The murder that threatens society 

The murder of Aarushi Talwar continues to haunt. The manner in which it has been investigated, debated in public and drawing rooms and telecast threatens to increase the divide and the chasm in the class conscious Indian society. After unjustly blaming the murdered servant for the foul deed the rounding up of others has raised many an embarrassing questions. 

A case that was open and shut for police has become a riddle that is driving it and the society in compromising and confrontational situations.

True to its character, when the body of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar was discovered in a pool of blood, her throat cut and the family's domestic servant nowhere to be found, the police had only one suspect. Senior officers had then claimed they knew where Hemraj the 45-year-old Nepali servant might be hiding and a team of officers was being dispatched to Nepal to track him down.

The police was so confident that it did not deem it necessary that sniffer dogs be brought. It did not even photograph the scene of crime and despite the fact that there were drops of blood on the steps leading to the locked door of the terrace. Unlocking the terrace door was the last thing on their mind.

It was not just the police that thought that the case was shut and closed. In a frenzy of activity the media especially the electronic, went to town. There were lurid details of the murder and the motive and it unquestioningly blamed Yam Prasad Banjade, also known as Hemraj, the missing servant. This lasted a day till someone opened the terrace door and discovered Hemraj's decomposing body lying on the floor. He too had been murdered, in the same way as Aarushi.

The Police now had to reopen the shut and closed murder mystery.

As the local police and later CBI investigated the case there were angry demonstrations by Nepali labourers, outraged that one of their countrymen had been blamed unfairly for such a horrible crime. Later, when the CBI took over the case more was to follow.

Even after more than a month has passed since the foul deed took place, all that the investigators have done is keep Dr. Rajesh Talwar, the father of the murdered girl in judicial custody and adding on the number of detained ‘servants’ to the list of suspects and witnesses. Thus, after first suspecting the dead servant Hemraj of committing the murder, the needle of suspicion has been indecisively escalating towards the help in the Talwar clinic and a few other domestic helps. So, after running down the reputation of the family friends Duranis and suggesting a lurid relationship as the cause of the murder, now their servant has been picked up by the CBI. Also to be repeatedly interrogated is the driver of the Talwars.

This would have been normal if it had not become the object of ridicule because of the declaration that the Police will arrest the ‘absconding’ Hemraj from his village in Nepal! Ever since then the theories of the servants being involved in all the crimes that take place in homes has come under suspicion.

In fact this case and its shoddy investigation has focused fresh attention on the uneasy relationship between India's middle classes and the ubiquitous servants who wash, cook, shop, drive, garden and clean for them. It has highlighted too, the deep anxiety of many who live in perpetual fear that their servants will rob them, poison them or worse. A constant source of conversation among people who employ domestic staff, such fear is now being expressed openly with the police also warning residents and asking them to have the credentials and antecedents verified.

"We always get our staff verified by the police and we also try and get people who are recommended to us. Only then do we let them in our house," is a refrain of many well to do residents. "But even after all this I am still very careful", is also carefully added.

With the size of the middle class and working couples growing, hiring of servants is becoming common place. Unlike in the generation gone by servants do not come from the known background but are a result of the growing influx in cities and thereby cheap availability of labor. However many among those who become servants are those who become so out of necessity but have a loathing of domestic chores. In Delhi alone, it is estimated there are at least 60,000 domestic servants, of which perhaps just a third are registered with the police.

These maids, cleaners, drivers and cooks usually earn paltry sums for the work they do and long hours they put in. Often they live in miserable conditions. Often they are migrants from Nepal or else impoverished Indian states such as Orissa or Bihar. A full-time maid can earn as little as 2,000 rupees a month, supplemented with a meager diet and perhaps some cheap clothes given to them by their employer. For this, the servant will usually work 12 to 14 hours a day. It is a rare employ who gives them a day off. Usually, servants will live in a simple one-roof shack or shed, often built on the roof of the house – swelteringly warm during the long, hot summers and bone-chilling in northern India's brief but cold winters. Most servants' bathroom facilities are probably best left undescribed.

