The Blunderbuss Trail

Six days later, Sharma surrendered to the Chandigarh police and confessed he had killed Jessica Lall. The police also rounded up three eyewitnesses who gave depositions saying they had seen Sharma kill Lall. Thus, despite the fact that the murder weapon could not be found, it was an open-and-shut case that should have been decided in at most a year. Instead, the police dragged on the so-called investigation for six years, and Sharma and his accomplices were acquitted. To rub salt into the wound, additional sessions judge S.L. Bhayana gave this verdict on the ground that there was not enough evidence against the accused! If one were to comb the records of the judiciaries of the world, I doubt one would find another case in which justice has been so outrageously held in contempt.

What made the additional sessions judge give this perverse verdict? A close examination of what happened suggests a huge conspiracy between the accused and key members of the police investigation team to mess up the evidence and destroy its value. When Sharma confessed, it apparently did not "occur" to the persons recording his confession to have a magistrate present. So, Sharma was free to retract his confession later, which he, of course, did. The Delhi police failed likewise to record the evidence of the three eyewitnesses before a magistrate. As a result, they too were left free to turn hostile in court, without incurring any penalty. Had the police recorded their evidence before a magistrate, they would have been automatically guilty of perjury and contempt of court, and gone to prison.

To defend his judgement, Bhayana accused the police of first deciding who the criminal was and then looking only for evidence that would convict him. He also made much of the fact that the murder weapon hadn’t been found and that the police’s insistence that there had been only one shooter had been contradicted by the Central Forensic Laboratory in Jaipur, which said that the two bullets that had been fired had come from different guns. He also accused the police of tampering with evidence in order to secure a conviction.

This reasoning is more than a shade disingenuous. Every police force in the world follows a similar procedure. This is to collect information till it is able to identify a likely suspect and then work diligently to build a case against him or her. In a case built upon eyewitness evidence, the suspect is identified at the very beginning of the investigation by them. The police would not be doing its duty if it frittered away its time and resources trying to think up alternative hypotheses, no matter how far-fetched they were.

The Jaipur lab’s finding is also puzzling. The normal way to compare the bullets is to recover them and compare the groove made by their passage through the gun barrel. But the lab apparently based its judgement upon an examination of the shell casings. So, what happened to the bullets?

The case becomes murkier when we examine what the police in Mehrauli chose to record and what not to. Immediately after the shooting, Bina Ramani chased a fleeing Sharma to the door of the courtyard in which Tamarind Court was located demanding that he surrender the gun in his pocket. At the door she met her husband Georges Mailhot coming in and asked him to chase Sharma. Mailhot did so on foot for a kilometre or more before he gave up and went to the Mehrauli police station to report the murder. But although he gave a detailed fir, the cops suppressed it and claimed he hadn’t been present at the restaurant.

In the meantime, Bina Ramani had taken Lall to the hospital. When she and her husband returned, they found that all the guests had slipped away, leaving one solitary van standing in front of the restaurant. When the Mehrauli police finally arrived, another hour later, husband and wife implored them to impound the van, telling them over and over again that as the killers had run away on foot this had to be their van. But, incredibly, the police refused to touch it. The next morning the van had disappeared.

The reason for this cornucopia of blunders and omissions becomes clear when we examine who Sharma and his associates were related to. Sharma’s father was a former Union minister. Vikas Yadav’s father was a well-known gangster and therefore an MP from UP. (Vikas himself now languishes in jail accused of another extremely brutal, premeditated murder—waiting no doubt for daddy to do the needful.) Shyam Sundar Singh, alleged to have helped one of the other accused to leave India with the murder weapon, is related to former president Shankar Dayal Sharma.

Those familiar with the case speak of the pressures and inducements offered to make the police omit key precautions in preparing its case, and witnesses turn hostile. They speak of honest cops who’ve been summarily transferred and others who’ve got promoted. Even Bhayana was elevated to the high court within days of delivering his verdict.

The prime minister’s decision to bring the entire case under the scrutiny of the home ministry shows that decency has still not completely deserted Indian politics. One can only hope that, despite the odds, justice will be done.