Amrutha Varshini, 21, married her long-term boyfriend P. Pranay Kumar on 30 January. Months later, her father K. Maruti Rao, allegedly got him murdered.
Miryalaguda: Amrutha Varshini wants her father, a wealthy upper-caste powerbroker named K. Maruti Rao, dead.
He is the reason her husband P. Pranay Kumar, a Dalit Christian, is no longer alive, the reason her yet-to-be-born child will grow up without a father.
The couple’s story has come as the latest reality check for a nation yet to overcome its imagined social hierarchy.
Pranay, 23, and Amrutha, 21, had met in high school, when she was in Class IX. They got married on 30 January this year, against her parents’ wishes.
On 14 September, Pranay and Amrutha were exiting a hospital in Miryalaguda, Nalgonda, after a routine pre-natal check-up when a contract killer allegedly hired by Rao attacked him with a machete. He died on the spot.
Also read: Telangana father wanted to ‘find his daughter & kill her’ after she married a Dalit
Amrutha, who is five months pregnant, witnessed the murder, as did Pranay’s mother Premlata.
Rao, who belongs to the influential Vaishya caste, had hired the assailant for Rs 1 crore, police have said.
The caretaker Telangana government, led by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), has since offered Amrutha Rs 8 lakh, a government job, a house, as well as agricultural land as compensation.
However, other than an initial Rs 4 lakh payout for the funeral, Amrutha and Pranay’s family have rejected the rest.
“I do not want land or money or a job, or anything from the government other than justice,” Amrutha told ThePrint.
“I want them to ensure that this doesn’t happen to anybody else. Casteism must end, and people like my father should be hanged,” she added.
“He was incredibly brave, my son,” Premlata told ThePrint, “We warned him many times that his marriage would not be accepted by Maruti Rao, but he would not listen. He loved her very much.”
Before resorting to murder, Rao allegedly used every weapon in his arsenal – political, economic and social – to try and end the marriage.
“Maruti Rao even went to local TRS leaders to tell Amrutha to leave Pranay and come back home,” Nalgonda deputy superintendent of police (DSP) P. Srinivas told ThePrint. “But when she refused, he decided to eliminate Pranay.”
According to police, the attack was meticulously planned over months of secret meetings, and involved a criminal gang suspected to have connections with Pakistan’s ISI.
Maruti Rao: Cash, caste and cruelty
Locals in Miryalaguda, where the two families are based, describe Rao as a man everyone identified.
“I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard the name Maruti Rao since I was a child,” Karthik, a resident, told ThePrint.
Members of the Vaishya caste, to which Rao belongs, and the equally powerful Reddys, own a majority of the local rice mills which provide jobs to thousands.
A politically connected real estate businessman, Rao is said to wield significant clout, and inspires fear in the community.
The banners Rao put up welcoming state energy minister G. Jagadish Reddy on an earlier visit still decorate the streets of Miryalaguda.
When K.T. Rama Rao, the state IT minister and son of chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, visited Miryalaguda to give a public speech in April, Rao was one of the men he adorned with a pink stole on stage.
When the murder came to light, KTR condemned it in a tweet, saying “the perpetrators of this heinous crime will be punished and justice will prevail”.
Pranay’s gruesome murder in Miryalaguda has come as a rude shock. Dismayed & anguished on how deep rooted casteism still is
The perpetrators of this heinous crime will be punished & justice will prevail
My condolences & wholehearted sympathies to his wife Amrutha Garu & parents
Pranay’s gruesome murder in Miryalaguda has come as a rude shock. Dismayed & anguished on how deep rooted casteism still is
The perpetrators of this heinous crime will be punished & justice will prevail
My condolences & wholehearted sympathies to his wife Amrutha Garu & parents
— KTR (@KTRTRS) September 16, 2018
Local lore has it that Rao’s rise to prominence traced its path through the seedy lanes of crime.
“He was a kerosene salesman in the village, who also supplied prostitutes to higher officials and politicians, which got him an in-road to gangs and ministers,” alleged Prasad, a close friend of Pranay’s father, and a teacher in Miryalaguda town.
“He doesn’t care which party you belong to, the Maruti Rao style is to make a network with anybody who gets his job done,” he added.