However, it must be added that most of the employers treat their staff fairly. They might not be treating them as the family members as employers did in the years gone by but they do give them gifts on Diwali and Holi and a bonus when the servant goes to his village for an extended leave.

But there are numerous reports of employers treating their staff as little more than bonded labors. Often the relationship is difficult with the older masters being difficult to satisfy. Even more often there are instances when old couples, dissatisfied with the lack of attention paid to them by their own children take out the frustration on the servants. They expect, in such cases, ideal and exemplary behavior from them, the kind that they might have dreamt of from their own progeny. Physical assault on the servants is also not unheard of.

Given these wretched conditions and the fact that not all servants are in that profession of service of their own free will it should not be surprising if servants were to turn to opportunistic crimes. "The class difference of employers and the employed is so big and that tempted them to commit crimes," a Delhi police spokesman, Rajan Bhagat, recently told the press.

Many believe that lot many more crimes are being committed than they are actually being reported that the divide between the master and the servant is much bigger than it is apparent. The Aarushi murder case is no doubt exceptional but even in this case the lawyer of the affected family did not rule out the possibility of the servant being somehoe involved in the crime. Instances of car drivers routinely pinching money meant for petrol are numerous. So are the instances of the maid servants going through the jewelry boxes but there were many factors behind the phenomenon – increasing economic disparity, the increasing influx of rural people into cities and even mafia-style groups that force domestic servants to steal from their employers.

The fact is that there are 300 million among the middle class and as many below them but who are constantly aspiring to rise. Unfortunately none of them want to do any kind of menial work but the compulsions of life are such that many who arrive in the cities with dreams of bettering their lives are forced by circumstances to take up jobs that they really hate. The era of the ‘Maharaj’ presiding over the kitchen and lording over other servants has long died. Today what is visible that people are changing their class at a much faster rate. The servants, especially part time, witness the fast pace at which their masters acquire new economic identity.

It is futile to blame globalization and the desire of everyone to acquire the goodies. At the end of the day everyone is doing the same thing thus the blame should not be laid at the door of the servants.

But Aarushi’s murder and its investigation has raised more awkward questions than just the role of the servants. As far as the Noida and the UP police is concerned, it has damned itself many times over but the CBI too has not covered itself with glory. In fact the manner of its investigations raises many questions over which the citizens of the country should be worried.

It must be remembered that the Indian police in general solves the cases by using third degree methods. It is argued that since the police-population ratio is heavily stacked against the police this is the only tool that can be employed to beat the pressure of time and work. However, apart from being inhuman and unscientific it is also fraught with danger. Often innocent people are pummeled into submission and confession of a crime they did not commit. In the Aarushi murder case too it is left to conjecturing what the fate of Hemraj might have been had he been alive and arrested.

We would like to believe that the CBI does not use this tool of the dark ages. At least not in cases that come to light and are under public and human right groups gaze. But it has used a tool, in the present case repeatedly, that is inadmissible in the court of law.

The original suspect, Dr. Rajesh Talwar has been subjected to polygraph test, at least twice. Krishna, his compounder, who was first said to be a witness, was detained for many days, taken to Banglore for narco-analysis and then arrested. This has been severely criticized as it is obvious that his detention for so many days without being produced in a court of law and without his being allowed to meet either a lawyer or his family members is illegal.

Even more worrisome is the fact that after substituting polygraph tests and narco analysis for the third degree methods for confession of crime and discovering the tools of murder, the CBI has not made any headway. Compounding the poor functioning of the CBI is the fact that more servants are being taken into custody and more effort is being put, much like the Noida and UP police, to find out what kind of personal lives were led by the Talwar couple and their friends. In fact the only difference, at the moment, being that while the UP police was gloating over what it thought it knew about the lives of people like Talwars, the CBI is more discreet.

However, the law abiding citizens of this country should be worried. Worried at the fact that when Indian police is deprived of the weapon of third degree it cannot solve a murder. It is not capable of scientific investigation and the only recourse in the name of new techniques is resorting to methods that are inconclusive, some times misleading and inadmissible in a court of law.

Meanwhile, the divide between the masters and the servants is bound to increase. At least in the metros.