For a year and seven months, Jhabbu Lal, a presser, kept searching for his 10-year-old daughter Jyoti at all places, including the brothels of Mumbai and those at the Garstin Bastion Road in Delhi (more popularly known as GB Road). Seventeen months later, his search would finally conclude just 30 feet from his house in Noida’s Nithari village, at a house across the road, where he found Jyoti’s clothes that she was wearing when she had gone missing, along with her earrings.
It was bungalow number D5. The house made it to the headlines, globally, in December 2006, after several skeletal remains were found on its premises raising suspicion on its occupants Moninder Singh Pandher and his house help Surinder Koli, of having killed, chopped and buried, over 19 children and women.
The village, then a secluded and a deserted neighbourhood, 20 km from central Delhi, today remains surrounded by palatial row houses making the area round it one of the posh residential areas of Noida. The village, however, still largely houses labourers and migrants, many of them who either sell vegetables, own small shops or are employed as contractual workers. Amidst all this, D5, sealed since 2006, stands dilapidated as the bushes and trees in the house have outgrown the building structure.
Despite intensified investigations, initially by the Noida police and then by the country’s premier investigative agency the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and several rounds of trials in lower courts, almost 17 years later on Monday, both Koli and Pandher, previously granted death sentence, were acquitted by the Allahabad High Court.
Putting the onus for the acquittal on shoddy probe, the high court called it a “betrayal of public trust by responsible agencies”.
But Jhabbu Lal believes this verdict is more than just betrayal.
Swiftly dragging the heavy charcoal iron back and forth, Lal, now 70, recalls how his only purpose of life that was to see the duo be hanged till death is now lost.
“I and my wife both work as pressers. We have been working at the same spot for the past 35 years. For the past 17 years, I have seen that house every day. It has reminded me of my daughter every single day and each day I have hoped that I live to see that day when both Pandher and Koli will be hanged to death. As many other families whose children were killed by them shifted away from this area, we chose not to move,” Lal said.
Today, I have lost the only purpose of my life, along with the faith in the judiciary and in the probe agencies of this country, he said, resting the iron on a stone slab.
The couple, who works and lives under a makeshift shanty-like structure at the side of a road, in a residential neighbourhood, across which lies D5, say they clearly remember the presence of Pandher and Koli in the area much before the alleged involvement of the two in the serial killing had even surfaced.
Lal’s wife, Sunita Kanoujia said both men had been living in D5 for almost two years before this incident became known. “Those two years they lived a very normal life. Since I and my husband have been doing the same work from much before, Pandher also would send his clothes to us for ironing. I often noticed there would be some stains on the two of Pandher’s Pathani suits he wore. They seemed like blood stains. But Koli said they were from the chicken shop from where Pandher bought meat. Sometimes, he would say they are stained because he ate ‘paan’. I later realised they could be blood stains of those innocent victims whom he killed,” she said.
Recalling the day when her daughter went missing, Kanoujia says it was a Tuesday and her daughter was home because the school was shut. “Since she was home, she volunteered to go to one of our customer’s house. As it was close by, we allowed. But my daughter never returned. Initially, while searching for her, I remember asking Pandher also if he had seen my daughter but he denied. There is no place on earth we did not search for her, from brothels to morgues. It was only a year-and-a-half-later when some body parts were spotted in that house and the police came for a detailed search, my daughter’s belongings were also recovered,” the 60-year-old woman said, using her red dupatta to wipe her moist eyes from behind her spectacles.
The couple have been earning their living by ironing clothes for over 35 years now. The compensation of Rs 5 lakh and a plot sized 25 yards that they had received from the government, like the other families of identified victims, Lal says was all consumed in fighting the “lost” legal battle.
“Probably it was my fault to be adamant on getting justice for my daughter. A lawyer I had then hired demanded Rs 4 lakh for the case. I paid him from Rs 5 lakh that we got as compensation. I already had a loan of Rs 3.5 lakh, which I had borrowed from people for travel and other expenses while searching for my daughter in different cities as I would also bear the cost of the police team. That debt was paid off from the remaining Rs 1 lakh and Rs 2 lakh that I received from selling off my 25-yard plot. We were left with nothing but only the hope for justice, which also now seems lost,” Lal said.
Jyoti was one of the six children Lal and Kanoujia had. But some families in Nithari village lost their only daughter. Durga Prasad, a driver, was among them.
“The court was right in saying that it is a betrayal. But we wish to ask when the CBI and trial courts gave death penalty, why did the high court acquit them? Were the other courts framing them illegally then? Why did our former president reject their mercy petition then? Why only after 17 years the court realised that there is no sufficient evidence?” asks Prasad, whose seven-year-old daughter was one of Nithari’s victims.
Prasad, lives with his wife and son in Noida Sector-122, where he was given a plot as compensation.
Like Prasad, 52-year-old Pappu Lal, also left Nithari village and got settled in Kulesra, Greater Noida, 15 km apart.
It was his eight-year-old daughter Rachna who fell victim to what unfolded in D5. Pappu also says he had found Rachna’s clothes and slippers from D5 when they barged in along with other locals after the initial human remains were found.
Pappu, who works as a security guard now, says his daughter remained missing for over eight months. “She went missing in April 2006 while playing outside our house. We lived in D2, three houses from D5. We searched for her madly but finally the search ended in the same neighbourhood. This incident had changed our lives. The area we lived in also became a nightmare for us, hence, we decided to move out,” said Pappu, who then worked at a travel agency in Delhi’s Connaught Place.
“Aggrieved and outraged”, the family members, however, say they are still hopeful there would be some way out that can be used to get justice for several victims who met the brutal end.
SK Yadav, the lawyer who had been representing the CBI in the case, said the same evidence that was used by the lower courts to award death penalty was made grounds to grant the acquittal. “It will have to be seen what led to such a verdict. We will advise the CBI to move Supreme Court,” Yadav said.
Meanwhile, Pandher’s family, after the acquittal verdict, is hopeful that he will walk free of the Luksar jail in Noida, where he is lodged.
When contacted by News18, Karan Pandher, son of Moninder Singh Pandher, said all these years have not been any less traumatic for his family also. “We were made the demons. Media played a very vital role in portraying my father as an evil. We are just waiting for him to walk out of the jail where he has spent years despite his innocence,” Karan said, adding “at the end justice has prevailed”.
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