Aarushi (11 page)

The emails were not limited to the period of investigation either, as Dharini Mishra claimed in her belated clarification. The investigation was over in December 2010, but CBI officers kept writing to the Talwars till May 2012—when the matter had moved to the courts and trial proceedings had begun. Judge Shyam Lal mentions the emails in his judgement as if there was nothing at all amiss. He merely lists what he thinks is an unremarkable fact, saying Kaul had created the email ID to stay in touch with the accused during investigation.

Gautam Patel, who later became a judge at the Mumbai High Court, had this to say about the Hemraj emails in a column for the
Mumbai Mirror
:

To describe this conduct as disturbing is to put it mildly. It is downright dangerous, certainly dubious and calls into question the CBI’s motives and intentions, especially given that the CBI, like every arm of the government, has official email addresses. The implications of permitting this conduct are serious. A non-official email
ID
has been created and used to introduce material into the record of a court trying a criminal case. Does this contaminate the entire evidence pool? Does it jeopardize the integrity of the judicial record?

Why should any government agency be allowed to communicate with anyone using a non-official address? Imagine what might happen if, say, the Enforcement Directorate or Income Tax starting sending us emails from unverifiable gmail or hotmail addresses. How would we even know if these emails were authentic, spam or some new form of digital trickery? Have agencies like the revenue services ever communicated with anyone in this manner? Has the CBI itself ever created or used non-official addresses in any investigation previously? If it has not, then why is it doing so now? And what is to be made of its many denials?

These are the kinds of questions that the CBI has been asked repeatedly, but perhaps not enough times. These are the kinds of questions it should answer in court. But for that, the court needs to know. I was a little taken aback by Judge Shyam Lal’s simple, unquestioning acceptance of the email address. The Hemraj emails had earlier been submitted to the Supreme Court too. It had said nothing about them. Judge Shyam Lal also blandly recorded the fact that the address had been created.

***

In early March 2010, Kaul’s team received a minor setback.

Kaul finally got the consent and the court order for the narco tests for the Talwars. Kaul had accused the Talwars of avoiding the narco tests the previous January. Nupur tried to explain that it was Dr Vaya’s opinion that there was no need for one at the time. If the investigation required it, they had no objections.

In February 2010, the Talwars travelled to Gandhinagar to undergo their tests. The scientist there found them cooperative but Dr Vaya told them clearly that this round of testing was different: they had come to the lab as prime suspects. The Talwars each told their stories in a trance as videotapes rolled. The scientists had been given the new hypothesis, and at one point Nupur was asked about her friends. She mentioned a Dr Dogra, and there was alarm.

Was he the same man who spoke with the post-mortem doctor? ‘Tell us more about him,’ the scientists asked Nupur. She told them she was talking about a lady doctor. Someone who she had met at a function after Aarushi’s death. This Dr Dogra had just lost a son in a road accident. They became friends because of their shared grief. The conclusions drawn from the narco were clear, and in line with Dr Vaya’s assessment a year earlier: no information regarding the Talwars’ participation in the crimes was revealed.

Kaul received the report in early March 2010. But it didn’t have what he and Dahiya were looking for. Instead, it said that, for the Talwars, Aarushi was a ‘long awaited, precious child’. And that the parents’ ‘behaviour throughout indicated that they have nothing more to lose compared to what they have lost’. The Talwars’ narco also as good as negated the honour killing motive—their value systems wouldn’t allow it. The results said: ‘Considering the parents’ intellectual capacity, outlook and open-minded attitude, it will be easy for them to accept even the most unacceptable behaviour of their daughter compared to losing her permanently.’

The scientists who conducted the narco tests also suggested the CBI should investigate whether the Talwars had been drugged on the night of the murders—Nupur had revealed that she felt extremely drowsy that night, and although Rajesh was a late sleeper he fell fast asleep after a telephone call around 11.30 p.m.

But with this report, Kaul would have to find other material to build his case. It would be useful if a witness turned—if a witness who had helped the Talwars’ cause gradually turned against them. Such a witness came to Kaul, in the form of K.K. Gautam.

