Aarushi (8 page)
Arun Kumar and his team were instead preoccupied with trying to limit the damage to their reputations. They now came under pressure to subject the Talwars to narco and brain-mapping tests. In January, the Talwars travelled to Gandhinagar and were from then on in the hands of Dr S.L. Vaya, who put them through a polygraph test as well as a brain-mapping test. The results cleared them of any suspicion. Dr Vaya looked at the test reports of the three servants, one of whom, Rajkumar, she had personally administered the test to, and the contrast between the two sets of tests was definitive: she told me that the Talwars clearly appeared innocent and the servants guilty. As far as Dr Vaya was concerned she felt no need to put the Talwars through the invasive narco analysis test, particularly because Rajesh Talwar was on anti-depressants and Nupur Talwar was on medication to help conceive another child; the chemistry of the narco test would interfere with the chemistry of these separate medications. Arun Kumar accepted Dr Vaya’s recommendation.
***
The curious case of the vaginal swabs and other errors of omission probably cost the first CBI team its assignment. In mid-2008, Arun Kumar had jumped the gun and as good as held the servants guilty in a press conference, even though all he had to go on were brain-mapping and narco tests. His team could not file a charge sheet, or take the investigation forward. The confusion over the swabs threw the investigation off by a number of months and was the final straw. The boss wasn’t happy.
Unnamed CBI sources spoke on Ashwani Kumar’s behalf to share the director’s views. As the team was reconstituted in September 2009, the
Indian Express
wrote: ‘The CBI director was unhappy with Arun Kumar’s “line of investigation” ever since he joined last year. “The case was transferred to Dehradun since no development has emerged in the investigation even after all these months,” the source said. “The forensic reports have also gone against CBI’s line of probe.”’ Ironically the very evidence that would have helped the CBI had been sitting on the investigators’ desk for more than two months.
How common is it for the CBI to reconstitute a whole team? ‘My successors are the ones who need to answer this,’ Vijay Shanker told me later. ‘Either you have sacked a person for not having done his job properly, and you reconstitute. Or you give good reasons why you are reconstituting. These are matters of life and death! And you are laying down the foundation of justice.’
The reason here ostensibly was that it was sixteen months after the murders and the case was going nowhere. So the CBI brass advised a change in the line of investigation. In effect it was really saying: ‘It’s got to be the parents, get them, close this damn thing.’ Why did the CBI go after the Talwars? This is a complex question, the answer to which comes in distinct parts—parts that may have nothing to do with each other.
For me it started with an unforgivable act of incompetence on the CBI’s part in missing a crucial finding of the CDFD report—that Hemraj’s DNA was found on Krishna’s pillow cover. The second reason was a consequence of that error: the direction of the investigation was changed, and a licence given to follow the new line without any ethical restraints. The third element is the most difficult to understand when the context is law or policing. This was that the investigator simply did not ‘like’ the Talwars, especially Nupur Talwar. From Nupur’s account of their interactions, it becomes clear that she wasn’t intimidated by the new CBI investigator, Additional Superintendent of Police A.G.L. Kaul. This is something the Indian constabulary isn’t used to—in their experience, it is only the influential guilty who are not intimidated by the threat of prosecution.
Kaul came into the case in September 2009, a little more than a year after the CBI took over. His boss, Neelabh Kishore, who was officially in charge of the case, was based in Dehradun. Kishore in turn reported to Javed Ahmed in Lucknow. But for all practical purposes, Kaul led the investigation. Kaul was in his early fifties, a balding man of average height with a rather large belly, which became even more substantial through the investigation. (The Ghaziabad regulars would greet him saying
‘Healthy lag rahe ho, Kaul sahab.’
)
The superintendent had the air of a man who knew everything about everything, and then some. Part of this may have been because of the way some journalists pandered to him, nodding vigorously as he gave his short, low-decibel, briefings. Kaul was selective about who he briefed, but he seldom said much. He did, however, unfailingly give the impression that he knew a lot more—a tiny twisted smile would appear on his face at times, as if to say ‘We have this thing tied up, the sensational stuff you’re looking for will be revealed shortly.’ Sometimes, after having been briefed this way, reporter colleagues would tell me, ‘Just sit down one day with Kaul sahab, he will tell you everything.’
