The child’s hand reached out of the mud, almost as if it had clawed its way out of its shallow grave in a desperate effort to catch the cricket ball that had soared over the boundary. Terrified, Manoj Kumar jumped back over the high walls that closed off the service lane from the park, forgetting his mission to retrieve the ball. The children informed their elders about what Manoj had seen. The police were called in, but it concluded there was evidence only of a boy with an overactive imagination.
Ever since news of the Nithari killings case broke in 2006 — more than a year after that cricket match — India has learned every detail of the lurid story of Surender Koli, rapist, necrophile, serial murderer, and cannibal, helped by a tidal wave of tabloid-television reportage.
The time has come for Indians to ask if the entire story isn’t fiction, manufactured to help traffickers who murdered dozens of children escape justice. This week, a brilliantly reasoned Allahabad High Court judgment tore apart the confessional statement on which the entire Koli story was built.
Evidence of incompetent police investigation and egregious prosecutorial misconduct has been mounting across the country. There is credible evidence that innocent men are on death row for the Mumbai suburban train bombings of 2006, which claimed more lives than 26/11 did. Earlier this year, the Rajasthan High Court acquitted men convicted of a terrorist bombing in 2008. There are disturbing signs evidence was planted in the Bhima Koregaon case.
Little imagination is needed to see just how rotten the Indian criminal justice has become: Faced with political and public pressure, police have become adroit at finding suspects to lock up, even if they turn out years later to be the wrong ones. The Nithari killings case is just the latest in a long series of high-profile cases that demand thorough reinvestigation to establish what went wrong — and accountability for the individuals responsible.
Also read: ‘Naam photo dekh kar police ne ratvaya hai’ — how Surinder Koli ‘confession’ fell…
Framing the villain
Koli might never have had the chance to clear his name earlier: Scheduled to have been hanged on 12 September 2014, he was granted a dramatic midnight reprieve by Supreme Court judge KL Dattu. The Allahabad High Court later commuted his sentence to life, but Koli would remain in jail unless the Supreme Court reviewed its 2011 decision upholding his conviction. The new judgment asserted he would strangle his victims to death, “and after killing them, he tried to have sex with the body and would then cut off their body parts and eat them”.
The story, as prosecutors had it, was that Koli would be driven to sexual frenzy when he saw his employer, Moninder Singh Pander, engaged in orgies with sex workers. This would lead him to murder and rape children.
Except, the Allahabad High Court judgment tells us now, there’s little evidence to back up the story. Following two uninterrupted months in police custody, during which the class VII dropout was offered no legal aid or even medical examination, Koli was finally produced before a magistrate to make a confession that could be admitted as evidence.
The confession, the high court records, contained extended testimony making clear that the police had compelled Koli to memorise the names of his purported victims and tutored him on the circumstances and time he was supposed to have killed them. The judge, who recorded the confession, did not explore Koli’s video-recorded claim but followed up with several letters mentioning that he had been tortured in custody.
For the confession to be believable, the high court notes, one would have to accept Koli had “no clear recollection of the nature and manner in which he disposed of the bodies or whether he had sex with them or whether he ate parts of them, but has a clear and categorical recollection of the time, sequence and manner of entrapping his victims”.
The illegality of the confession is matched only by its inconsistency with other evidence, the high court notes. The idea that Koli was driven by a sexual motive sits uncomfortably with the fact that only skulls, hands, and feet were found in the drain behind the home where he worked. The missing torsos were never explained by investigators. Forensic tests were not carried out to see if any DNA could be recovered from the area where Koli allegedly cooked his victims’ livers.
Local residents did not even report the stench of decomposing bodies, suggesting the torsos were taken elsewhere. Indeed, the court notes, experts consulted by the National Commission for Women that the bodies of the victims were “cut with surgical precision” — an observation that suggested they might have been kidnapped for organ trafficking.
Also read: A ‘slaughterhouse’ & a ‘confession’: 14-yr-old’s rape-murder is why Surinder Koli won’t walk free
Forensics, drugs, and fantasies
The repeated use of narcoanalysis—involving the administration of the hypnotic drug sodium thiopental—probably had something to do with the strange sadomasochistic fantasies that emerged in Koli’s testimony. For decades, scholars have known that so-called narcoanalysis makes subjects highly susceptible to suggestion and can lead to false memories being implanted. Efforts to rehabilitate narcoanalysis after 9/11 failed in the United States—but the disreputable science flourished in India.
Although the Supreme Court allows narcoanalysis only with the consent of subjects—and its results are not admissible in evidence—the Koli case shows how it can lead investigations into the thickets of fantasy. Elsewhere in the world, the science and judicial community have been increasingly concerned over the impact of pseudoscience on criminal investigation.
Even practices like fingerprint recognition, bite-mark matching, and blood-splatter analysis, a 2009 review by the United States National Academy of Sciences noted, had not been subjected to the gold standard of double-blind studies.
A grim pattern
Fabrication of evidence has, recent judgments show, become routine in cases. The Rajasthan terror acquittals were the outcome, in part, of the high court detecting crude malpractice. The police produced a bill for a cycle that alleged terrorist Mohammad Saif was said to have purchased to plant the bomb. The frame number in the bill, though, didn’t match the cycle used to plant the bomb. Even though every other bill issued by the Anju Cycle Company bore grooves where it was torn from the book, moreover, this single one was smooth.
Amazingly, investigators never seized and studied user records or the central processing unit at the Naveen Café, from where the Indian Mujahideen had sent its claim of responsibility. The police did submit a site plan of the premises—but it did not, surprisingly, show there was ever a computer there.
The Mumbai train bombings, National Investigations Agency detectives recorded in a separate investigation, were carried out not by the men on death row but by a completely different group of terrorists. “The Mumbai train blasts (2006),” an NIA chargesheet asserts, “were carried out by Indian Mujahideen operatives including but not limited to Sadiq Sheikh, Bada Sajid [‘Big’ Sajid, a nickname for Mohammad Sajid], Atif Ameen and Abu Rashid.”
The fate of these cases at the apex of the criminal justice system points to the ill-health of the administration of law in India. If investigation and prosecution are this suspect in high profile cases conducted under intense public pressure and media scrutiny, the fate of hundreds of thousands of other more ordinary ones gives reason for concern.
Late one summer afternoon in 1854, Faujdar Muhammad Shaikh and five other police officers dragged Gunnoo Kunbi into a cowshed, held his face down in the filth, and sodomised him with an umbrella until he confessed, scholar Anupama Rao records. Gunnoo was led to the well where the body of his five-year-old niece had been and made to admit his guilt to the assembled villagers. Two days later, on 13 August 1854, Gunnoo died in a Nasik police cell, haemorrhaging into his intestines.
“Laziness,” an imperial civil servant explained to the judge and philosopher James Fitzpatrick Stephen when they discussed why the colonial police tortured him. “It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper in a poor devil’s eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence.”
The Nithari case shows India’s police forces are still administering a regime of criminal injustice. The victims, and the country, deserve better.
Praveen Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)