Centred on the alleged 'abduction, rape and murder' of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district of Jammu region of J&K, 'Justice for Asifa'was an outright communal campaign conducted in April 2018 by some ill-motivated and self-righteous celebrities and media personalities.
The propagandists were quite successful in whipping up a frenzy of disgust and loathing among the sections of the Indian public as well as the 'international audience' for whatever is alleged and advertised to be an instance of "Hindu communalism".
The campaign was based on some glaring falsehoods, such as equating the very reasonable demand for a CBI investigation into the alleged crime with "siding with the rapists".
The 'Justice for Asifa' campaign is a lovely example of how Indian media and prominent media personalities openly engage in viciously communal reportage, commentary and propaganda campaigns day in, day out and get away with it.
Being directed against all that can be stuck with the label 'Hindu,'this routine and virulent communalism has been given carte blanche and absolute impunity in India.
On Tuesday, a court in J&K ordered that six members of the police team that investigated the case be booked on charges of torturing witnesses and forcing them to give false testimonies.
In June 2019, six out of the seven accused were convicted by sessions judge Pathankot. Vishal Jangotra was acquitted.
I understand the convicted have appealed against their convictions.
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I had an opportunity in late July 2019 to read a critical commentary on the case, skim through the 415-page judgement of the sessions judge, and to see some of the reportage of the case that I had not seen before.
It was part of an exercise to render some help to the person who wrote that critical commentary which he/she planned to develop into a book.
It involved writing my impressions of the case which I found to be a very dubious case despite the six convictions.
The following are those impressions that I wrote on 2nd August 2019.
I have redacted the name of the person who wrote the critical commentary because I am not sure about the appropriateness of citing his/her name and yet unpublished work.
His/her name appears in my commentary as 'Abcd'.
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Having gone through the manuscript of Abcd’s work on ‘Kathua rape and murder’ case as well as the trial court’s record of the case and the verdict dated 10 June 2019, I give here my broad impressions about the case.
Since I am not a lawyer, this write-up cannot be a legal evaluation of the merits of the case against the accused or the decision of the sessions judge Pathankot.
It’s simply my understanding of a case about which I first learnt in April 2018 on Twitter and which I subsequently followed keenly for several weeks on the same social media platform.
When this news took the media by storm in April 2018, I was not plugged into the broader context of the case, namely the prevailing tension and antagonism between PDP (the party then governing J&K in coalition with BJP) and the ‘Hindu’ residents of Jammu who were agitated by this case as well as a number of other issues.
Months after the media campaign on Kathua case in April 2018, I watched a videoof Ankur Sharma in which he explained the virulently Islamist nature of the J&K government and why the non-Muslim residents of the state felt cornered and under attack.
I agreed then and continue to agree with Ankur Sharma’s conclusions because they were in sync with my own findings, namely that the colonial DNA of the Indian state itself is primarily ‘Abrahamic’ in nature. I have written, for instance, in as yet unpublished work about the fact that Section 295A of IPC has origins in Islamic terror.
What was impossible to miss in the media campaign in April 2018 was its maliciously communal nature. I maintain that whatever be the ultimate outcome of the court case, what was mustered in April 2018 was openly communal hysteria against the ‘Hindus’ of Jammu in particular and ‘Hindus’ in general.
An outright communal and hysterical campaign was the first giveaway that things were probably not what they were made out to be.
I also found it difficult to understand then and still do as to what exactly makes the demand for a CBI inquiry equal to ‘supporting the rapists and murderers’ even though I can’t vouch for the exact nature of the agitation that the ‘Hindu’ side in Jammu engaged in and the role played therein by the BJP minister or legislators.
What added to my suspicions subsequently was the unravellingof Talib Hussain from being projected as one of the ‘heroes’ of ‘Justice for Asifa’ campaign to the one involved in cases of rape and violence.
