NOIDA DOUBLE MURDER CASE

This is the article in THE HINDU dated 24th May, 2008. In this case the criminal is the father of the murdered.. Can't believe where our country is going!!


LUCKNOW: The police on Friday cracked the Noida double murder case in which teenager Aarushi Talwar and her domestic help, Hemraj, were killed. The girl’s father, Rajesh Talwar, who reportedly confessed to the crime, has been arrested. However, many questions on the motive of the crime remain unanswered.

According to the Additional Director-General of Police, Law and Order, Brij Lal, Dr. Talwar, a dentist, was arrested at 12 noon from near the Sector 21 temple in Noida.

Mr. Lal said the domestic help was first struck senseless with a hammer and a surgeon’s knife used to slit open his throat. After committing this murder on the roof of his residence, he added, the doctor came down, went to his daughter’s bedroom and carried out the second murder.

He said the twin murders were executed after midnight on May 15 and there was a difference of about 30 minutes between the first and second killing. In the intervening period, Dr. Talwar had a couple of drinks, Mr. Lal claimed.Dr. Talwar’s wife, Nupur Talwar, was asleep when the murders took place.
The hammer and the surgeon’s knife have not been recovered. On the visit to Hardwar by a team of the Noida police on Thursday, the ADGP said it was a matter of investigation and details could not be disclosed.
Mr. Lal had two theories on the motive for the murders. One was Dr. Talwar’s alleged extra-marital affair with the doctor-wife of a friend and colleague.
The ADGP told newspersons that Dr. Talwar used to bring his lover to his residence when his wife was away. The affair was objected to by his daughter and eventually Hemraj and the other servants came to know about it.
According to the police official, the accused was perturbed that his secret had been discovered. Asked whether the wife was aware, the official said this was being investigated.
Since Aarushi and Hemraj were privy to the affair, the two became friendly. Their intimacy was not liked by Dr. Talwar, Mr. Lal added. This was another motive for the crime. Hemraj had told another servant that his life was in danger.
On the night of the crime, Dr. Talwar first surfed the internet and made a phone call to the U.S. before going straight to Hemraj’s quarters situated on the roof. He took a hammer and a surgeon’s knife with him. Not finding him there, the dentist went to his daughter’s room and found Aarushi and Hemraj together, Mr. Lal said.The accused thereafter took the domestic help to the roof and killed him before murdering his daughter.
Mr. Lal said the doctor probably intended to kill only Hemraj but Aarushi was murdered as a potential witness.

The Suryanelli Case

This is an article published in The Hindu on September 10,2000. This is about a 16 year old girl abducted from school in Munnar, and raped by 40 men for 42 days at 15 different places in both Tamilnadu and Kerala, and consequences of the case.

KOCHI, SEPT. 9. It's light at the end of a long dark tunnel for the girl from Suryanelli, who was abducted from her school at Munnar and raped by over 40 men for 42 days at 15 different places in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, in 1996.

When the special court at Kottayam, set up for the first time in the country to try the sexual harassment of a minor girl, handed down stiff punishment to 35 of her tormentors on September 6, it created judicial history on many counts.

More important, it has given a glimmer of hope for the countless victims of rape and sexual harassment across the country, who had so far failed to put their tormentors in the dock.

But more than anything else, the Suryanelli verdict is the triumphant end to the saga of a village postmaster, a nurse in a remote tea-garden dispensary and their teen-age daughter. Braving all odds, they showed the courage to expose the rapists and take them to court. They were weak and poor; they were harassed and frequently threatened by the culprits; they were jeered at and taunted by society. Still, the three fought bravely.

``We are fighting not for our daughter alone,'' the postmaster had told this reporter in an interview four years ago. ``We are fighting for the daughters of all the parents who have suffered the same kind of pain.'' His wife had this resolve: no other daughter in the country should face such painful experience.

This resolve echoes in the special court's verdict. The special judge, Mr. M. Sasidharan Nambiar, after 317 days of trial that started after the special investigation team probed the crime for two and a half years, sent at one go 32 men and three women, to jail for involvement in one of the most sensational sex racket cases in the country in recent times. Of the 35 sentenced, nine persons, including one woman, got 13 years' rigorous imprisonment as they were found guilty of rape, mass rape, abduction, illegal detention and sale of a minor girl for sexual abuse. The Rs. 4.20 lakhs to be collected from the culprits as fine would go to the girl.

