Sultanpur: When Dr. Ghanshyam Tiwari came home all bloodied and bruised in an e-rickshaw on the evening of 23 September, his wife Nisha took a while to recognise him. His shirt, open at the front, was soaked in blood and his feet were bleeding profusely. He couldn’t take more than two steps, she told ThePrint as she recalled the harrowing episode.
“I thought it was someone else,” she told ThePrint as she sat on a chair in the courtyard of their house in Sakhauli Kalan village in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur district. “All he could say was that Ajay Narayan had beaten him. The e-rickshaw driver lied to me and claimed that he found him lying on the bypass road. When police caught up with him (the rickshaw driver), he revealed that Ajay Narayan had asked him to take my husband home”.
On 23 September, 55-year-old Tiwari, a doctor at Sultanpur’s Jaisinghpur community health centre, was allegedly beaten and tortured by Ajay Narayan Singh and his associates over a land dispute. Ajay and “two unknown accomplices” have been booked for murder (Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code), according to a First Information Report (FIR) registered suo motu by the police. ThePrint has a copy of the FIR.
Sultanpur Police have arrested Jagdish Narayan — Ajay’s father and a co-accused in the case — and announced a reward of Rs 50,000 for information leading to the arrest of Ajay, who’s currently on the run.
The doctor’s family, meanwhile, has claimed that he was tortured with a drill machine, and alleged that three others were involved — Ajay’s uncle Girish Narayan and cousins Vijay and Chandan Narayan.
Girish is the former district president of Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Sultanpur unit. According to media reports, he is a member of the BJP’s state executive committee. Chandan is the district president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the BJP’s youth wing.
State BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi confirmed to ThePrint that Chandan Narayan is the district president of the BYJM. However, he said that only the local Sultanpur unit can confirm whether Girish Narayan is a member of the BJP state executive committee.
Since the incident, local authorities have made several rounds of the Tiwaris’ house to persuade Nisha to accept a compensation of Rs 10 lakh that the state government is offering. But so far, she has turned down every such offer.
The Tiwari family wants immediate arrests, a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), as well as compensation of Rs 1 crore with a government job for Nisha.
But for the bereft Nisha, mother to a seven-year-old child, justice is everything. “I don’t need Brahmin dakshina,” she told officials who were present when ThePrint visited. “Money means a lot but it’s not everything. The accused is not arrested even after so many days.”
Th killing has also assumed a political tone, pitting the state’s Brahmins and Thakurs against each other. Earlier this week, Brahmin politicians across the political spectrum united to demand justice for their fellow caste member. Significantly, Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a Thakur.
The killing comes a year before the next general election, in which Uttar Pradesh will send 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the highest number of any state in India.
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Allegations of torture
Nisha said that on 23 September, Ghanshyam came home at 4 pm asking for Rs 3,500. The money, she recalled her husband saying, was to be paid to the person who was drawing up a map of their soon-to-be constructed house on a plot of land that they had purchased from Ajay Narayan’s father Jagdish.
Later, she said she realised that her husband had received two calls from Ajay Narayan — one at 10:28 am and another at 3:30 pm — purportedly to demand more money.
The source of the dispute, according to her, was the plot measuring 2 biswa that they had purchased from the Narayan family. One biswa equals 1361.24 sq. ft of land.
The Tiwaris, claimed Nisha, had paid Rs 50 lakh for the plot, but Ajay Narayan had been “pressuring them” into paying more.
“My husband gave an extra Rs 50,000 to him but he was continuously pressuring for more and refused to give us the possession of the land. We wanted to start the construction of our house during navratri,” she told ThePrint.
The family claims Ghanshyam’s attackers drilled holes into his thighs and both his feet. In addition, “his right hand was broken”, his younger brother Ravindra Tiwari told ThePrint.
When Ghanshyam came home, blood from his feet soaked the insides of the shoes he wore that day.
“When I realised it was indeed my husband, I was shocked and asked him to come inside the house but a neighbour pointed to the blood and pus oozing out of his feet and the shoes soaked in blood,” she said. Neighbours then helped rush Tiwari to the hospital.