By the time I saw reportsthat Vishal Jangotra was likely to have been present hundreds of km away from the scene of the crime when the crime is supposed to have been committed, I did expect for a while that the entire case might gradually fall apart by more such revelations.
So the 10th June verdict of the sessions court came as a surprise to me because the judge convicted all the accused except one.
Since the most probing of the mainstream media coverage hasn’t gone beyond showing some material attesting to Vishal Jangotra’s alibi, the 10th June verdict has been something of a dead end for all those like me who believe that the entire ‘Kathua rape and murder’ is most likely an act of malicious frame-up based on false accusations.
The material that I have seen here therefore fills the information vacuum left by the mainstream media. Along with reading this material I have also seen a few videos of the JK Mediathat – I discovered – has been presenting the side of the 'Hindu' community directly affected by this case.
I found Abcd’s critique of the case and the verdict convincing enough.
The following are some salient points that come to my mind after reading his/her critique followed by a reading of the judgement.
1. I think the prosecution has built its entire case – and the judge has predicated his entire verdict – on the theory that there were irredeemably acrimonious relations between Sanji Ram and his community on the one hand and Mumamad Yousuf and Bakarwals on the other.
The theory, which they have sought to bolster by citing 11 FIRs on instances of bad blood between the two sides, has allowed the prosecution and the judge to stick the label of ‘circumstantial evidence’ to whatever material was adduced in the court.
None of those 11 FIRs pertain to Rasana village, but they nevertheless have been deemed to be the solid peg on which a crime of the alleged nature can be hung.
Thus the entire case has been built as a crime motivated by communal hatred, which eventually allowed the judge to gloss over apparent fabrications in the charge-sheet and infirmities in the prosecution’s case.
The agitation of the local Hindu community in the initial months of 2018 might unfortunately have aided the police and the prosecution in laying this basis.
[I recall, for instance, watching a video clip in which Sanji Ram upon his surrender to the police tells a Muslim TV reporter on camera that ‘If they (Bakarwals) can be so damaging in minority, imagine what will they do to us when their numbers swell’. This Muslim TV reporter then turns to the camera and maliciously tells the viewers something to the effect, ‘Here’s the mastermind of the rape of an innocent child not content yet and still expressing hatred for his victims’.]
Was the Defence able to counter the theory of acrimonious relations to show that the ties between local Dogra community and the Bakarwals were, after all, not so bad as to push a respectable Hindu family down to the level of brutalizing an innocent child in order to strike fear among the nomadic group?
It doesn’t appear so.
Abcd’s treatment of this aspect of the case in her manuscript also does not appear to me to be commensurate to the weight that the prosecution and the Judge Tejwinder Singh have given to the same.
2. Abcd’s manuscript says the police submitted two charge-sheets, the first depicting Shubham Sangra (who is a juvenile) alone committing the crime and the second telling an implausible tale of Sanji Ram hatching a ‘conspiracy’ with ever more bizarre additions of dramatis personae.
Is it legally permissible to submit a charge-sheet that presents an entirely different narrative from the one contained in the first charge-sheet without withdrawing the previous one?
I don’t know, but this exercise clearly points to the probability that the J&K government decided as an afterthought that it wanted to implicate an entire community through this case.
This afterthought must have necessitated the implication of policemen Anand Dutta and Tilak Raj both of whom were earlier part of the investigating team.
So it seems that the prosecution ‘explained’ the two conflicting narratives by telling the judge that Anand Dutta and Tilak Raj misled the investigation which resulted in the first narrative – and that when their complicity was discovered the second narrative supplanted the first one.
3. Abcd’s manuscript makes the point that the Devasthan was much in the nature of any frequently visited temple which could hardly admit of the commission, without discovery, of the heinous crimes of illegal confinement, drugging and sexual assault.
However, the court file shows that the prosecution and the judge have been successful in showing the Davsathanto be a place quite unlike a bustling temple.