CBI officers could be assigned one of three branches in the organization: anti-corruption (against public servants, such as the investigation into the fodder or coal scams), economic offences (that result in losses to the national exchequer, such as major tax evasion/fraud, for example, the fake stamp paper racket run by Abdul Karim Telgi) or special crimes. Major crimes such as the Rajiv Gandhi assassination or various terror attacks come under the last category. So do dowry deaths involving the families of politicians, murders that may have a political angle to them—and therefore the possibility of abuse of influence—and murders of ordinary citizens that make too many headlines.
But special crimes investigations do not always have a high profile; in fact, most cases never make it to the papers in any significant way.
Most CBI officers will tell you that anti-corruption and economic offences are the preferred postings: the sensitivity and scale of the investigations undertaken make for much more interesting work. The darker side to this is that it offers CBI officers inclined that way much greater opportunities for making money or influence-peddling.
A special crimes position isn’t, therefore, exactly prized. A direct recruit into the force, Kaul was in the economic offences wing in his early years. There, a departmental inquiry was held against him on a corruption charge, of which he was later cleared.
Arun Kumar was too senior to be Kaul’s immediate boss, but he had upbraided Kaul both privately and publicly when Kaul was under his charge: Kumar had information that Kaul had been trying to extort money from people implicated in a dowry death case.
As his superior, Kumar was also privy to a list that the CBI guards with zeal. This is the ODI list: Officers of Doubtful Integrity. He told me Kaul was consistently on it. It’s fair to ask why Kumar didn’t just sack Kaul. But that’s not how governments work: the government servant is too well protected for that—not just by the law, but by other colleagues who watch each other’s back. The worst that happens is a transfer or a denial of promotion. Kaul was due to make the rank of superintendent earlier than he did, but was superseded.
Working within the system, the easy way out for Kumar was to avoid assigning Kaul to sensitive cases or ones in which he would need to interact with Kaul regularly. For instance, in the Nithari investigation, of which he was in charge, Kumar gave Kaul only a bit part. In the Aarushi–Hemraj investigation, no part at all. I learned from various people in the CBI that Kaul’s reputation within the CBI had another facet: not everyone approved of his methods, but he was also seen as someone who got the job done—at a cost.
Kaul had for example in the past used the sex angle in a case effectively. The infusion of sex into a story worked very well in the media; it focused public opinion not on the facts of the case, but on the character of the suspects. In the notorious killing of the human rights activist Shehla Masood in Bhopal, which he had investigated, the media was supplied lurid excerpts from a somewhat dubious diary that Zahida Parvez, the alleged mastermind, maintained. Parvez’s motive in arranging the hit on the activist was jealousy. She purportedly suspected Masood of having an affair with a politician she herself was involved with. Within two days of Kaul taking over as investigating officer, the contents of the diary were all over the press.
Kaul was also known to have settled on a quarry and then coerced the suspect’s friends/close associates to testify against them. The 2003 murder of Ram Avtar Jaggi, a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) politician in Chhattisgarh, was one such. Kaul’s theory at the time was that a political rival had bumped off Jaggi. He decided the culprit was Amit Jogi, son of the Congressman and former Chhattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi.
The conspiracy to murder Jaggi was hatched in a hotel room in Raipur, with Amit Jogi as its mastermind, said the investigator. Kaul then got a man who had known Jogi for decades to say under oath that the chief minister’s son was the chief conspirator and director of operations. The scene described by the witness defied credulity. He claimed there were more than a dozen people present in the hotel room at one point or another; some were called, some came, some went, and some stayed, as Jogi hatched his plan. Along with Amit Jogi, dozens were arrested on the basis of this and other similar statements.
