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Published in OPEN magazine in the first week of March 2015
Also featured on Huffington Post

The lane in an area known as 'Bangladesh' in Mota Fofalia, wherein four of the 11 arrested accused lived within shouting distance of each other


A portion of the wall painted black in the cabin has 19 names inscribed on it. It is a list of Jaydev Singh Vaghela's predecessors; those who occupied his chair since the second half of 2006. The tenures of sub-inspectors of Shinor police station, a taluka in Vadodara district of Gujarat, are dramatically short. While the rulebook allows them a maximum of three years, some barely last more than a month.

“That is the reputation of this thana,” Vaghela explained. “There is a lot of tough rope-walking to be done – politically. There isn’t a lot of crime in this area but when there is, it is a big one.”

He recalled a murder that had recently taken place in Chhota Udepur, a taluka located over 50 km east of Shinor, bordering Madhya Pradesh. It was a colourful tale featuring a man walking into the police station with a confession that would send the cops scouring for a headless body in the next hour. He cited another murder in his jurisdiction where the murderer surrendered by his own initiative, albeit in a less dramatic fashion.

“Try to understand the psychology of the criminals here,” said Vaghela. “Here, they won’t hide the evidence. They will take the head in their hand and march to the station.”

A resident of the same taluka, Vaghela has over seven years under his belt as an officer in Gujarat police. Six months in Shinor police station and he has already received his transfer orders. On the evening of February 11, he said that the reason I found him across the table was for want of a successor. As we leisurely chatted over a cup of tea, the 37-year-old told me the numerous transfers that had taken him all over Gujarat.

“So what is the biggest case you have worked upon?” I asked.

After a pregnant pause, he smiled and I knew. We had spent the last two hours discussing it.


THE TIPPING POINT

             Place: Bithli village. About 9 kilmetres from Shinor.

Large swathes of land in Shinor, home to cotton, sugarcane and other water-rich cultivation, owe its potency to the Narmada river. The landowners, almost entirely from the Patel community, live in clusters near the centre of the villages. The labourers, comprising of indigenous and migrants belonging to the the scheduled tribes (ST) – majority of them Vasavas, Bhils and Rathwas –, are scattered all over their land. The topography in the outskirts is dotted with rooms that are built to shelter the electricity connections of the tubewell beneath it. Most of these rooms, referred simply as kuan (a well), are used by migrant labourers as houses.


The topography of Shinor is dotted tubewells, referred to as kuan, that are used as houses by migrants

            Till a month ago, in one such kuan in the outskirts of Bithli, there lived a family of seven; a father, two sons and their wives, an infant and an uncle. It had barely been a few days that 18-year-old Rakshaben*, the newest addition to the family, had moved in with her husband Hitesh* (20). On the evening of January 17, the melodies of the bhajans that wafted to their household came from a bhandara (a religious function) that was being held at the local temple. As the darkness descended, the family lay themselves down for rest after a long day in the fields.

It started at 10.30 pm. Four men, their faces covered with scarves and armed with a chopper, showed up at the doorstep and woke up the sleeping father and his brother, asking them to open the door. They didn’t have to; the latches of the house weren’t in place. The intruders barged in, rousing the two couples and a sleeping infant who launched himself into a terrified wail. Three more men emerged out of the shadows.

“At first, they said, ‘Take everything’,” Rakshaben told me in the second week of February, her voice betraying no emotion. When her husband resisted, the frail 20-year-old was thrown out of the house. He took his chance and sprinted towards his landlord’s residence. Meanwhile, the family meekly handed over their life savings: Rs. 750 in cash.

“Then they said,” Rakshaben continued steadily, “‘We want the women.’”

The men lunged forward and grabbed at the two women. They couldn’t get better of Rakshaben’s brother-in-law who wrapped his arms tightly around his wife and child, refusing to let go even as the men started beating him. Rakshaben was unprotected. As the family was hustled into a corner of the house, the four men lifted Rakshaben by her flailing limbs and made their way to the fields behind the house.