Police dispute this account. “He was in real estate, and no such complaints were registered against him, so we did not consider him a criminal,” Srinivas said.
After murder and grief, fear
Given his clout, members of Pranay’s family, including his parents and brother, say they are afraid Rao will get bail before his court hearing.
DSP Srinivas, who was at their house Monday, has assured them that the case will proceed fast and the accused will stay in jail.
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However, Vennamalla Sri Ramulu, a local social worker, told ThePrint that the promise offered cold comfort because Rao had the power to intimidate and pressure people from within the jail too.
“If anyone tried to oppose him, cases would get registered against them with police and they would be frequently intimidated,” he added.
“All the political leaders…support him. He’s taken over so much land belonging to the SC/ST community,” Ramulu alleged.
The conspiracy
As a child, Amrutha said, her parents had made the rules clear: She was not to mingle with people from the ‘lower castes’.
“When they found out about Pranay, things got bad. I was miserable at home, and my freedom was lost,” she told ThePrint.
Rao, police say, began planning Pranay’s murder six months after the wedding, in July.
According to police, he first contacted Miryalaguda Congress chief Abdul Kareem, who then put him in touch with a man named Asgar Ali, the gang leader who “oversaw” the contract.
Ali subsequently contacted his friend Mohammed Bari, who finally hired the contract killer, Bihar-based Subhash Sharma, it is alleged.
“Maruti Rao met with Ali and Bari on three separate occasions, two of which were in Hyderabad,” DSP Srinivas alleged.
“He paid them Rs 1 crore to carry out the murder, of which an advance of Rs 15 lakh was given to Ali, Kareem and Bari around 10 July,” he alleged.
Ali and Bari were also arrested in 2003 in connection with the murder of Gujarat minister Haren Pandya. They were later acquitted by the Gujarat High Court for lack of evidence.
DSP Srinivas alleged the two were trained by known ISI agents, a connection police are currently exploring.
The 14 September attack was allegedly Samastipur native Sharma’s third attempt on Pranay’s life. The first was made exactly a month earlier, on 14 August, when Pranay went to pick Amrutha up from a beauty parlour. However, the couple was accompanied by a friend of Pranay’s, and police said Sharma aborted the plan “after he got confused about the identity of the target”.
Sharma’s second attempt, a day before Amrutha and Pranay’s reception on 17 August, was reportedly called off due to lack of planning.
These five people are among seven people arrested for the crime, the other two being Rao’s brother Sravan Kumar and his driver Samudrala Shiva. They have been booked for murder and under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, among other charges.
Police negligence under lens
The question, however, remains: How did police fail to detect the presence of not one, but two hardened criminals with alleged ISI connections over the course of three months?
DSP Srinivas said the meetings to plan the murder “happened in secret”.
“While police was aware of a threat to the couple ever since their marriage on 30 January, such an attack was unprecedented and completely unexpected,” he added.
The signs, though, weren’t entirely absent. Police held three separate counselling sessions with Rao, in February, April and June, also attended by Srinivas.
“We warned Maruti Rao not to interfere in his daughter’s relationship by force. And the couple was also told to be cautious,” he added.
In the second week of February, Pranay’s father P. Balaswami received a call from police saying someone had registered a case against him for selling fake insurance policies.
Balaswami visited the police station twice, but no one there would guide him.
He told ThePrint that he is “100 per cent sure that Maruti Rao did this, no one but Maruti Rao”. The matter was only resolved when Pranay and Amrutha approached deputy inspector general (DIG) Stephen Ravindra and asked him to intervene.
The DIG was thus aware of Rao’s threat to the family, and, according to police, he alerted Nalgonda superintendent of police A.V. Ranganath about the matter.
In a press statement issued six days ago, Ranganath acknowledged that police could have acted faster and smarter.
“We have started a parallel inquiry on lapses in police surveillance, and why we missed obvious signs that something was going on,” he added.
For B. Lakshmaiah, state president of the Caste Annihilation Struggle Committee (CASC), this isn’t enough.
“Police is now behaving like a detective squad,” he told ThePrint. “They seem to know all the details of the criminal’s steps – where they went, what time they met — but that’s not their only job,” he said, “They are supposed to protect the public, before a crime happens, not afterwards.”