minute of silence, what flags at half mast? And after that, what encore? The gleams of life’s miracle, missed. Is there a cure for the hankering for your child?
After the CBI’s closure report which is also a sham, made the Talwars accused in the case, charged them with destruction of evidence and asked the CBI to charge sheet them. While the closure report only put Rajesh as the suspect, the CBI court has gone even further and charged Nupur also with murder. f in the unlikely event the murders of Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjade never interested you or repulsed you with their pulp fiction narrative, turn instead to the gripping social document that is the CBI’s closure report. It may tell you far more about India than what you want to know. It may tell you what could happen to you — if your bubble burst.
The case received nationwide attention, and has become symptomatic of what most people believe are recent unsavoury tendencies in the Indian media, such as sensationalism , the urge to "overkill" and to carry out a public trial-by-media. The Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury, condemned the police for what she called the "character assassination" of a child victim and called for a commission of legal experts to investigate whether specific legislation existed or needed to passed in order to allow filing of defamation suits against the Noida police, a government agency. In addition, the focus by 24-hour cable news on speculative aspects of the personal lives of the father and his dead daughter, and the media frenzy that compromised the privacy of the families involved in the case has caused comparisons to be made to the JonBenet Ramsey case in the United States. The case has also attracted a lot of public attention as a bizarre whodunit, with the CBI reporting that the agency had been receiving a large number of telephone calls from members of the general public, giving investigators ideas and advice on how to solve the case. I n addition, the story hit the blog-o-sphere in a major way with many Indian bloggers avidly and enthusiastically blogging about the murder mystery.
Till date nobody except the killer or killers, of course, knows what exactly happened in the Talwar residence during the six crucial hours between 12 midnight and 6 a.m. on May 16, 2008, when both Hemraj and Aarushi were brutally murdered within an hour. Aarushi was bludgeoned on her forehead and her throat slit with a small, sharp object. So was Hemraj.
The latest news is that on Jan 9 2012 the Times of India Reported that The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Dr. Rajesh Talwar would remain on bail till he appears before court on February 4 to face trial in his daughter Aarushi's murder case.
Very well written. Was wondering what we would have done in such a situation.
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