Fathers and sons

He wasn’t scared of exams. The parent-teacher meeting had taken place days before and his teachers had no complaints. In fact, on the day of the murder my son had a physical education exam. Why would he be worried? No one fails this exam,’’ said the father of the 16-year-old class XI student of Ryan International School in Gurugram, who has been accused by the CBI of murdering eight-year-old Pradyuman Thakur inside the school washroom on September 8. The CBI said the accused killed Pradyuman by slitting his throat, allegedly to get the parent-teacher meeting and his exams postponed.

The case became a matter of discussion among the CBI brass as they could not recall the last time the agency had investigated a juvenile accused. “The matter was discussed and we came to the conclusion that our focus is not the juvenile, but to carry out a fair investigation,” said a senior officer.

Pradyuman’s father, Barun, said he wanted the guilty to be punished. “I don’t know the family of the accused. Neither did they make any attempt to speak to me. The CBI is the top investigating agency of the country and I don’t think it will rush to any conclusion without due diligence.”

The Haryana Police had arrested the school bus conductor Ashok Kumar and recorded his confession, which he retracted later. Once the Haryana government handed over the investigation to the CBI on September 15, the CBI carried out its own probe and arrested the 16-year-old. Kumar, who was arrested on September 8, was granted bail by a Gurugram court on November 21.

‘’The investigation is based on scientific and forensic evidence gathered by the CBI team. All aspects of the case are being looked into and we are hopeful that a charge-sheet will be filed within 90 days,’’ said CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal. However, sleuths who questioned the boy said he told them that they would not be able to prove anything against him.

Youngsters, especially those born after the turn of the century, are growing up in a completely different environment. Their exposure to thrill, blood and gore is not just limited to movies and novels, but extends to impressions gathered from 24x7 media tools. “Youngsters face stress of various kinds today. While they may not get intimidated easily, the average teenager is still not mature enough to understand life like an adult,” said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research. She is among the activists who worked tirelessly to ensure that the Juvenile Justice Act was passed in 2015. Kumari said one of the main aims of the Act was to prevent law enforcement agencies from rounding up children from railway stations and streets and forcing them to own up offences they did not commit. Times have changed and so has the law.

Today, the victim’s father wants the accused to be treated as an adult under the Act, which was tweaked after the 2012 Nirbhaya rape case to treat juvenile offenders charged with ‘’heinous’’ crimes as adults if they were above 16. Thakur has pleaded before the juvenile court that his son’s murder was ‘’chilling, horrific, monstrous and serious in nature’’ and must be treated as a ‘’rarest of rare’’ case.

Sandeep Khirwar | Aayush Goel

The father of the accused said the CBI conducted a false probe and accused his son of a crime he did not commit. The accused has retracted his confession, alleging that the CBI employed pressure tactics. ‘’I am depending on the court for justice. My son is being framed so that the school authorities do not face the heat,” said the father. “He is a disciplined child. How is it that he was never suspended from school or referred to a counsellor if he suffered from behavioural problems?’’ It has become a case of one father’s word against another father’s. And, caught in the middle are two minors.

‘’Neither of them should face injustice,’’ said Kumari. She said if the accused committed the crime to get the exams postponed, he should be treated as a juvenile and not an adult. ‘’Only if the CBI can prove that it was a well-planned or premeditated murder may the juvenile accused face the law [as an adult],’’ she said. The CBI, however, does not have eyewitnesses or footage to show what happened inside the washroom.

“When most of the evidence is circumstantial, the basic principle an investigating agency needs to follow is to build the sequence of events in a manner that the chain is unbroken and connected. It is only when all the recoveries and evidence are connected in a single thread that a conviction can be achieved,’’ said Karan Singh, an advocate in the Delhi High Court.

Among the evidence collected by the CBI is the data recovered from the laptop and the mobile phone of the accused, which contain details of internet searches related to ‘’poison’’ and ‘’destroying evidence’’ and call records. The CBI has also reviewed footage from more than half a dozen CCTV cameras installed in the school to map the activities of the accused on the day of the murder. The CBI is also looking into the purchase of a knife a day before the murder.

There are allegations that the Haryana Police did not secure the crime scene properly and allowed its investigation to get swayed in a certain direction, nailing the bus conductor without waiting for forensic reports. Kumar’s lawyer Mohit Verma said that without political pressure, the Haryana Police would not have attempted to charge-sheet his client within a week. “Since he was poor and vulnerable, he was picked up and tortured without any concrete evidence against him. There were bruises on his body and he was forced to confess,’’ said Verma.

Gurugram police commissioner Sandeep Khirwar said the investigation was at an early stage when the case was handed over to the CBI. “So it is wrong to say that the investigations carried out by the CBI and the state police went in opposite directions. We are lending all assistance to the CBI,’’ said Khirwar.

Barun said he would continue his fight till society was woken from its slumber. “If a child loses the fear of law and starts moving in the wrong direction, whose responsibility is it to stop him? Have our school and household systems become so weak that our children are being let loose like this?” he asked. “I am trying to bring all parents under a foundation named after Pradyuman, and we intend to work for the safety and security of all children. That is what Pradyuman means for me today.”