Why investigation of gang rape and murder of Dalit girl in Jind is proving disastrous

The brutal rape and twin murder of a boy and a girl belonging to Jhansa village in Kurukshetra, Haryana recently brought this village into national spotlight.

On the dusty by-lanes leading to this village on Kurukshetra-Pehowa highway, an outsider might look at signs of modern influences through life-size hoardings and posters of Virat Kohli and Deepika Padukone. But these hoardings actually hide the real picture of Haryana.

One of the many real pictures is depicted by the kind of crimes taking place here, mostly rape and murder, and honour killing with unique brazenness and frequency.

Jhansa village incident is just the tip of the iceberg, even as the investigation into it is on, in the past six days five more rapes have been reported from elsewhere in the state - in Pinjore (a 50-year-old raped a 10-year-old girl), in Hisar (a 15-year-old boy raped a three-year-old girl), in Panipat (an 11-year-old was raped by unidentified men), in Fatehabad (two men raped a newly-wed woman, in Faridabad a 22-year-old was raped by three men.

In all of these cases, the rapists were known to the victims and the victims thankfully survived except for one case. Therefore these cases didn't neeed much of an investigation. But imagine for a moment if the victim dies and the police has to circumstantially treat the case, then the Haryana Police best exemplifies the raw sense of larger Haryanvi medieval folk sense that hypothesis leads to discovery. But if there is no such discovery then treat such incidents as part of life. This is what the additional director general of police, Ambala Range, RC Mishra said in a recent statement about rising rape cases: "It's part of society. Such incidents have been taking place forever."

Talking about these folk hypotheses, some of them are, a girl wearing a skirt may not have a good character, a girl and a boy together are in a physical relationship, smoking hookah with water filter is good for health, etc. These hypotheses though brilliantly conceived at a time they were, in the present times lead to an ugly discovery.

So after the girl from Jhansa village allegedly went missing with a boy named Gulshan and before her body was found, her father went to the police station umpteen times between January 9, the day she went missing, and January 12, when the body was found, to enquire if there was any clue to his daughter's whereabouts.

On January 12, a relative called him when he was entering the police station, and said that a news channel was flashing the images of a girl's body found 110 kms away in Budha Kheda village. Half-an-hour later, the father started crying profusely. The TV images were of his daughter.

In the meanwhile, the Haryana police used its folk sense of hypotesis - use the baton not the brain. So if the girl is dead, boy is missing, the police thought it was an open and shut case pretty much reminiscent of Aarushi-Hemraj murder, when the Noida police started looking for Hemraj as the prime suspect in Aarushi's murder but found him dead on the terrace two days later after having dispatched teams to look out for Hemraj all over.

In a similar fashion, Haryana Police also started looking for the 18-year-old Gulshan as "culprit". In the meanwhile, they picked up his family thinking that the boy would come running on getting the news of his parent's detention. Till "Gulshan the culprit" comes walking into the police station, the cops remained adhesed to the easiest thing, the arm chair investigation as part of which they tortured Gulshan's younger brother, who is a school-going minor. They thrashed him, spread his legs, kicked his private parts, gave him electric shock even as his father was made to watch his son go through all this from across in the same lock-up, and kept begging the cops to not be so brutal with him. Finally, when Gulshan's body was found, the Haryana Police hypothesis based on medieval wisdom fell flat. "I was relieved at least my husband got back, if not my son," said Gulshan's mother Radha.

The post-mortem of the girl reveals that she was raped by several individuals, brutalised, and finally she was drowned. Her body was first seen by the morning walkers on January 12 at Budhakhera, 110kms from Jhansa and six days later Gulshan's body was found 25kms from where the girl's body was lying.

The police have registered a case against unidentified men for gang-raping and killing the girl and started the proceedings under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) with regards to the death of the boy, again an armchair piece of work.

Having put the cart before the horse, the Haryana Police now had to begin the investigations afresh. And they began with seeking the help of the CCTV footage. One CCTV footage shows the victim walking in the village on January 9. A little later three youths riding a motorcycle are seen in the footage. Eyewitnesses had also seen the girl and Gulshan walking alongside the bridge over a canal from where Gulshan's body was recovered.

Apart from these bits of information and some telephone call details, the Haryana Police are cornered, since they have exhausted the possibility of using the baton and hypothesis.

It is too soon to say the case is going the Aarushi-Hemraj way, but the mistakes have already been made and the signs are visibly ominous of this rape and murder going the same way.

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