Nithari victims’ kin wonder if the authorities did enough for them Noida, December 28 As relatives of the victims of the Nithari killings await justice and arrange a havan on December 29, the day their children’s bodies were found in a drain last year, the question they are asking themselves is: did the authorities do their best?
“I’ve lost half my family and no one has cared to take stock of my situation,” says Bandana Sarkar, whose daughter was one of the victims. She recently lost her husband Jatin in mysterious circumstances. “The Noida police might have committed blunders, but what did the Centre, to which we wrote many letters, do?”
Commodore (Retd) Lokesh Batra, an
RTI and social activist, says, “There were so many people from so many authorities to trace the son of Adobe CEO in November 2006. When children from the village were disappearing, nobody bothered.”
Girija Vyas, chairperson of the NCW, wrote a letter to the prime minister on January 15 (copy of the letter received from PMO through a
RTI) defending the commission after The Indian Express reported the same day that NCW had been sleeping on the case till the skeletons came tumbling out.
The letter says “NCW had taken prompt action as soon as report of missing girls was brought to its notice.” She also said that after August 2005, “neither guardians nor parents of missing girls nor any mediapersons or any other organisation approached us for any further action in the matter”.
Usha Thakur, a social activist who lives in Sector-31 and has worked with the victims’ kin for over three years now, had written a complaint to the President, the Prime Minister and the NCW, besides 13 other higher-ups on May 18, 2006.
In response to another
RTI filed in the NCW by Batra, the Commission’s reply says “the letter dated 18.05.2006 by Usha Thakur was received on 23.05.2006” but “availability of the complaint was not known to Chairperson (Girija Vyas) and other senior officials at the time of writing the letters to the Honourable Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi.”
“Is this the kind of accountability expected from the chairperson,” Batra asks.
The NCW conducted its first survey of Nithari village on August 24, 2005 (after complaints of Rajesh and Jhabbu Lal were received on August 4 and 5, respectively) and met the families of six victims who were then recorded missing. The report of the single-member committee headed by Nirmala Venkatesh, member of NCW, however, took almost three months to be formalised and was later sent to the Noida police on November 9, 2005 (Copy received through
RTI filed in NCW).
In response to a legal notice and another copy of the report sent to the Director General of Police, Uttar Pradesh by the NCW on January 2, 2007, the then DGP Bua Singh, in his letter (dated January 12) replied that no such report dated November 9, 2005, was ever received in the Noida police’s office. He also disputed the NCW’s claim that the number of missing children was five, and not six, as claimed by the NCW committee’s report of 2005.
In the period between August 2005 and December 2006 (when the media exposed the case), close to 32 children were reported missing from the village. “And the NCW never cared to enquire about their letter for close to 14 months. It is nothing but incompetence of the members that nobody bothered about the children’s cases,” Batra says.
Nobody from the NCW visited the village again and there is also no official record of anyone from there (including Nirmala Venkatesh) enquiring about the cases after that.
However, a letter written to the DIG Police, Meerut Zone, by SSP, Noida, Piyush Mordia (he also mentions attaching a copy to NCW and the copy of this letter was found in records of the NCW during a file inspection by Commodore Batra) on December 12, 2005 mentions sending a copy of one of the Investigation Report (case of Jhabbu Lal) to the NCW in response to the same letter of November 9, 2005.
“This proves that the NCW had received some response from Noida police but did not mention it in the letter to the PMO or while issuing notice to DGP, UP Police on January 2, 2007,” Batra said.
“Also, the NCW committee never questioned or took any action towards establishing correctly the number of missing girls after their claim was disputed by the UP police. Is this the amount of concern and commitment they had for the children of our poor,” Batra says.
Nithari victims’ kin wonder if the authorities did enough for them