Nithari is closer than one thinks

It somehow drained out. In a country where life is cheap, it still had the power to astonish, if not shock, in times when social media outrage had still not made its appearance. On December 29, 2006 , skeletal remains of eight children, possibly a few of women too, were discovered from the drain of a house in Nithari village of Noida’s Sector 31 . More skeletons were discovered the next day- the remains of women and a few more children. What, however, was revealing for everyday normalisation of brutality in the country wasn’t the number of people meeting their end but the fact that they could end up in a kitchen cauldron and be flushed out of drains too.

As the chilling details kept tumbling out with the arrest and narco-analysis of house owner Moninder Singh Pander and his domestic help Surinder Koli, cannibalism and necrophiliac bestiality seemed the next possibility. Debauchery was the new porn for news consumers – repulsive but served with grisly details by news media as it fed collective voyeurism.

Early this week, a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court awarded the death sentence to Moninder Singh Pandher and Surinder Koli in one of the 16 cases of Nithari serial killings, which were allegedly committed in 2005 and 2006. The judicial process, obviously, hasn’t made any exception in reducing the time taken to try the case as banal as the legal labyrinths go in this country.

Having being sentenced to death earlier in another Nithari case, the consideration of his mercy petition delayed and then rejected and eventually the Supreme Court terming any move for execution ‘unconstitutional’ on account of delay, Surinder Koli has seen that crime as well as the process to punish it can’t escape the banality of every day India. In all likelihood, his employer, at the receiving end of the attack for favourable class treatment, would look at the sentence in the Pinki Sarkar killing case as a new legal challenge waiting to be addressed.

The investigations have not much in terms of evidence to prove the multiple cases of rape and murder of a number of children and women, mostly maids looking for work, and then Surinder Koli’s self-confessed acts of cannibalism on the dead bodies. Did the repulsive sway of cannibalism diminish the need for a clinching case against the perpetrators?  In a piece for a leading daily three years back, journalist and novelist Manu Joseph alluded to the missing links in the investigation and how the horror value of cannibalism, and his own confessions, might have provided the police and even courts to look away from the lack of rigour in assembling unassailable evidence.

What, however, has been intriguing many is why the scope of the probe was so limited if there were reports of a far greater number of children disappearing from the locality over the years. As Joseph put it: “Where are the other children of Nithari, whose disappearances are not attributed to Koli? There are more skeletons that have been recovered than what Koli can account for. How is that?” It’s a question that comes up repeatedly in Ram Devineni and Tushar Prakash’s documentary film on Nithari serial murders Karma Killings (2016). The film goes to the extent of suggesting that there was nothing that could incriminate Moninder Singh Pandher.

Unsurprisingly, the easy legal conviction of Koli and the stern defence put up by Pandher earned the domestic help some brownie points with human rights lawyers and activists like Indira Jaising who argued his case in the Supreme Court. Class, if it’s relevant in the case at all, seems more pronounced at the receiving end of the crime. Most of the victims were either children of migrant workers, or migrant workers themselves – looking for avenues of employment. Bringing in the class perspective for scrutinising merits of the case often becomes a red herring that strays from fixing individual accountability for the crime.

Another detour was the unrealistic expectation from the pre-emptive policing. The discovery of human remains initiated a slew of suspensions in the Noida police force – ranging from high-ranking officials like the senior superintendent of police to beat constables. Though the napping city police didn’t cover itself with any glory, the knee-jerk response was another act that displayed a thing or two about our refusal to understand the nature of the killings.

Whatever be the nature of investigation or the merits of the case, it’s the cannibalism which captured the dark alleys of demonic repulsion in people’s imagination. It’s no wonder that four years ago a piece published in Outlook on an alumni meet in St. Stephen’s College, the well-heeled Pandher’s alma mater, makes it a point to mention him as “yet another was accused of cannibalism”. Ever looking for macabre spectacle, television news media obviously pounced on their discovery of nar-pisach (vampire) in Surinder Koli. Grisly details of their alleged acts followed with the assurance of a viewership keen on peeping into the realms of depravity.

The fact that disappearance of children was relegated to banality and sensationalism of crime-porn attained centrality wasn’t surprising in a country which has insidiously reconciled itself to unexpected ways of losing lives. What, seemingly, made Nithari intriguing was people discovering how the proverbial skeletons in the cupboard of an urban settlement, located in a satellite city of the country’s capital, told them about how little they know about themselves. In an increasingly atomistic urban formation around us, we obviously don’t know whether a Pandher or Koli is lurking somewhere in our unknown realms, with our own wild leaps of desire. In those self-absorbed sites of urban living, we are too alone to know that.

In ways we are least likely to be comfortable with, the Nithari house killings somehow were sum of all our fears and alienation with our cocooned urban selves. We might still be deluding ourselves with the exceptionalism that its extremes make us believe in. The aftertaste of cannibalism was sensationalist, counting dead bodies was mundane and the missing children were irrelevant. Millions of urban city-dwellers in India might not be living too far from such houses, probably living in it with a side of themselves they aren’t so sure about. They don’t know, nor did Moninder and Surinder. Pinky Sarkars and Jyotis knew where it led to.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.