Murdered on 15th May

 

 

Dozens of indian citizens - daughters, sons, husbands, mothers and friends - were killed across the country on may 15, 2008. yet, for middleclass india and the media, it was only the murder of aarushi talwar and the lurid sensationalism related to it that mattered. tsi meets the family members of the unknown victims and realises that voyeurism and callousness in middleclass india is reaching alarming proportions. TSI examines the murky scenario

Aziz and his neighbours are taken aback. Never before had they seen a media person visit their corner of the fetid, crowded and garbage infested slum called Seemapuri in Delhi. They are even more surprised by the fact that the media wants to know about Shabnam, the six-year-old daughter of Aziz, who was murdered and buried in a graveyard. Aziz, who works in a packing factory in Old Delhi, is heartbroken and keeps staring at photographs of Shabnam. He tells TSI that he badly wants to take out one from the album and hang it on the wall. But his religion doesn’t permit him. l In faraway Bangalore, Manjula bursts into tears when a TSI reporter wants to know more about Lokesh. We had traced Manjula to a garment factory near Vittalnagar where she works for a living. Her brother Lokesh, an auto rickshaw driver has been murdered. Lokesh was a trouble maker in the family and used to perpetually harass his sister Manjula for money. Now, her brother is dead and her husband is behind bars.

There is a pall of gloom and fear in the building in Calcutta that has Apurba Roy Choudhury’s house. His wife Shanti is not interested in talking to TSI - or any media for that matter. her son Rajarshi too refuses to talk. Apurba, Personnel Manager at Lumtex Jute Mills, was murdered by a group of workers. Both Shanti and Rajarshi have no kind words for the media. In Ballabgarh near Delhi, gardener Lekhraj and his wife Lakhsmi reveal ravaged and resigned sorrow struck eyes, even as they hold a photo of Manish, their six-year-old son who has been murdered. The killer has not been found. Lekhraj turns wistful when he says, “ If I had more money and power, maybe the police would have shown more interest. Bhai, Justice is meant for the rich alone.”

In Saidapet area of Hyderabad, Laksmaamma and her two grandchildren feel lost and bewildered. Her 30-year-old daughter Jayamma, an employee of Hyderabad Municipal Corporation has been brutally murdered. All the murder victims mentioned above – and many more not listed here – have something in common. Middleclass Indians are simply not aware of these murders; not that they would be interested either. But no national news channel, newspaper or magazine wrote about these murders and the loss, grief and tragedy that has engulfed the family members of these victims. A few lines buried in the inside pages of a local newspaper was all the attention they got. They have something else in common.

It would be naïve to expect middleclass Indians, the chattering classes and the media to spare time for Shabnam, Manish, Lokesh, Jayamma or Apurva. Even the fact that these murders involved sex, sleaze, jealousy, mob behaviour and vindictiveness makes no difference to the national media. Sure, middleclass Indians love their dose of sex, sleaze, scandal and gossip. But who the hell cares about Shabnam, who stays in a hell hole called Seemapuri? Or about Shankar, who was beheaded by rivals in Trichy, leaving behind a distressed and destitute widow. But Arushi was not ignored. In fact, her murder and the subsequent investigations, and the frenzy of speculation, gossip and innuendo it triggered, has been in a class of its own. It will go down as a case study for students of sociology analysing disturbingly voyeuristic middleclass behaviour; for media researchers trying to figure out how news hounds justified the very presence of the word ‘hound’ in the term and for urban analysts on the gradual collapse of law and order in India of today.

The first thing that would come to mind is the tired old chestnut about the divide between the rich and the poor. Shabnam and Manish – despite being heart wrenching and heinous murders in and around Delhi – were completely ignored by the media because they belonged to a social class that has completely dropped off the radar of the middleclass. Arushi was perfect for both the middleclass and the media – which is the main source of news, information, gossip and sleaze for them. There were dark hints of sleaze, of orgies, of deviant sexual behaviour, of the romance between a dead teenager and her alleged boyfriend, and even darker hints about a dead teenage girl being found in an objectionable position with her servant by a characterless father. “Every time I see Arushi on TV, I start crying, asking why Shabnam had to be snatched away from me. I can understand the pain and agony that the Talwars must be going through. I too have lost a daughter on the same day. I know how it feels. Yet, I wonder if the police would ever show such alacrity when it comes to people like us.” Delhi is witnessing unexpected bouts of rain, and the by-lanes of Seemapuri, where Shabnam spent her life, are clogged with garbage and filth whose stench makes the TSI team flinch with dismay. The father wistfully talks about the video camera that was supposed to be a birthday gift for Arushi. Shabnam too was a ‘spoilt brat’, he says. Demands issuing from her sing song voice would never produce a video camera – but there were plenty of photos clicked in a neighbourhood studio because Shabnam liked to see her own photographs. Aziz hadn’t really thought of a birthday gift for her.

