It was 2010. Eight years had passed since Aisha Hassan lost her three children in a bus accident. A member of the nomadic Bakarwal community, Aisha was still struggling to recover from the tragedy. She had given birth to two sons after the accident, but continued to mourn the death of her daughter, Shehla.
That year, Aisha adopted the two-month-old daughter of Fatima, the sister of her husband, Javed Hassan. The infant grew up to become the family’s darling.
By the time she turned seven, the child had been helping Aisha in her daily chores. She loved the company of sheep and horses, with whom she had grown up in the pastures of a village around 60km from Jammu. Sometimes, she would chase horses to see them gallop. Her favourite horse was Sunder, and she had a pet dog, Billu.
On January 10, as was her routine, she left her home with the horses. The horses returned at 4pm, but the girl did not. Hassan began a search, but could not find her. He then lodged a complaint with the police, suspecting that she had been kidnapped. The police, too, could not locate her.
A week later, her body was found in the woods. It bore signs of extreme torture.
Aisha was shattered, again. The girl who had helped her overcome a tragedy was gone. Like a lost soul, Aisha has been wandering the hills and meadows ever since. “I miss her a lot,” she told me. “When I close my eyes, I see her.”
She said Billu is gone, too. “After she was killed, Billu would go searching for her every day,” said Aisha. “One day, the dog left home and did not return.”
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The girl’s murder, though gruesome, did not initially attract attention outside Jammu and Kashmir. It began making news after the police interrogated Shubham Sangra, the juvenile nephew of Sanji Ram, head of the local temple and a former revenue official.
Sangra told the police that he had been living with Ram, ever since his school rusticated him for drug abuse and indecent behaviour towards girls. He said he had murdered the girl at the behest of Ram, who wanted to drive away the nomads from the village.
After Sangra’s confession, the case was transferred to the J&K Police’s Crime Branch, which then formed a special investigation team. In three months, the SIT uncovered a plot that has left people across India horrified.
Based on the findings of the SIT, the Crime Branch has filed a charge-sheet against Ram, Sangra and six others—Sangra’s friend Parvesh Kumar, special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar, Ram’s son Vishal Jangotra, Constable Tilak Raj and Sub-Inspector Anand Dutta.
The charge-sheet identifies Ram as the mastermind of the crime. According to it, Ram hatched the conspiracy to drive away the Bakarwals from the village, and assigned tasks to Sangra and Khajuria, separately. On January 7, says the charge-sheet, Khajuria and a friend purchased ten Epitril 0.5 MG tablets—used in treating and preventing seizures—using the prescription issued to Khajuria’s maternal uncle, “who had a psychiatric problem”.
Khajuria then promised Sangra that he would help him cheat and pass exams, if he kidnapped the girl. On January 9, Sangra roped in Parvesh Kumar, who bought four sedatives from Hiranagar. The following day, when Sangra was on the roof of Ram’s house, he heard the girl asking a woman, Veena Devi, about her horses.
He then took the keys of the local temple, and three sedatives. He went out and told the girl that he had seen her horses, and led her to the woods. Parvesh, too, came. Sensing trouble, the girl tried to flee, but the duo forced her to the ground and gave her the sedatives. After she lost consciousness, Sangra raped her. The duo then took her to the temple and locked her up.
The following day, Hassan and Aisha reached the temple in search of the girl, but Ram told them that she might have gone to some relative’s place. At 12pm, Khajuria and Sangra went to the temple, gave her more sedatives and forced her to drink water. Then Sangra called Jangotra, who was in Meerut, and told him about the girl. Jangotra was told to return if he wanted to “satisfy his lust”.
On January 13, Sangra gave the girl three more sedatives. The same day, Ram performed rituals in the temple. After he left, Sangra and Jangotra raped the child. The SIT later found that Ram had taken the police into confidence to cover up the crime and paid Rs 1.5 lakh to Anand Dutta, the sub-inspector, through Constable Tilak Raj.
On January 17, Ram told Sangra that it was time to kill the girl. Sangra, Khajuria and Jangotra took her to a culvert near the temple, where all three raped her. Khajuria had told the other two that he wanted to rape her “one last time”.
Khajuria then tried to strangulate her to death, but failed. Sangra then pressed his knees against her back and strangulated the child to death using her chunni. To make sure that she had died, he hit the girl’s head twice with a stone.
After the body was recovered, the villagers prevented her family from burying her in a strip of land that the Bakarwal community says belongs to them. “That land was purchased by Haji Mamjan [a Bakarwal] for the graveyard, but they objected [to the burial],” said Hassan. “Then, we took her body to [a nearby village].”
Aisha is now travelling to Kargil with her brother Mirwaiz Khan, as part of the springtime journey that the Bakarwals make every year. She says her child was killed because she was Muslim. Aisha now fears for the safety of her elder son, Samad, who is a high school student at a nearby town. “He stays with my mother,” she said. “I have told Hassan to bring him back. It is not safe there.” The younger son, Yasir, is now with Hassan.
The girl’s biological father, Muzaffer Wali, now lives on a meadow near a hill outside Udhampur, with three other Bakarwal families. He said he would fight for justice. “All of them [the accused] should be hanged,” Muzaffer told me. “Only then will her soul rest in peace.”
Muzaffer said he gave up his daughter for adoption because Aisha was struggling to cope with the loss of her three children. “Perhaps, it wasn’t the right decision,” he rued.
Locating Muzaffer proved to be a tough task. By the time I reached the area where he was camping, night had fallen. When I tried calling Muzaffer over the phone, poor connectivity made communication difficult. A shepherd who was passing by helped me by talking to Muzaffer in Gojri, the language Bakarwals speak. “You see that mud house,” the nomad told me after ending the call. “He will meet you there.”
The nomad left, clutching the rope around the neck of a goat. After some time, Muzaffer came down with a torch in his hand. “We cannot talk here,” he said. “You will have to come up.”
After a 15-minute trek, we reached their camp. Women were sitting around hearths, baking bread. Fatima spotted Muzaffer and rolled out a blanket. A lamb slept nearby.
“We are camping here because, up there, is an Army camp,” said Muzaffer. “We feel safe here. They know we are Bakarwals. Here we sleep in the open.”
Fatima said that they had been planning to bring their child back and enrol her in school. “She was already eight, and we were upset about her not attending school,” she said. “So, we had decided to bring her home.”
Umar Wali, Muzaffer’s brother, said, “They had to kill our daughter. Why didn’t they do it in one go? Why did they torture her? It hurts us more.”
Fatima said she was regretting the decision to give up her child for adoption. “Today, I am cursing myself for it,” she said. “Had she been with us, she would have been alive, perhaps.”
Saif, the girl’s brother, said he wanted all the accused to be awarded the death sentence. “All those people should be hanged,” he said. “I shiver at the thought of what they did to my sister.”
Said Raziya, the girl’s sister: “I miss her a lot. Every day, I cry when I think of her.” Raziya said she is now afraid of travelling alone. “Now, I don’t talk and mix with people who are not Muslims.”
As I got up to leave, the Bakarwals’ sheepdogs bared their fangs at me. Saif and Umar shooed them off. “These dogs are better than humans,” Muzaffer told me. “They guard us and our herd.”
The names of the victim’s relatives have been changed to protect identities.