The responses that Bhagmal Khajuria (Satura village Sarpanch), Bishan Dass Sharma (resident of Rasana), and Monica Sharma made to the judge’s questions depict the Devasthan as a rather secluded place that’s hardly used for any frequent social gathering.
How does one explain that the Defence had nothing substantial to prove that Devsathan was actually being used for the festivals of Lohri and Makar Sankranti, and Kirtan, etc., and was indeed a place not conducive to the commission of a heinous crime?
It’s ironical that the people behind the ‘Justice for Asifa’ campaign in April 2018 made the Devasthan the central element in their attempt to evoke public disgust and loathing, projecting the building as any other Hindu temple. They were thus quite successful in linking ‘Hindu’ iconography with a heinous crime, evoking the image of a new ‘low’ in ‘Hindu communalism’.
In the trial court, however, the same Devasthan turns out to be hardly a Hindu temple, and more like a disused store-room.
4. I haven’t quite understood the status of Shubham Sangra’s ‘confession’ in the sessions court Pathankot. Was it permissible for the Defence to call him to testify?
Has Shubham Sangra retracted his ‘confession’ at the juvenile justice board or pleaded that he signed it under duress? If he has not retracted his ‘confession,’ does it not mean that the case is closed to the extent that someone from Sanji Ram’s family was indeed involved in the crime (even though a number of other accused might have been falsely implicated)?
How will Shubham Sangra’s case at the Juvenile Justice Board affect the case against the other seven accused – (given the fact that he is allegedly the central character in the commission of the alleged abduction, illegal confinement, drugging, rape and murder)?
5. The court file does not, in any way, explain to me as to what were the contents of the CDR (call detail records) and how did they help the prosecution’s narrative.
6. The forensic reports pertaining to drugging, murder and rape are also not clear to me. So I regard them as dubious. How do these forensic reports prove that it was indeed Shubham Sangra who killed the girl?
I understand that the forensic examination could not find any signs of semen; the PM examination leading to the conclusion that the girl was indeed raped in not clear to me.
Is there a legal test to establish sexual assault in such cases? Was that applied to this case?
Were the sedatives, including the Ayurvedic concoction, potent enough to produce prolonged sedation? Not convincing at all.
7. I have found nothing in the case file that explains the money trail from Sanji Ram to Anand Dutta. Was any of the bribe money recovered? Was the police able to establish Sanji Ram’s source of funds by, say, tracing the records of withdrawal of money from a bank? Was it able to find any such records at Anand Dutta’s end.
8. The ease with which the judge accepts the testimony of the Zee TV regarding Vishal Jangotra’s alibi – which actually damages the entire narrative of the prosecution – only shows the low standards of the judge. It seems a few more diligent media investigations would have demolished the entire edifice of the prosecution’s case!
9. In fact, the judge comes across as shoddy in the entire judgement. He sounds wishy-washy in talking about “minor lapses” in police investigation without identifying them – and invoked the so called “circumstantial evidence”.
He also sounds completely confused and incomprehensible at places. The following paragraph from his decision, for instance, reads like a load of nonsense.
“Learned Special Public Prosecutor for the State submitted that in view of this authority since in the present case the prosecution has successfully proved incriminating evidence against the accused persons of their criminal conspiracy against the victim by leading circumstantial evidence supported by documentary evidence, therefore, the same may be given due weightage and be considered for holding the accused persons guilty under the law.”
10. Since Vishal Jangotra’s plea of alibi was accepted, did the counsels of the other accused try the same for any of their clients? Didn’t any of the other accused have anything to show that they were not present at the scene of the crime when it was supposed to have been committed?
11. There may be just a few points that I’d written in the note-book that Abcd has. One of those points pertains to the assertion by the police that Tripta and Tilak Raj happen to be “close friends” by virtue of the fact that they were in the same class at school.
I found this assertion curious, wondering if a rural area really had (and has) coeducational schools. A lot of government schools even in urban areas like Delhi continue to be gender segregated.
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