Palwal: It was way past midnight in Palwal, Haryana. It was the first day of 2018. Naresh Dhankar was re-enacting his army drills. ‘Left, right, left, right, left, right’, the 6-feet tall former soldier from the Ghatak army platoon yelled and marched eerily down the street.
Just 90 minutes ago, Dhankar had gone on a killing spree, smashing the heads of six people. And he wasn’t done yet. The night of carnage continued as he injured three policemen out to nab him. His terror ended with him slipping and hitting his head on the edge of a drain.
For years, the small town of Palwal called him the ‘psycho killer’. This week, after 72 court hearings and 52 witness depositions, the district and sessions court of Palwal finally sentenced Dhankar to death.
“It was cold and he was asking for some tea. His in-laws weren’t letting him in,” said one of Dhankar’s neighbours who responded to his knocks on their door.
In the court, Dhankar’s lawyers pleaded his case as one of insanity or bipolar psychosis but the judge Prashant Rana didn’t accept it. “No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people,” the judge said, citing French Nobel laureate Albert Camus.
Dhankar was convicted under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 332 (causing hurt to public servant), 353 (assaulting public servant) and 186 (obstructing public servant) of the Indian Penal Code.
The bloody night
Three o’clock—the devil’s hour. Tasleem Khan heard a loud bang from the second floor of Palwal Hospital and ran upstairs, only to find his 32-year-old sister-in-law Anjum lying in a pool of blood, her head smashed in. Khan looked up to see a smiling Dhankar emerge from the bathroom holding an iron rod.
Sub-inspector Jairam Sarout of Palwal city police station, who was sent to look for the accused, found a trail of dead bodies within a 500-metre radius. The other victims were identified as Munshi Ram, Sita Ram, Khem Chand, and Subhash.
Media reports described the events from the night as a temporarily insane man who went on a killing rampage. But Sarout says Dhankar told police he killed Anjum because she looked like his wife. “He said he killed anyone who he thought had seen him going to the hospital,” Sarout, who was also the investigating officer in the case and retired as inspector last year, told ThePrint.
None of Dhankar’s victims, all of whom were attacked from behind, had preempted the attack. Their post-mortem concluded death due to shock and hemorrhage. “The bodies were all in very bad shape. Some eyes had fallen out of their sockets, while some noses were completely broken,” Sarout recalled. “The fog was so thick you couldn’t see your own arm. The victims never saw him coming.”
Kamla Sharma, wife of Khem Chand, a factory foreman, says she still can’t wrap her head around the events of that night. “It was 4 am. My husband had left for work with his tiffin. Hours later, I was standing in a mortuary looking at his disfigured head. I still have nightmares,” Sharma told ThePrint at her residence in Palwal.
Insanity is no escape
Dhankar is a former army officer and was part of the special Ghatak platoon. In 2003, he took voluntary retirement and joined Haryana’s agriculture department as a sub-divisional officer.
He and his wife Seema were going through a rough patch in their marriage, and had allegedly been separated since 2015. While Dhankar lived in Omaxe City, Seema was living with her parents in Adarsh Nagar.
On the evening of 1 January, Dhankar had gone to his in-laws’ house with fruits, ice cream and gifts but they didn’t let him in. “They told him his wife is admitted at Palwal hospital,” Sarout said.
Dhankar reportedly went back to his house in Omaxe City, where a security guard saw him leave the society on foot around midnight with a ‘danda like thing in his hands’.
From there, he went to the hospital and found Anjum asleep on the bench outside the ICU where her sister-in-law Mikseena was admitted. “He saw Anjum and mistook her for his wife,” Sarout said. The murder was captured on the hospital’s CCTV.
The defence said Dhankar had been suffering from psychosis since 2001. His lawyer cited army documents that ruled Dhankar aggressive, irritable and suffering from lack of sleep. The defence also said that a report submitted by the Assistant Superintendent of Jail, Faridabad, submitted on 28 January 2023, claimed Dhankar suffered from bipolar disorder.
But the judge dismissed bipolar disorder as grounds of insanity, noting: “77 lacs people in India would be given a licence to kill on account of insanity and a much large number on account of depression etc. disorder. In fact, these are common disorders and they cannot be termed as insanity.” “He is not proved to be of unsound mind at the time of the offences committed by him,” the judge concluded.
Prosecuting lawyer Assistant District Attorney Dinesh Ambavatta says the defence’s case of temporary insanity was weakly fought. “Dhankar came to court and sat with a lot of composure. He would even wish all of us ‘Jai Hind!’,” he said.
A shaken Palwal
On 2 January 2018, residents of Palwal woke up to a video that led to a self-imposed curfew in the city.
Police had widely shared the CCTV footage of a man in blood-soaked clothes with an iron rod in his hands terrorising people at a private hospital.
Important meetings were canceled, doors were double bolted. The New Year cheer had ended with a bloody Tuesday. The residents stopped going for morning walks.
Media had dubbed the man in the video as a ‘psycho killer’. The story soon became an urban legend. “He killed 15 dogs that night too. Anything that came in his way, really,” alleged a resident. “He was always sceptical of his wife. Thought she had affairs and killed so many people out of anger,” claimed another.
Five years later, his in-laws in Adarsh Nagar live with their windows closed and gates shut. Their neighbours are sympathetic toward them. “They’re good people. What happened to them is unfortunate,” said a neighbour.
But families of unsuspecting victims like Khem Chand’s wife still lie awake at night searching for answers to the only question they have: “Why us?”