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