When it came to Arushi, there is hardly a television viewer or a newspaper and magazine reader who would not be aware of how the Talwars had planned to surprise Arushi on her birthday with a video camera. And why not? Since when have the police in India made even a semblance of being equally prejudiced towards the poor and the rich. “That’s a wrong notion. The police always investigate all murder cases with equal resolve,” says Union Minister of State for Home, Shri Prakash Jaiswal. Policemen that TSI reporters talked to in Trichy, Puri, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ballabgarh, Bombay and Delhi had similar responses. But beneath the official reaction lay the acknowledgement of the divide between India and Bharat. In Puri, Orissa, May 15, 2008 witnessed a bizarre orgy of violence when four people were killed in a mob fight between two groups of villagers. One victim, 20-year-old Kuna Tarai was beaten to death. Three more, 70-year-old Ananta Patel, his wife Hema (65) and their granddaughter Manduli – just seven years of age – were burnt to death. This story did appear in the Oriya edition of TSI. But the English edition didn’t find it ‘interesting’ enough. The Additional Superintendent of Police of Puri, Rajat Kanti Mishra insists that 20 culprits have been arrested. But locals aver the real killers have political connections and the cops have shown they 'care 'by arresting some poor miscreants and beating them up to. The family members of Manish, Shabnam, Lokesh and Jayamma will probably not be reading The Sunday Indian. But people like you and me do. And, the strange spectacle that relentless media scrutiny and a police force still mired in the arrogant attitudes of the British Empire are creating is the dissolution of the walls between the rich and the poor when it comes to propagating sleaze, torturing ‘suspects’ and generally destroying their lives. Agreed, Rajesh Talwar is a lucky man: he was not a poor resident of Seemapuri or Ballabhgarh; he is still alive, despite 50 days behind bars, and his lawyers have at least not officially complained of police torture. But short of death in police or judicial custody, and publicly visible signs of torture, there is nothing that Dr Talwar has not endured that the poor in India do not endure on a regular basis.

To that extent, you could even ‘praise’ Indian democracy and its police force for not distinguishing between the rich and the poor. We are familiar with the police casually referring to poor suspects as ‘characterless’, ‘immoral’, ‘deviant’, ‘sexually promiscuous’ and even ‘savage’. We are used to the media routinely peddling the same observations and allegations without any cross checking. And we are used to middleclass Indians tut tutting in mock despair over the lack of moral foundations of the poor. But here was the police tarring the rich and influential Talwars with the same feather. Here was the media peddling the same innuendo and salacious gossip being nakedly propagated by masquerading as custodians of the ‘public interest’. And here was middleclass India obsessed with the wild theories revolving around the murder, with everybody becoming an expert on parenting, on sexual deviations, orgies, or the problems of teenage girls with too many boy friends and on the dangers of teenage girls doing the unspeakable with domestic servants. According to advertising professional and columnist Santosh Desai, the Indian middleclass is being relentlessly bombarded by 24-hour news channels that are in such a savage race to garner high television rating points that no boundaries or restraints are held sacrosanct any longer. There is a tendency for the news channels to highlight the bizarre to lure viewers and virtually all have fallen prey to this dangerous disease. But then, as senior journalists like Ashutosh argue, it is the same media that has been responsible for the families of victims getting justice in the notorious Jessicca Lal, Priyadarshani Mattoo, Madhumita Shukla and Nitish Katara cases. But what about the middleclass? It stopped voting long time ago. It has de facto seceded from the Indian republic by building walls of private security, private water supply and electricity supplied by generators. It has cashed in on globalisation by making malls the new Mecca and multiplexes the new temples. And as the Arushi case revealed, it has exposed its true colours – that of bitching, back biting, conniving, gossiping and shallow individuals that inhabit the classic book Raag Darbari. In the book, all that a set of villagers do is gossip, bitch and tend to see the worst in others. Thanks to 24-hour news channels, the Indian village – warts and all – has now been transformed into a 200-million strong middleclass that metaphorically feasted on detritus offered by the macabre Arushi affair.

Deepak Pandey of Pratap Nagar, Ghaziabad lost his 22-year-old friend Deepak Bisht on May 15, 2008. His friend was murdered and he knows that the police or the media have no time for the case. Yet, every time he sees Arushi on television, he not only misses his friend, but also feels bad for the Talwars. His namesake and friend Deepak used to love ice creams that they used to share after dinner. He is not sure if Arushi was fond of ice cream.