Rarely have women been sentenced for rape and mass rape in India, but the judge found Usha, accused No.2, who was the key link in the sex racket, responsible for all the rapes and mass rapes committed by her male accomplices. Rare again is the long jail term awarded to her for such a crime.

The `Suryanelli' case has rocked Kerala ever since it broke out in February 1996. Not just because of the age of the girl and the number of the persons involved, but also because of the number of political activists involved. Those sentenced include a former District Congress-I Committee secretary, a former University union chairman and several local-level politicians. The girl had pointed accusing finger at the former Union Minister, Prof. P.J. Kurian, but his trial has been stayed by the Supreme Court. Small wonder then, that the `Suryanelli case' has remained a political issue in the region. The two major political fronts volleyed it every time an election was held. Prof. Kurian lost his Lok Sabha election in Idukki last year mainly because of the scandal.

Suryanelli, some 20 km from Munnar, had been a sleepy mountainous village in the folds of the high ranges in Kerala's Idukki district - until January 16, 1996. That day, the 16-year- old class IX student from the village who attended school in Munnar, was abducted by a bus conductor known to her. The conductor handed her over to a female pimp, Usha who, in collusion with other racketeers `rented' her to some 40 men.

After a 42-day ordeal, the girl was sent back home by the abductors. By the time she returned, her body was host to a number of infections and her mind was deeply scarred. A few weeks after her return, the girl had narrated to this reporter the agonies she had passed through. Throughout the interview, her face was flat, her eyes were dry. As she recounted her traumas as if they had happened to another person, it was hard for the interviewer to hold back his tears (the interview was never written).

Surprisingly, when the family decided to bring the culprits to book almost everybody opposed it. The Munnar police wanted the family to withdraw the complaint (three of the policemen have now been suspended following the special court's strictures); relatives and friends advised them to keep quiet for fear of social stigma. But the family was determined. The result: they were isolated. The relatives disowned them, the friends looked the other way, the society shunned them. A section of the media was initially guilty of reporting the explicit details of the girl's woes, thus allowing its readers to take part in a collective voyeurism.

Visiting the family a couple of years after the marathon legal battle started, the father told this reporter that the family had used up its humble savings of a lifetime and that the case had ruined his and his wife's health. There were times when the three seriously considered a suicide pact. But the battle had to be won.

For over four years now, surrounded by policemen posted by the Government for her `protection', the girl has been almost under `house arrest' for over four years. In a humble two- room quarter on a desolate, cold mountain slope, she used to spend most of the day in loneliness. She has no friends; there are no visitors. She could not step out of home, even to go to church, without the policemen in tow. Hopefully, this would change now.

Kunan Poshpora

1991
This is a shyful act committed by the Indian army in the village of Kunan Poshara, Kashmir, India in 1991. The following article is by Kalpana Sharma, the then Dpty Editor, The Hindu, in Sept. 2002.

"YOU can never understand our pain," shouted a young woman, head swathed in a black scarf. This outburst came at the end of an hour talking to students, men and women, at the SSM engineering college in Srinagar about the current situation in Kashmir. The young men dominated the discussion; the women, dressed in pastels, sat quietly in the first rows. Until this woman from the back burst forth.
What she said cannot be disputed. No matter how much you read about Kashmir, how many of its people you meet elsewhere, you can never fully understand their pain, frustration, tension, grief, loss and the longing for peace and normalcy. Yet, once there, you sense it in every conversation, in homes, in the market place and even in places unconnected with the troubles.