Jogi was acquitted in 2007 after spending nearly a year in jail because Kaul had been careless. It turned out that on the night in question one of Jogi’s close friends whom his star witness had named hadn’t been in the Raipur hotel at all. He was in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t just him. Two other people whom the CBI claimed were in the hotel were also in the UK. A fourth was in Patna. Those who were out of the country produced their passports and immigration records. Kaul promptly had these seized for ‘verification’. The CBI kept the passports for over a year, Amit Jogi told me, leaving the affected people running around trying to put together UK immigration records, passenger manifests of the flights they took, hotel reservations and records of credit card transactions.
The CBI’s image is built upon the notion that it is more competent and more neutral than the police (it reports to the central vigilance commission and the department of personnel, Government of India; the police report to their respective state governments). That the CBI’s recruits are largely from the same pool as the police is somehow forgotten.
The announcement that the CBI has taken over an investigation is routinely treated as good news. It comes with the suggestion that there is intent to get to the bottom of whatever the matter is. With this comes expectation. In the Aarushi case, for instance, the magistrate who sent the case for trial reflected the general belief that the CBI had disappointed not just her, but the country, by saying that it didn’t have enough evidence to convict anyone when it submitted its closure report.
This faith that the CBI has the ability to crack every case, nail every culprit, isn’t rooted in reality. It recalls, without irony, those 1970s’ films starring the legendary Raaj Kumar as the CBI officer zipping down to a crime scene in an Ambassador Mark 2, with his assistant—a terrified German shepherd struggling to maintain balance on its roof—and solving mysteries by simply looking at the suspects as he smoked a cigarette. The reality is different. What does the CBI do in cases where winning a conviction seems difficult? The Jogi case reported in the press is instructive.
Firoz Siddiqui is at once a journalist, a detective and a murder conspirator out on bail. He has also wet his beak in Raipur’s political soup, and is seen as an Amit Jogi follower.
In line with his strategy, Kaul summoned Siddiqui and asked him to record a statement under Section 164 saying that he knew of Amit Jogi’s plan to get rid of his rival Ram Avtar Jaggi, and that it was hatched at a particular location.
‘I told him I knew nothing about this. How could I just make it up?’ Siddiqui told me. Kaul first tried to coax Siddiqui, and when this failed, told him that he was asking for trouble if he didn’t comply. ‘He said he would arrest me, but I refused to give a 164,’ said Siddiqui.
Then, late one night, Kaul summoned Siddiqui to a guest house in Raipur saying he needed assistance with the identification of some people in photographs related to the case. When Siddiqui reached there, he was told that his visit had nothing to do with any photographs. He was there only to record his 164, failing which he would be arrested.
Over the next several hours, Siddiqui kept insisting he could not make up a story. At 4 a.m., Kaul woke up Siddiqui’s brother Raees and summoned him to the guest house. ‘He told Raees, “Try and drill some sense into your brother—does your family need all this hassle?”’
In the end, Siddiqui was arrested. In CBI custody for the next fortnight, he says he thought up a plan. He began to pretend that he was ready to spit out his 164. The arrest, the effect it was having on his family and his financial situation were all too much for him to take.
Kaul was pleased, and told Siddiqui he would grant him a second chance. Just before the statement was recorded, Siddiqui requested Kaul to talk to his brother Raees and explain things, reassure him that no harm would come to the family. Kaul agreed. What he did not know was that Raees was recording the conversation and several more that were to follow. In them, Kaul is heard saying that he cooked up the charge sheet; that the court was under his control, at least in the matter of granting reprieves; that the Siddiqui family would be taken care of financially.
He promised Raees a fleet of Innova cars to start a taxi service, and said he had already sent some money to the Siddiquis. (Siddiqui told me that his family received Rs 25,000, and that they accepted it since it was part of the sting operation to nab a crooked cop.) The tapes went straight to the media of course, causing a storm in Raipur. They were also submitted in court. But Kaul simply denied that it was his voice. The court asked if the officer would be willing to offer a voice sample for matching. Kaul refused. (By law, you need not give evidence against yourself.)
Jogi spent ten months in jail, before eventually being acquitted. Four years after his 2007 acquittal, the CBI challenged it and the matter is now in the Supreme Court. As for Siddiqui, the lower court convicted him, along with dozens of others, but in the light of the quality of evidence, he was granted bail by the high court.