A panting, haggard Hitesh had meanwhile burst into his landlord’s house and alerted him about the robbery bid. Sanjaybhai Patel immediately dialled the police control room and the seemrakha Mushtaq Sindhi, a private guard who watches over the fields. About half an hour later, Hitesh was escorting officials, guards and village elders to his house to find his family locked in. The torn remains of Rakshaben’s clothes lay on a mud-path running along the periphery of the fields. The police instructed the locals to inform the residents of all the villages in the vicinity. 

Nearly half a kilometre away, deep in a camouflage of the banana plantations, a chilling scene was enfolding. “One had closed my eyes, one my ear, one had held my hands, one my legs,” said Rakshaben. “I could still hear the seemrakha calling out my name at a distance but they had the chopper on my throat. I was told, ‘Don’t scream or we will kill you.’”

As mentioned in her medical report, Rakshaben was raped for nearly two hours.

Around 2.30 am, the Bithli locals received a call from a neighbouring village informing them about a young girl who had been spotted. The entire brigade rushed to the spot and were told that the residents of the kuan who had spotted her, not knowing any better, had already shooed her away, assuming her to be a thief.

Out of desperation, Hitesh called out to his wife of 20 days. In response, faint sobs broke out from the surrounding fields. Clad in a shirt, jacket and a scarf wrapped around her waist, Rakshaben was shivering when they found her. Predictably, there was a barrage of questions now being tossed at her, none of which she could answer coherently in her state of mind.

“We thought, she might be in a trauma,” inspector AM Saiyad from Vadodara (Rural) crime branch told me.  “In the morning, I went to meet her again.”

From the conversation that morning, the cops had some vital leads. During the confrontation at the victims’ house, the scarves had slid down and the entire family had seen the accused. Once Rakshaben was abducted, as they dragged her to the fields, one of the kidnappers had used his cell phone to call his accomplice. Rakshaben told the cops that she had overheard him say, “Mahesh, come here.” It was the same dialect that the tribals spoke in. After the rape, they had lent her a shirt, a jacket and a scarf to cover herself with. Then they had split up. Four of them led her deeper in the fields. At a point, as they huddled around a dying fire for warmth, she spotted an opportune moment and quietly slipped away.

“We put our sources on the job. They got details of around 11 tribals with the name Mahesh in the surrounding villages,” said inspector Saiyad. A certain Mahesh Thakur Vasava, resident of the neighbouring Mota Fofalia village, hadn’t returned to his residence since the wee hours of January 18. The cops then conducted a background check and found a sex-worker that he once had relations with. According to the cops, she identified the jacket as Mahesh’s and told them about all of his friends. As Vaghela told me later with much relish, “Every man makes enemies.”

By January 21, on the basis of the information supplied to them by the sex-worker, they detained Mahesh from his sister’s place at the neighbouring village. They had also tracked down six of Mahesh’s friends to their residence in Mota Fofalia and Malpur villages, both in a 10 kilometre radius of Bithli.

The cops told me that Mahesh owned up to the crime and revealed the names of the other six. On the night of January 21, the cops, in a series of coordinated strikes, detained Nitesh Vasava (22), Mahesh Ramesh Vasava (20), Ranjit Vasava (19), Rajesh Vasava (23) and Ghanshyam Vasava (23) while they were sleeping at their residence. No explanations were offered to any of the families. The seventh accused, Chiman Tadvi, has been absconding ever since.



The temple of Mhaishasur, a local diety, where the seven accused allegedly gathered at the temple before they attacked their victim in Bithli


FOURTEENTH JEWEL

I was curious. In spite of having revealed their identities and left three pieces of clothes behind –substantial evidence by any standard – a criminal of limited means would try his utmost to dig himself a burrow to the other end of the earth. Here, the cops had managed to catch five of them as they lay on their beds with their families by their side.

“It wasn’t the first time [that they had raped someone]. Before this, they knew no fear,” said Vaghela.

There are certain techniques that are used during interrogation, he explained. When an accused is taken into custody, the only thing in his mind is to secure his own release. Enter the dangling carrot – tell us everything and we will let you off.