At the Ziayarat Makhdoom Sahib Shrine, which nestles below the imposing Mughal Fort on Srinagar's Hari Parbat, hundreds of women arrive at an early hour on Mondays and Thursdays to meditate, pray, ask for a . You don't need to speak to anyone. Just sit there, listen to the haunting tones of the intonations on the loudspeaker, watch the pigeons in the courtyard take flight when someone passes by, and look at the faces. They speak of the grief, of the loss that must be a part of every life. There are old and young women, some are crying, some are talking to themselves, some just sit quietly. What are their stories?
Far away, in the village of Kunan Poshpora near Kupwara, separated by a range of high mountains from Pakistan, you sense the same sorrow, although no one speaks of it voluntarily. In this medium-sized picturesque village, with about 300 families, the women seem to live in idyllic conditions. Unlike villages in India, there is no harijan or social exclusion. There are poor families, but all of them have roofs over their heads and some land. The village grows paddy, corn, vegetables, walnuts, almonds, some fruit and has a river running past it. There is plenty of water and low voltage electricity. Firewood is available as long as there are women around to collect it. And all the children go to school.
But the sadness in the eyes of the women of Kunan Poshpora is not the consequence of the eternal burden that women must carry, of fetching, carrying and caring, tasks that remain unalterable regardless of location. Their eyes tell a different story; even today they can barely hide the terror and shame of a day in 1991, when Indian Army personnel raped over 30 women from this village. These women were young then. Today, 11 years later, some of them remain unmarried, others have come back to their maternal homes, and all of them are scarred for life.
Young Posha was just five when the incident took place. Today she is an worker earning Rs. 800 a month (paid infrequently and hardly ever the entire amount). Yet, she is proud that she earns and says she is luckier than the other girls in the village.
"People come here and promise all kinds of things," she says. "One lady came and said we should get all the women raped in 1991 married off. But nothing happened."
Young women like her continue to carry the memory of what happened to their mothers. "Girls here face a lot of problems," says Posha. "We have to tolerate the taunts of people from other villages when they hear that we are from Kunan. Also whenever anyone from the army comes to the village, all the young girls have to hide in their houses. There are no men around most of the year. Most of them go off to Punjab or Kolkata to sell shawls. They only return in March to help in the fields."
Yet, despite this, the grit and determination in these women stand out. They do not just stand about and wail. The "victims" of the 1991 incident merge with the other women; no one tries to pull them out to tell their story. All the women are getting on with their lives. The younger ones are learning to do the typical Kashmiri embroidery on so that they can find some means to earn. Shamima, just 15 and not yet a matriculate, is teaching pre-school children how to read and write. She is determined to get through although she admits that girls have a harder time than boys do, "because they have to do so much housework".
There is a whole generation of young women like Posha and Shamima in Kashmir who have known nothing else than "guns pointed at them from both sides". What will so-called "normal" life mean for them given their extreme vulnerability? Being a village close to the border, the army keeps an eye on them. So do the militants. And the villagers, particularly the women, have to walk with care.
What you sense in all of them is a hunger to learn and to earn, to be economically independent. After a week in the valley, I came away with a feeling of hope after talking to women like Posha and Shamima. And Dilafroze, a woman in Srinagar who could have lived a comfortable, cushioned life. Instead, after her experience of being targetted by militants, she decided to do whatever she could to help other women. So she arrived in the Kunan Poshpora earlier this year on a mission that failed. Far from being defeated by it, she returned a few weeks later with ideas and funds to help the women help themselves. Single-handedly, she has set up a pre-school for girls, and embroidery classes for young women.
You will see plenty of Kashmir in the valley. But most of them are not "wilting lilies", women who throw up their hands in the face of the constant violence and terror around them. Young or old, these women are a Kashmiri version of "steel magnolias".
Ref: indiatogether.org

Shanti Mukund Hospital Case

Raped September 6, 2003

A 19-year-old nurse was on duty at east Delhi's Shanti Mukund hospital one night, taking care of a comatose patient. She awoke in the middle of the night to find a ward boy, Bhura, trying to force himself on her.

When she resisted, Bhura plunged his fingers into her eyes, gouging out the right and wounding the left. He then dragged her to an adjacent bathroom, raped her and locked her in. She lay unconscious and bled through the night.

After she was found the next day, it took the hospital two hours to take her to the casualty ward. A report of the National Commission for Women on the rape and the treatment the nurse received noted that none of the four ophthalmologists of the hospital could be contacted at the time. The victim was taken to the gynaecology department, and then shifted to Guru Tegh Bahadur hospital after tests.

At GTB, she was examined by a second-year PG student and her senior. They merely noted the condition of the eye but did not examine it despite the serious injury. No X-ray was done, nor were any senior doctors called, even though it was a medico-legal case.

She was finally admitted to GTB hospital late at night, but despite her infected eye, kept in the general ward. Says Meenakshi Lekhi, the nurse's lawyer, "She was shunted from one hospital to another. There were lapses on the part of both."

Bhura was caught and, on May 4, 2005, sentenced to life imprisonment for sexual assault and for causing grievous hurt, and to one year for wrongfully confining a person. Just before sentencing, Bhura made an astounding proposal that he was willing to marry his victim if he was freed.

But the girl urged the court to give the severest of punishment to the convict so that "such a horrendous act is not repeated". The NCW held both hospitals culpable and liable to compensate the victim, and called for cancellation of Shanti Mukund's licence.

