This is like we’ve been through this before. This story is a familiar one. A moving bus. The dead of night. A woman locked inside as the outside city falls asleep through tinted windows. The capital city was again taken aback by its own fractured image on May 11. A woman aged 30 in Rani Bagh area has come as a massive shock to the people of Delhi. It was so bad that the Delhi HC didn’t even have to wait for the petition to reach his desk. They took matters into their own hands.
In situations where the judiciary takes suo motu cognizance of a crime, it is a result of his dismay and frustration with the administration apparatus. The removal of a file from the highest court in the city by its own motion is a big, clear message to the police department. The bench awaits enquiries. They want to know exactly how a private sleeper bus can be a moving crime scene for hours and no one will notice something is wrong.They want to know exactly how a private sleeper bus can be a moving crime scene for hours without a single patrol car noticing something is wrong. It’s a really scary question. We live in a highly surveilled, heavily policed capital, which we are told. But the foundation of public safety utterly failed a woman simply attempting to return to her work at the factory.
A booklet detailing the events of the assault.A booklet outlining the assault.
The initial police reports have been dire. The victim was on his way to stand at a bus stop at Saraswati Vihar on Monday night. She had come off a long shift. She approached the private, parked bus just to ask the man at the door the time. That’s where the timeline turns into a complete mess.
The woman’s statement says she was dragged into the heavy vehicle. The doors were shut. The two men in the car were the driver, Umesh Kumar, 40, and the conductor, Ramender, 45. The incident and the circumstances which ensued are currently under intense investigation by the criminal police. According to one of the reports the big bus was parked close to Nangloi Metro Station during the attack. Other sources tell the police that the car was indeed on the move, driving around for almost two hours in the Rani Bagh district, covering a distance of 7 km.
One has to do a bit of mental gymnastics to imagine the sheer audacity of that. A commercial sleeper bus, which normally runs the day to day Delhi to Bihar route with a woman who is being held in its driver’s compartment. Eventually, one of the perpetrators let her go or she escaped. How she will leave is still unclear. By 4:45 AM, however, she was able to obtain a telephone and call the police control room.
The Competing Narratives of the Police
That’s where things get official. And, the truth is, it starts to become a bit defensive. The victim’s complaint is obviously a description of her being kidnapped from the bus stop, but the local police told the press a slightly different story.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Vikram Singh said on record that the preliminary investigation led them to believe that there was some monitory agreement between the woman and the accused. The police say the three boarded the bus together by choice and the fighting only broke out because the three men said they weren’t going to pay what they had been told. That’s one way to tell the story, and even if you do accept it as true, the legal truth remains unchanged. The official police statement clearly stated that the woman gave her consent, and she requested the men to refrain. They refused. Indian law defines gang rape as that.
In any event, the end result was deceptively rapid. A First Information Report was filed with the police after the victim had a comprehensive physical examination and gave a statement to a counsellor. The investigative apparatus was put into high gear. One of the accused was immediately caught at the scene by them. It took them only a few hours to find the second man in the same general vicinity. Both Umesh and Ramender were quickly dragged in front of a magistrate and remanded to judicial custody.
The Investigation Strategy
The mechanical bus is now being kept in an impound lot at the Rani Bagh police station. It’s a huge chunk of ballistics evidence. The scene is most likely being worked inside by the crime scene team and they are searching for biological evidence, fibers from the victim’s clothing and anything that will support the victim’s timeline.
The list of those under investigation is growing. Delhi Police are now scouring the CCTV footage from the Saraswati Vihar bus stop to the end of the bus route at Nangloi. They are sending out messages to cell phone towers to determine the exact digital trails of both the accused and the victim throughout the night. They must create a legally sound geographical chronology that they will share with the High Court. The judges are going to be looking for a perfect charge sheet. When the judiciary is vigilant in suo moto notice, it is all but impossible to have any slack with police work. The cops are very aware that they are under a huge spotlight.
The Political Fallout
A crime such as this cannot be divorced from the poisonous political context in Delhi. The reaction was very rapid. It was a case of an AAP going on the attack. They singled out at length the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has a tight grip on the Delhi Police via the Home Ministry of the Union government.
The heinous Nirbhaya case of 2012 is being compared openly with the present case by political leaders. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia criticized the lack of security for women in the capital at night, on social media. There is a lot of verbal noise. Slanderous rumors are spreading. However, there is a definite and weary sense of anger in the city, one that goes beyond the political rhetoric.