“But they won’t always tell us straightaway. For such cases, there is the chaudava ratan (the fourteenth jewel),” said Vaghela, using the euphemism for a stick. And confess they did. In the coming days, the cops spread the word: they had arrested a gang of serial rapists.

OPEN is in possession of the list of seven other rapes that were allegedly been committed by a gang of 13 men in last one year, none of which were reported to the police at the time. This list, I was told, is prepared on the basis of the confessions of those arrested. The accused are residents of Mota Fofalia and Malpur. Most of them work as farm labourers and are predominantly between 18-25 years of age. At the time this issue was going for print, ten accused had been arrested. Of the two people absconding, one is a 15-year-old.

According to the police, some of the accused stayed within shouting distance of one another. They got acquainted with the rest at wedding functions where they used to work as waiters for a local caterer. The gang would identify soft targets, those of limited means who stayed alone. They used to conduct a recce after identifying their target, zero in on the location and communicate to others with a not-so-cryptic ‘Aaj raid paadvaani che’, Gujarati for ‘Today, we have a raid.’ Over time, after their first few victims chose silence over lodging police complaints, they got emboldened.

The ‘confessions’ that the cops told me about are as disturbing as they are bizarre. In one of the incidents, the victim is a teacher at a local school who was returning home on a two-wheeler vehicle. Around 5 pm, one of them, lying in wait on the sidelines, jumped on the road and kicked the vehicle. As the vehicle and the rider skidded to a halt, she was dragged off the road, into the fields and raped by eight men. In another incident, two of them allegedly raped the wife of a factory owner at night right outside her house where she was sleeping.

When the ‘confessions’ came in, the police decided to take it upon themselves to track these victims down and get them to lodge an FIR. However, complainants were hard to come by even when discretion was promised.

“During this time, I went to meet a mother-daughter duo at Bithli who the accused had confessed about. But they told me that no such incident had happened, that they were only threatened. Then they said, ‘Please go away from here’,” said SI Vaghela.

While researching for this piece, the cops wouldn’t tell me the names or addresses of any of the victims who hadn’t lodged a formal complaint. They, however, maintained that all of them had been approached by the police or through unofficial but trustworthy channels.

By February 2, one of the victims, Daajiben*, had agreed to step up and lodge a complaint. Accordingly, four more, Yogesh Rawad (20), Jaswant Vasava (22), Gopal Vasava (33) and Alpesh Vasava (19), were arrested the next day.



The four accused caught by Vadodara police on February 3, 2015

56-year-old Daajiben* doesn’t remember her age. Her elder cousin, 60-year-old Kapilaben*, tells her that she is the younger one by nearly four years. Daajiben accepts it without protest just as she accepts her elder sister’s narration of what had happened to both of them that night. Neither of the two remembers the date of the incident. It was on a full moon night around the time of Diwali, they tell me.

That night, when the men flashed a torch on her face, Kapilaben could barely make out the outline of the two intruders. “Who are you? What happened?” she asked them. Without answering, the two men exited the hut and returned with five more.

“They were saying, ‘Come to the fields.’ I didn’t go, so then they dragged me off my bed and stripped me off my clothes. First there was one man, then another; around seven of them. If I tried to stand up, they would push me down and it would start again,” said Kapilaben. A chopper was pointed at Kapilaben’s throat. After they had had their turns, they went to Daajiben and proceeded to rape her.

Even after they left, the two women, mentally and physically traumatised, did not venture out of their house till the morning. They told their landlord and within a few hours, they were back to work on the fields.

“Why? Didn’t you tell him to do something?” I asked.

“He said no, don’t lodge any case,” said Daajiben.

“The Patel from Bithli took up the (Rakshaben’s) case. He (Bharatbhai) didn’t,” said Kapilaben. “Nobody knows us. Why would anyone take up our case [at the police station]?”

As per the FIR registered at Shinor Police Station, both cousins were raped twice each in a span of 10 days by nine rapists. I point out discrepancies vis-a-vis the narrative of the two victims. Both sides stick by the version of events. While the police maintain that the women had seen the rapists, the victims say that they had their faces covered. In the following days, some men came back to their huts, once to steal, another time to scatter their belongings, and on yet another occasion, to hang a dead snake on their door. It was at such times that they saw the men, the two tell me. In the identification parade conducted in February, assuming they were the ones who had barged into their house that full moon night, they identified the seven as their rapists.