A case of negligence, filed by the victim against four doctors of Shanti Mukund Hospital, is currently in court. It's nearly three years but the girl, who has a temporary job at a Delhi hospital, is yet to overcome her trauma. Says Lekhi, "She's still waiting for compensation. Meanwhile, her family has spent a lot of money on her treatment.

She has undergone five to six operations and plastic surgery too, and wears a prosthesis in one eye. The other eye is still painful. Can she ever be compensated enough?"

ref:TOI

Maimun Case

Raped 1997

It was love that brought the 18-year-old Maimun and the already-married Idris Mohammed together. But what kept them apart wasn't Idris' marital status or their caste but the fact that by virtue of living in the same village Sudaka in Haryana's Nuh tehsil they were gotra bhai-behen.

Same-gotra marriages are not allowed among Hindus but this is a custom that even converts to Islam cling to.

Despite the fact that the entire village frowned on their union, the couple got married at Nizammuddin's dargah in Delhi on June 8, 1997. But her family refused to accept it and married Maimun off to another man in a hurry. On the wedding night, she was gangraped by the new husband, his brother and two friends.

Then they slit Maimun, from neck to stomach, as punishment for her marriage to Idris, and left her for dead. Maimun was rescued by another villager and, while being treated for her injuries in hospital, was reunited with Idris.

The couple approached National Commission for Women (NCW) in New Delhi after hearing that Idris' old parents were being punished for Maimun's disappearance. Syeda Hameed, member of the Planning Commission, and former NCW member, has profiled Maimun's story in her book They Hang: Twelve Women in My Portrait Gallery.

She recalls in the book, "Surprisingly, they were not complaining about the beating and torture inflicted on them by their biradari...It did not strike me till much later that women accept violence as part of their daily lives simply by virtue of being female..."

On August 14, 1997, while the country prepared for its golden jubilee Independence Day celebrations, an NCW team went to Sudaka, along with Maimun, Idris and some Haryana policemen. The couple hid in the vehicle, while the NCW team tried to persuade the villagers to accept their marriage.

Padma Seth, lawyer and then NCW member, recalls, "Suddenly, thousands of people poured in from nearby villages. They broke open the door of the vehicles and forcefully dragged out Maimun like a piece of meat." The policemen refused to go to her rescue, saying they had to consider the team's security as there were

people armed with knives waiting near the village's exit. Maimun was later found after NCW told the Gurgaon deputy commissioner that it would otherwise file a habeas corpus writ. Says Seth, "It was said that she was raped by the village pradhan after she was taken away." With the help of a court directive, Maimun was first sent to a

Nari Niketan near Karnal, and later reunited with Idris.

Hameed says, "We heard reports that Idris had gone to the Gulf for a while and then opened a shop in east Delhi. Then one day, I saw a familiar face in a newspaper Idris with his two children. That's when I came to know that Maimun had been killed by her brother." It was July 29, 2003 six years after her marriage to Idris that Maimun's brother killed her to save the family honour. Idris and his two children went into hiding; no one knows where they are now.

Seth says, "Men are still treating girls as property they can dispose of. Women are being sold for paltry sums like Rs 10,000 and Rs 12,000. Maimun told us her parents had sold her for Rs 14,000. Also, Muslim converts are hanging on to Hindu customs like gotra and other superstitious beliefs."

Sayeed regrets, "When Maimun was pulled away from us in Sudaka, I felt that despite 50 years of our Independence, there were pockets of ignorance, trapped in a time warp. When she was killed, I realised that no matter what, woh mahilaon ko kabhi bakshte nahin hain (they never spare women)."

Maimun learnt that the hard way.

ref: TOI

Aruna Shanbaug Case

Raped November 27, 1973

On June 1 this year, Aruna Shanbaug will turn 58. But she'll never know that, just as she has remained oblivious to all her birthdays since November 27, 1973.

On that day, 25-year-old Aruna, then a nurse working at Mumbai's KEM hospital, was attacked by a ward boy Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki, while she was changing clothes in the hospital basement. Walmiki first choked her with a dog collar, then raped and robbed her.

The asphyxiation cut off the oxygen supply to her brain. As a result, she has become cortically blind her eyes can see but her brain does not register the images.

She was also diagnosed with brain stem contusion injury and cervical cord injury. She cannot speak, emote, use her limbs or control her muscles. For 33 years, she's been living a vegetative existence on a bed in KEM hospital.

