A minor girl was gang-raped by four men in Borivli (West) on Monday night. The incident happened between 8.30pm and 9.30pm on Link Road inside a mini tempo parked near the Tukaram Ombale Garden.

The MHB Colony police have arrested three accused, identified as Sonu Kamble, Jayprakash Pal and Aslam Khan, all aged around 22-23. The fourth accused is unidentified and on the run. All four accused are autorickshaw drivers.

According to the police, the 17-year-old victim is a school dropout and resides alone in the nearby Ganpat Patil Nagar slums. Her father and sisters live in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh; she came to Mumbai six months ago to earn for her family back home. She has been sent to Dongri Children’s Home.

The police said that on Monday night the girl was waiting for an autorickshaw near the garden to go to a restaurant on Link Road to pick up food. “Kamble, who is known to her, approached her with three of his friends. Before she could react, they dragged her inside the tempo, which was open at the back,” said senior inspector Suresh Kilje.

The four allegedly took turns to rape her. “In her statement, the girl said she tried to resist them and screamed, but the four threatened her and she could not do anything,” Kilje added.

After the incident, the four started running from there. When the girl started screaming, a passer-by chased the men and caught Pal. He handed him over to assistant sub-inspector RH Patil of MHB Colony police who was patrolling on Link Road.

Kilje said, “The passer-by left the scene, but Patil brought the girl and the accused to the police station, after which the girl narrated the whole incident.”

Two teams were sent to nab the other accused; both Kamble and Khan were caught from the Ganpat Patil Nagar slums, where they all reside. The police are looking for the fourth accused.

Medical reports have confirmed rape and, according to the police, all the three arrested accused were drunk at the time of the incident. Kamble also has four cases of theft and assault registered against him.

The accused have been arrested for rape, wrongful confinement and criminal intimidation under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and under relevant sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.

Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law,” wrote William Gaddis. Justice has fled the world, replaced by its this-worldly counterparts like judges, lawyers and the media.

The Aarushi-Hemraj double homicide judgment on November 25, from the special CBI court located in a small court campus in Ghaziabad, convicted Rajesh and Nupur Talwar for killing their 14-year-old daughter Aarushi and their servant Hemraj. The couple have been convicted under the Indian Penal Code, section 302, 201 and 34. The Special Judge Shyam Lal on November 26, awarded life imprisonment to the couple for the crimes committed.

The media, in paradoxical ways, sways between being a mechanism of social change on the one hand, and a problem-generating machine on the other. Often it is even circular, where the problem and the solutions are both generated within the same mechanism. The Aarushi-Hemraj murder trial depicted this ecology of communication that is emerging in the Indian media.

To make sense of the incidents surrounding the case, it is imperative to analyze the frames and formats and the structures within which a story is narrated. Like the meaning of a sentence requires a play of semantics as well as syntax and grammar, the meanings of a story require not simply some events in isolation, but the events ordered within a structure, a narrative, a frame.

After the judgment, the Talwars in a statement said they were “deeply disappointed” but would “refuse to feel defeated and will continue to fight for justice”. But the trial was only partly about justice. It was more about different narratives and stories, told by the State and the courts on one hand and the media on the other, sometimes contradictory and sometimes jointly conflagrated.

Over five years, the police, the CBI, the multiple media groups all narrated several stories within various frames. The Talwars were framed as child murderers well before the judgment. Reports circulated about how they were wife swappers and Rajesh Talwar having other affairs. They apparently were “too composed” during investigation, they didn’t cry enough. They had purportedly found young Aarushi in a compromising position with 45-year-old Hemraj. And then there are other images too, those of a middle-class family, dentist parents and a 14-year-old daughter Aarushi studying in the 9th standard. Images of a close-knit happy family juxtaposed with images of cold-blooded murder, the bludgeoned head and the throat slit with surgical precision.

The judiciary, the CBI and the Uttar Pradesh police are equally involved as co-producers in scripting the multiple versions. But in this case, the frames of their storytelling are different from those of the media. The police and the judiciary have a different internal logic and coherence, guided by laws of evidence, strategies of prosecution and witness cross-examinations. It is about staging a different play in the court halls of law. Soon after discovering Hemraj’s body, the UP police called a press conference to narrate their conjectures, which, muddled with journalistic passions, fed into the creation of sensations and epics.

The UP police were later replaced by the CBI which had theories of its own. The CBI in its closure report cited “critical and substantial gaps” in the evidence, an absence of any clear cut motive and an incomplete understanding of the sequence of events. Yet the District Magistrate saw it fit to order trial of the Talwars as the main accused, based on the same closure report. Now, it was left to the prosecution to find creative ways of joining the dots and give meaning to the scattered facts.

