DNA Edit: Justice for Talwars

The Allahabad High Court’s order acquitting Rajesh and Nupur Talwar of the charge of murdering their daughter Aarushi and their servant Hemraj on the intervening night of May 15-16, 2008 is a relief for the Talwar couple, who have been, for a decade now, waging a war against a Kafkaesque state.

The judgement once again highlights that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), often identified as India’s premier investigation agency, does not deserve that descriptor. It has been the agency’s shoddy, motivated, and suspiciously perverted probe that not only protracted this case, but also managed to scuttle the ends of justice.

Even today, it remains a mystery as to who really was responsible for the double murder case. As it is, the Indian state is a monolith of unyielding opacity and jarring incomprehensibility, whose levers are pulled and pushed by men of power and deep pockets from behind the curtains, and caught in this tragicomedy are we, the people, unwitting, helpless and still beating on against a system that will readily settle for easy answers over justice, salaciousness over probity, and witch-hunts over truth. The HC decision ought to send a chill down our spine.

If such horror-of-an-investigation can be inflicted on the Talwar couple — a couple with the means to hire best legal brains — then one can very well imagine the plight of those who are innocent and impoverished. Some questions remain unanswered. How is it that the same circumstantial evidence that was strong enough for the trial court to award a life sentence to the Talwars is falling short in the view of the HC, forcing it to give the Talwars a benefit of doubt?

The couple may have been exonerated, but in the kangaroo court, that is the public eye, they have been, for the nth time, convicted and found guilty; their reputation cut to pieces, their lives traumatised in the wake of our apathy. Even if CBI chooses not to pursue an appeal in the Supreme Court, the punishment has already been delivered to the Talwars. In the aftermath of the double murder, the Talwars proved to be ready meat for the media.

The couple, varyingly through the media’s lens, were child murderers, adulterers, wife-swappers, cold-blooded sociopaths. In the Talwars, the media found a punching bag. The CBI wasn’t far behind. By the time CBI was called in to investigate the matter, Noida Police had done a par-excellence job of destroying the evidence. The first CBI team to probe the case found no evidence against the Talwars, but managed to build a case against Hemraj’s friend Krishna Thadarai, Raj Kumar and Vijay Mandal. But, after CBI director Vijay Shanker’s term ended in July 2008, Ashwini Kumar became the director and the investigation took an unnatural turn.

Kumar disbanded the first team led by Arun Kumar, and a new team led by AGN Kaul was tasked to look into the probe. Kaul’s finding upended the findings of the first team and revived the theory that was being pondered by the media and Noida police, essentially, that Rajesh Talwar killed Aarushi and Hemraj in a fit of sudden grave provocation.