Within days of being sexually assaulted, the two victims cousins abandoned their house and moved near the centre of the village. Pictured here is the spot where the house, similar to one in the background, stood for nearly twenty years


             THE GANG 

They are not sex addicts. They are not addicted to pornography. While they drank the local brew and smoked beedi occasionally, they don’t have any prominent affiliation to any intoxicant or psychotropic substances. None of them exhibit any discernable unusual behaviour. In fact, as inspector Saiyad told me, as far as such aspects are concerned, “they are totally normal.”

Why would they do it? Apparently, because they thought they could get away with it. At least, that’s what the cops conclude.

             I visited and spoke to the families of all the arrested accused at their residence. If there was one common thread binding most of the families, it was that of ignorance of their ward’s activities. But for one, none of the families knew much about their sons’ circle of friends, his day-to-day conduct and, in a few cases, the crime they had been arrested for. Their woes stemmed not out of their son’s arrest for his alleged involvement in multiple gang rapes but at the loss of an earning member in the family. It would be prudent to mention the other two threads binding them at this stage: lack of education and poverty.

The situation is especially stark in case of Mahesh Thakurbhai Vasava who, by all indicators, comes across as the ring-leader. His name crops up in all the eight rapes believed to have been committed by the gang. The family of four – Mahesh, his brother and parents – live in a hut in the outskirts of Mota Fofalia.

“I don’t know what he was up to. Sometimes, he came home late at night around 10 pm. At such times, he used to sleep outside,” Mangiben, the accused’s mother, told me.
Mangiben believes that her son is innocent although beyond maternal instincts, she has nothing to back her claims with. Her husband, on the other hand, is more pragmatic: “I don’t know,” he says when asked about his son’s alleged involvement in the series of sexual assaults.

             Gopal, son of Jayantibhai Vasava, a businessman who rents out mandaps at weddings, used to stay a few houses away from Mahesh. The family is of the belief that after facing corporal punishment, Mahesh gave the police the names of all of his eleven friends, thus leading to their immediate arrest without a shred of incriminatory evidence.

“They [friends and co-accused] used to serve at the weddings that Gopal was working at. But Gopal was always busy with his work,” said Jayantibhai. The family doesn’t remember the exact whereabouts of their son in the period during which Kapilaben and Daajiben were sexually assaulted.

There is, however, an exception to the trend. On February 3, the night his son Jaswant was arrested, Sukhdev Vasava spent the hours leading to the sunrise weeping on his front porch. At dawn, he accompanied his wife to tell his landlord about the events of the night. He then sent his wife back home. Around 10 am, the villagers found his dead body on one of the arterial roads of Mota Fofalia. He had committed suicide by consuming fertilizer.

Sukhdev is survived by his 59-year-old mother, two sons and wife, a cancer patient. When I met them in the last week of February, the women of the family told me that they hadn’t made any attempts to understand the details of the case against their son. Twice, they had visited the police station and every time, they returned both reassured as broken by Jaswant’s pleas of innocence.

As with every one of my visits, during the course of our conversation, we were joined in by their relatives, neighbours and a battery of curious onlookers. Their second son Manoj*, however, was missing from the crowd.

“What happened to Manoj?” I asked.

“He has gone to buy medicines for his mother. She suffers from cancer,” Sukhdev’s mother told me.

“He still lives here?” I asked, taken aback.

“Yes,” she said. “He should be back tomorrow morning with the medicines.”

I turned to the widow and noticed the cancerous lump on the side of her throat, until now covered by her saree. Her mother-in-law was wiping tears that were unleashed at the memory her son. I wondered if I should tell them that their 15-year-old was among the two people the Shinor police has marked ‘accused and absconding’.


 Sakhu Ramesh Vasava, mother of one of the accused Mahesh Ramesh Vasava, at her hut in Mota Fofalia

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