Media frames as well as judicial trials require a narrative structure. They are meant to tell a story. Telling a story, however, needs a coherence that scattered evidences can never seem to supply.
Stories need to have a beginning, middle and an end. Unconnected and scattered pieces of evidence are found, and need to be reconfigured into flesh and blood. They are packaged with actual people and emotions, making it look “realistic”. The “realistic” then takes a life of its own, alienated from the actual lives of the Talwars, which is rendered irrelevant.

In the language of law, unrestricted and unregulated freedom in publishing information about a criminal case under trial prejudices the mind of those who are adjudicating the matter and those investigating it. Such practices are considered as undue interference with the administration of justice. The Law Commission of India’s 200th report, which is on media trials and the fair administration of justice, speaks about the balance of freedom of speech and expression of the media on one hand, and due process of rights of the suspect and accused on the other. Talking about parallel trials in the media as an extreme form of trial, it states “since the newspaper usurps the function of the Court without the safeguards of procedure, right to cross-examine etc, such publications prejudge the facts and influence the Court, witnesses and others.”

There is some merit in the above argument about the relation between fair trial and media rights. But within the present context, the following comments arise. Firstly, such an insulation of the judiciary from the media is no longer possible in our global urban environments. It is also useful to look beyond the deceptive appearance of autonomy that legitimizes the judiciary. Secondly, as Pierre Boudieu the sociologist and philosopher says, the juridical field is in intense resistance to the influence of competing forms of social practice, it is a site of struggle in competition for control and power.

The control, inter alia, is over truth. Whether the truth about the Aarush-Hemraj trial was as stated by the CBI, the judiciary or the other versions of truth suggested by the media? The ultimate truth, of course, is revealed by the judiciary as an institution. But the site of struggle continues to be about who claims legitimacy over this alleged truth. Thirdly, truth here has to be read in terms of coherence in narrations and stories, not so much as satya but as kavya. The Aarushi-Hemraj trial is not about justice or the truth, but about narratives and control over it.

During its probe of one of the most sensational murder mysteries in the recent past, the CBI has done several flip flops, which dented the credibility of the premier investigation agency. Though there was hardly anything left for the CBI to probe, as the crime scene was distorted by the Uttar Pradesh police which initially started the investigation of the murders   the case was handed over to the CBI only after a fortnight.

A few days after the CBI took started its investigation, Rajesh Talwar was released the UP Police had arrested him a week earlier for the murder of Aarushi and Hemraj  as the investigators could not find any strong evidence against him.

A CBI investigating team headed by joint director Arun Kumar, a Uttar Pradesh cadre IPS officer, took over the probe. Within a few days, the team started giving contradictory versions to the Noida police.

The CBI probe moved forward focusing on three Nepalese friends of Hemraj   Krishna, Raj and Vijay. The agency claimed that they tried to sexually assault Aarushi and killed her when she resisted; Hemraj was killed as he was the only witness to their entry into the house.

They were arrested and the CBI claimed that they even confessed to the crime during narco analysis tests. But only after servants’ lawyers approached the national Human Rights Commission that the investigators were trying to frame the poor servants in order to protect the upper-class Talwars.

Ultimately, all the suspects were released in the absence of any concrete evidence and all of them had alibis and their DNA or fingerprints were not found at the crime scene.

A year later in November 2009, the new director of the CBI Amar Pratap Singh took over the probe from Arun Kumar, as his team was unable to achieve any breakthrough, and handed it over to a new team headed by Superintendent of Police Neelabh Kishore.

It was alleged that Arun Kumar, a Uttar Pradesh cadre officer, tampered the evidence, and turned the case against  domestic servants, giving a clean chit to the Talwar couple.

However, after investigating the double murder case for nearly two years, the new CBI team argued that the case should be closed, citing “critical and substantial gaps” in the circumstantial evidence collected and an “absence of a clear-cut motive and incomplete understanding of the sequence of events”.

The CBI closure report named Rajesh Talwar as the only possible suspect, but stated that there was not enough evidence to charge him.

Reasons for holding Talwars guilty
Door was locked from inside which shows that it is the work of insider only.

Private parts of Hemraj were swollen and Aarushi’s body parts were also cleaned up but the evidence of the same was found from the bed sheet.

Court relied on the testimony of Bharti, maid of the dentist couple who said that after ringing door bell several times at 6 am, Nupur opened inner latticed door and said to her through it that Hemraj may have gone to market to buy milk. “Aunty (Nupur) threw the keys from balcony…when I returned and put her hands on outermost door, it easily got opened,” Bharti said in her statement.

Talwars also cleaned up the golf stick which was used in the murder of the duo.

Blood stains from house and terrace were wiped out showing that there is an intention of destroying the evidence.