At the Kotwali Police Station, where the case is under investigation, Station House Officer (SHO) Sriram Pandey confirmed to ThePrint that a total of 10 injuries were discovered during the post-mortem examination, including a fractured hand and injuries on both legs.
Sultanpur Superintendent of Police Somen Barma said that it appears prima facie that the victim was beaten up with a stick. He also said that the autopsy report showed no injuries to indicate Tiwari was tortured with a drill machine.
“The report has been sent to the forensic science laboratory (FSL), Lucknow and we may find something extra after analysis,” he added.
‘Influential family’
According to Nisha, the police took her signatures on a plain sheet of paper and registered an FIR on their own on 24 September.
While the Sultanpur Police’s FIR names Ajay Narayan and “two unknown accomplices”, Nisha wants to register a fresh one naming others in the Narayan Singh family — father Jagdish, uncle Girish, and cousins Vijay and Chandan.
In a fresh complaint she submitted on 24 September — the same day as the police FIR — Nisha alleged that the accused Ajay Narayan and four unknown people beat her husband up.
“I had lost my mental balance after my husband’s death and the FIR was lodged after the police took my signatures on blank paper and took cognizance of the matter on their own,” she wrote in her complaint, a copy of which is with ThePrint.
But the police insist that the investigation will continue on the basis of its own FIR and that her complaint will be made part of the investigation, she told ThePrint.
When asked about Nisha’s allegations against the others in the Narayan family, SP Somen Barmen, quoted earlier, said it was “part of (the ongoing) investigation”.
But Nisha claims Ajay Narayan’s family wields significant influence in the area. “Following my husband’s death, we met several people who shared their stories of harassment and how they too were subjected to similar mistreatment,” she told ThePrint. “Ajay Narayan’s family is notorious for selling the same property several times and demanding a cut for every sale that takes place in the area”.
A senior police officer privy to the investigation also claimed people were “too scared” to file FIRs against the family.
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‘Brahmin vs Thakur’ row
The case, meanwhile, is kicking up the age-old ‘Brahmin versus Thakur’ battle in UP. On 30 September, Brahmin politicians across the state gathered at Sultanpur’s Tikoniya Park at a condolence meeting for Tiwari.
This motley group of politicians included Shiv Sena leader Pawan Pandey, BJP’s Deomani Dwivedi, the Samajwadi Party’s Santosh Pandey, and BJP’s Jai Narayan Tiwari.
Addressing a 10,000-strong crowd, ex-Akbarpur MLA Pawan Pandey claimed he knew how to take revenge for his own caste fellow. Brahmins, he claimed, wouldn’t remain silent when their families are “oppressed’.
Significantly, Sultanpur district administration conducted a demolition drive earlier this week to tear down three properties belonging to the Narayan Singh family. Bulldozers have been frequently viewed as the Adityanath government’s way of dispensing immediate “justice”.
Among the properties razed is Chandan’s office from where he ran the district BJYM office.
But the Tiwari family is far from convinced — Ghanshyam’s brother Ravindra says the government’s “inability” to arrest the accused in the case sends out a message of “casteism”.
“Brahmins have always supported the BJP but it seems that our community is orphaned. If a proportionate action is not taken against him, we won’t be able to recover from this tragedy ever and he (Ajay Narayan) would be emboldened,” he told ThePrint.
On his part, BJP’s Deomani Dwivedi, a Brahmin leader, told ThePrint that he has been “closely monitoring” the situation.
“I visited the family at the hospital the day the incident took place. Anger is not against the government but against the police. An inspector has been suspended now,” Dwivedi, a former MLA from Lambhua, told ThePrint.
“As far as the government is concerned, it’s putting efforts to catch the accused. The opposition is demanding that the accused be shot at in an encounter, but an encounter depends on a situation and is not a rule,” he added.
By the Uttar Pradesh government’s own estimates, 183 people have been killed in “encounters” with the state’s police since the Yogi government first came to power in 2017.
But for Nisha, the incident has left her and her family feeling unsafe.
“We only want justice,” Nisha told the officials on the day ThePrint visited. “My family can’t move freely. My life of freedom is gone. My son is just seven years old, and asks when his father will come back. Had he (Ajay Narayan) been jailed, we would at least have had some respite.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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