***

Gautam’s statement to the first team of the CBI led by Arun Kumar has him learning about the murders on 17 May. He doesn’t know the dentist couple, but his eye doctor—a friend of Rajesh’s brother Dinesh—insists that he visit the Talwars and he goes to the flat. There, he notices, with his policeman’s eye, that there are depressions on Hemraj’s bed that suggest three people have sat on it. That there are three glasses on the floor, and the servant’s bathroom is dirty, as if several people have used it and not flushed.

Gautam had lied in his first statement in 2008. He may not have wanted to go into his role on that first day—helping speed up Aarushi’s post-mortem. In April 2010, about two years later, Gautam was summoned by the CBI once again. This time, A.G.L. Kaul recorded a further statement.

Gautam now said that he had read his previous statement and would like to ‘clarify’ certain things. First, that he found out that Aarushi had been killed a day before: his eye doctor, Sushil Choudhry, had called him and asked if he could help get the post-mortem report released quickly. So far, so good. But this was followed by the claim that Dr Choudhry had also asked him whether he could use his influence as a former policeman to get the word ‘rape’ left out of the post-mortem report. Gautam told Kaul that he refused to help in this regard.

This claim that Sushil Choudhry, a friend of a friend, called to try and use Gautam’s influence to omit the word ‘rape’ was the central part of Gautam’s testimony. In the trial court in 2012, Gautam went beyond just clarifications. His early statements had him saying he had conducted an ‘inspection’ of the premises and observed things like the depressions on Hemraj’s bed which suggested the presence of others in the flat. He told the trial court that he had said no such thing to his interviewers in 2008. He had no idea how this and other details suggesting the presence of outsiders had found their way into his statement.

At the time that he gave his clarifications to Kaul in 2010, he had not mentioned that there were embellishments by the CBI officer recording his first statement. In fact he had said he read his earlier statement over as he gave his second, and just wished to clarify ‘some points’.

Gautam’s turnaround was swifter than the change he underwent from mid-ranking policeman to post-retirement education entrepreneur as patron of Invertis University, formerly Invertis Institute of Management Studies. There seem to be several reasons linked to Gautam’s turnaround.

In mid-March 2010, Kaul was picking up pieces of the puzzle that would compose his theory. During this time he spoke to Ajay Chaddha, the Talwars’ friend. Chaddha had been at the crime scene on both 16 and 17 May 2008, and Kaul asked him if he thought there was anything unusual that he noticed.

Chaddha recounted an odd incident that took place on 17 May. The Talwars had left for Haridwar to immerse Aarushi’s ashes, and he had stayed behind in the flat. In the afternoon, K.K. Gautam arrived with a man, who was introduced as someone from a detective agency, and two women. Gautam asked Chaddha if they could see Aarushi’s room. Since the Talwars weren’t present, Chaddha politely refused. But the four people hung around, and one of the women asked to use the washroom.

Chaddha couldn’t turn that request down, so he showed her to the guest toilet that could be accessed through the living area. Chaddha felt she was spending unusually long in the washroom, when the second woman also asked to use the toilet. With the guest toilet occupied, Chaddha was left with no choice but to ask her to use Aarushi’s. He showed her the way through Aarushi’s bedroom. The two toilets had a connecting door on the inside, which meant that you could access Aarushi’s bedroom from the guest toilet via her toilet.

Chaddha recalled that the women may have spent between ten and fifteen minutes in the toilets. Though he had met Gautam that morning, the man from the ‘detective agency’ and the women were strangers. He wondered why they had come to the flat and what they were doing in the toilets for that long. Kaul asked him if he could recall the names of any of the three strangers; Chaddha couldn’t.

But on the evening of 20 March 2010, while watching a television programme on News24, Chaddha recognized a panellist, Usha Thakur, as one of the women who had come to the Talwars’ with Gautam. On 22 March Chaddha emailed Kaul telling him that, though he had seen her just once, he was almost certain that it was Usha Thakur who had accompanied Gautam to the flat on 17 May 2008.