Walmiki was convicted but while Aruna is serving a life sentence, he served a mere six years in jail. Journalist and writer Pinki Virani, who has written a book on 'Aruna's Story', says, "The worst part: he was not sentenced for rape because he had not committed the rape vaginally; it was anal.

The examination of Aruna, when she was found the next morning, was done with what is called the finger test ingers inserted into vagina to check virginity she still was; so that was that." At the time, Aruna was engaged to a junior doctor at the hospital.

The then hospital dean chose not to report the anal rape to the police in order to spare the couple the public disclosure. The fiance was also discouraged from being a complainant. Instead, a sub-inspector became the complainant because no one else was willing.

The judgment against the rapist noted "that the victim was menstruating and the accused had gone there with the intention to rape". But as Bhartha was not charged with rape, he was convicted only for attempt to murder and robbery.

He was sentenced to seven years, which was reduced to six because he had already served a year in lock-up.

After his release, Walmiki reportedly moved to Delhi. But Aruna has remained in a twilight zone. She needs to be fed (mashed food), turned over once in a while, cleaned

she can do nothing on her own. Says Virani, "'She does not need any medicines or even nurses. There's just an ayah." And no one else.

Aruna's family asked for financial compensation and an apartment. They were refused and that's when they abandoned her. Her fiance remained devoted to her till his marriage a few years later.

Says Virani, "Aruna was actually quite an ambitious girl. She had found a nice man, planned on a home, kids as well as a consultancy or a nursing home with her husband. Now, there's no hope of her recovery."

ref: TOI

Bhanwari Devi Case

Raped September 22, 1992

She may be a Dalit, hailing from a poor, potter's family, but in the last decade, Bhanwari Devi has become a torchbearer for the women's movement in the country.

Though everyone remembers the name, few know that even 14 years after she was gangraped by upper-caste villagers for attempting to stop a child marriage in her village, Bhateri, about 45 km from Jaipur, this "icon" still hasn't got justice.

In 1992, as a sathin working for the women's development programme of the Rajasthan government, 41-year-old Bhanwari tried to persuade a Gujjar family not to get their one-year- old daughter married. The police, too, stepped in and prevented the marriage.

However, the child marriage took place the next day any way, and after that the village ordered a socio-economic boycott of Bhanwari's family, holding her responsible for the police intervention.

She was even asked to leave the village, but she refused. On September 22, 1992, five upper-caste men raped Bhanwari in the presence of her husband. The rape was widely seen as a punishment for her defiance and because she had challenged accepted cultural norms.

The police initially refused to record her statement. Past midnight that day, they asked her to leave her skirt behind as evidence and return to her village. She did, wearing her husband's dhoti. For her medical examination, she went to Jaipur, but there too, the medical report did not confirm rape, only her age.

Initial police investigations held her rape allegations as false they said she was too old and unattractive to be raped by young men. But pressure from women's groups and civil rights organisations forced the government to ask for a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which found all the allegations made by Bhanwari to be true.

The trial began in 1994. In the meanwhile, there were constant threats as well as pressure on her to withdraw the case. On November 15, 1995, the court found that the delay in filing her complaint with police and in obtaining a medical examination indicated that she had made the story up.

It acquitted the five accused of the rape charge, saying the incident could not have taken place because "upper caste men, including a Brahmin, would not rape a woman of a lower caste". The men were convicted of minor crimes.

In early 1996, women's organisations, CBI and Rajasthan government filed an appeal in the High Court against the acquittal.

Says activist and People's Union for Civil Liberties chief in the state, Kavita Srivastava, who has been at the forefront of the campaign to get justice for Bhanwari, "It's the 10th year of that appeal and not a single hearing has taken place yet. We twice appealed for an early hearing but both were rejected."

Says Srivastava, "She's living in penury. Though she has received a number of awards, Bhanwari has not received a penny from the state government. She cannot sell pots any more and has only a tiny plot of land. She is forced to survive on the Rs 500 salary she gets as a sathin every month."

So, why doesn't she leave the village? "Because she says she did nothing wrong. She also believes that the villagers will stand by her one day," says Srivastava.

Bhanwari Devi's case provoked women's organisations to file a petition in the Supreme Court, asking it to give directions regarding sexual harassment at the workplace. The apex court judgment, which came on August 13, 1997, gave the Vishaka guidelines that hold employers responsible for providing safe work environment for women.

Says Srivastava, "Bhanwari's case was a pioneering one for the anti-rape movement. It brought about a change even in the system of accountability of the police. Many women have gained from Bhanwari Devi's struggle, but sadly not her."

ref: times of india