As it happened Usha Thakur, a local social activist, had just been questioned by the CBI a few days before, on 18 March. Shortly after the murders, she had claimed that Hemraj had approached her for help five days before he was killed. He had apparently heard of her work for the victims of the Nithari killings. According to interviews Thakur gave at the time, Hemraj was very distressed about a possible threat to his life and wanted to speak to her in private. This conversation didn’t take place because she didn’t have the time that day.

Thakur was an ardent supporter of Gurdarshan Singh’s theory about the murders, and remains one to this day. Within ten days of the killings, she told reporters that the Talwars were responsible. The CBI took note of this and wanted to know why Hemraj had gone to her, and what role she played. Her replies, as reported in the press, were exactly what she had told journalists in May 2008, just after the murders. There was no mention of her visiting the flat with K.K. Gautam. Four days later, Ajay Chaddha’s mail popped into Kaul’s inbox.

K.K. Gautam had never said anything about returning to the flat. He said he had left once the police took over (post his heroics in the morning: finding Hemraj’s body, inspecting the crime scene, etc.). He didn’t mention anything about a detective agency or two women. That was perhaps because there wasn’t really any detective agency, just that Gautam’s friend Usha Thakur wanted a first-hand look at the scene of the crime.

Kaul told Chaddha that he would summon Gautam to his office so Chaddha could confront him. On the afternoon of 1 April 2010, Chaddha arrived at Kaul’s second-floor office in block 4 of the CGO Complex. Gautam had also been called, but he was waiting in another room.

Chaddha told me, ‘When Kaul called Gautam in, and I recounted his visit to the apartment, he just denied it flatly. He said he had never seen me before. I found this very strange. I told Kaul that I had no incentive to lie about such a thing. I had been asked if I thought something unusual had happened, and I thought this was unusual.’

What made Chaddha more credible was that he had been consistent about this—investigators had recorded him telling them about the visit in 2008. Gautam now had a lot of explaining to do. What was he trying to do back in the flat? Who was the supposed detective? Why had he taken the two women there?

In the weeks preceding the meeting between Chaddha and Gautam, the CBI had also looked into his links with Invertis University and seized his medical records from his eye doctor, Sushil Choudhry. Gautam may have retired on a government salary, but he would boast to Choudhry about the large house one of his sons had in South Africa and the sterling achievements of the other. Invertis University is a sprawling 70-odd-acre campus with an ‘avant garde’ (their description) building on the outskirts of Bareilly that attracts semi-rural ‘degree’ aspirants. Gautam’s son Umesh is the chancellor of the university, another son is the pro vice chancellor, and their wives are involved in various important capacities. The cellphone that Gautam was using was registered under the name of this institution.

Kaul had caught Gautam lying about his sly little afternoon visit to the crime scene on 17 May, but he also seemed to have much more on the retired policeman. Arun Kumar had been out of the investigation for several months by now, but he received a surprise telephone call from Gautam. Kumar knew Gautam well and not just by reputation. Early in his career, the IPS officer had served in Bareilly and Gautam had been a subordinate.

The most casual observers of the goings-on in the state of Uttar Pradesh would probably know that the universe that that state’s bureaucracy occupies has rules and mores that are different from what we may otherwise encounter. One of the traditions in the UP bureaucracy was the often reported annual ‘most corrupt officer’ contest. The public was excluded from the extensive search this required given the highly competitive field, but the award’s merit rested, in a way, in this exclusion. It was a brutal peer review exercise. The kind that one might perhaps have to go through to get published by, say,
Nature
. (Or, for that matter, by Penguin.)

The Neera Yadav case spoke to the ways of that universe. She was accused of corruption, and convicted in November 2012. Which is when the
Times of India
said:

Yadav, a 1971 batch IAS, became the first woman chief secretary of UP in 2005 when Mulayam [Singh Yadav] was CM. This flew in the face of IAS service rules as the CBI had filed the charge-sheet in the Noida scam. Her stint lasted barely six months, and she [was] removed on October 6, 2005, by an apex court directive. Earlier, in 1997, she was adjudged one of three most corrupt officers in UP by the UP IAS Association.