Future visitors to Rajasthan's Sarupe Ka Tala will always stop to stare at the Khejri tree in the village, which bears the mark of 13 April 2018, when tragedy struck this sleepy village in Barmer district, two kilometres away from the Pakistan border. Three teenagers, two of them cousins, were found hanging from a tree. Fourteen-year-old Shanti, 13-year-old Madhu and 17-year-old Desal. Photos of that fateful morning show the three bodies hanging close together, as though embracing one another in death
Shanti and Madhu were Meghwals, considered a “lower” caste in the Hindu community, while Desal hailed from a Sindhi-Muslim family. Police say it is a case of suicide, while the words “murder” and “relationship” are thrown around in hushed whispers.
Shanti and Madhu's parents allege that Desal and his friend Mohammed Hasan (known as Miniya) raped and killed the girls. Hasan, in his 20s, was taken into police custody but was later declared innocent in the case.
When The Quint visited Sarupe ka Tala to try and unearth the truth behind the deaths, we found that something much more sinister was at play. Everyone in the village has a different version of how the events unfolded.
‘It was Rape & Murder,’ Say the Family of the Girls
Shanti's father, Bheroram Meghwal, alleges that the police are twisting the facts of the case. Madhu is the daughter of his younger brother, Kishan, whose family lives with him.
There is a gang which runs a racket that targets Hindu Dalit girls. It’s not just these two boys, there are many with them.Bheroram Meghwal, Shanti’s father
“I am an illiterate man and was in no state to make any rational decisions. It’s a definite case of murder but they are calling it suicide,” he alleges. “The police have been bribed. They did not register my first statement and made me sign a blank paper for the FIR,” he says.
"My daughters had no reason to commit suicide," he says. “They were in a good mood that day,” says the mother of one of the girls. “They finished their usual chores before sleeping. We would’ve sensed if something was amiss but nothing seemed unusual.”
Bheroram says the girls went missing from their home early on 13 April – the day they were found hanging. The girls and their parents were asleep in the verandah that night, he says, their beds 10 meters away. “I woke up around 3 am on 13 April to find both of them missing from their beds,” he says, adding, “I think they disappeared somewhere between midnight to 3 am.”
The family claimed the girls were abducted. But when asked how they could be abducted without waking up any of the family members sleeping nearby, Bheroram said the girls were probably drugged. Someone may have performed black magic on them, he says, or maybe they were possessed so they walked out of the house in the middle of the night.
Bheroram says he tried to look for the girls in the village along with Kishan, but had no luck. Later, the neighbours came and told us about the tree, he says. “What I saw shook me. Main pagal ho gaya tha. Kuchh samajh nahi aa raha tha. (I lost my senses and could not understand or say anything). They showed me the bodies but I could not register anything,” says Bheroram.
Kishan says they did not show him the bodies: “Humein bodies nahi dikhayi. Mere aankhon mein aansu aa gaye bas. (They did not show us the bodies. I had tears in my eyes).”
When asked if the girls knew Desal, Bheroram said: “When our daughters would go to fetch water, these two boys would stalk and trouble them. Last year, we took the matter to the panchayat but no action was taken to prevent this.”
‘Told Desal to Stay Away From Hasan,’ Say Boy’s Family
Desal's father Kasim Khan says they saw the bodies hanging, but did not go to the tree “as there was no point”. "We reached the spot only after the police. None of our family members went there before. We went there only after the police called us there," he says.
Desal's uncle says that the police saw only three pairs of footprints near the tree. “I think they did this willingly because there was no one else. I don’t know anything about the other boy,” he says.
The other boy in question is Hasan, who Khan calls a bad influence on his son. Khan says he had not spoken to Desal for a year, ever since he became friends with Hasan.
“He was our eldest son but no one from our family had any idea about Desal,” he says, adding that Desal had stopped talking or listening to his family members. He would only come home to get clean clothes, he would not talk to me, says his mother.
“I spoke to Hasan’s family and asked them to control their son but they paid no heed,” Khan says. “Desal isolated himself from the family and also started to avoid me. So, we cannot vouch for anything.”
The girl’s family claims Desal and Hasan were seen together at around 11 pm on 12 April. Shanti's father Bheroram says that he knew Desal had dinner at Hasan's house that night – a claim Hasan’s elder brother Wali Mohammed denies.
Wali accuses other villagers of fabricating a story to get his family into trouble. “Desal and Hasan worked together. They weren’t friends. Desal was a wrong influence on my brother... He was not a good boy but our son did not listen to us.”
"My brother has been taken into police custody for no fault of his," he alleges. This was backed by the police, who said they had interrogated Hasan and found nothing to link him to the deaths.
However, the police said they had let Hasan go after giving him a clean chit, while the family claims to have no knowledge about his whereabouts. Where is Hasan? And how much does he know about the three deaths?
‘Clear Case of Suicide,’ Say Police
“This is a clear case of suicide,” says Surendra Kumar, the deputy SP of Bijrar Police Station at Chohtan – which, at 40 kilometres, is the nearest town to Sarupe ka Tala. The three teenagers were in a relationship, he says, adding that they were often seen together. “It has been going on for about two and half years and their parents knew about it,” he says.
“We found out that Shanti was to be married soon and that her parents had found her a match.” He said that Shanti had attempted to take her own life once before. She tried to drown herself but failed because the water wasn't deep enough, he says.
Desal too had referred to suicide in a few conversations with others, Kumar says.
We showed the bodies to the fathers upon getting them down. None of the bodies had any bruise or scratch marks on them. I checked both the bodies and there were no bruises or scratches on them, which means that there was no forceful activity on them.Constable Shanti, Bijrar police station, Chohtan
A senior police official told The Quint that three mobile phones were recovered from Desal's house. The call logs are yet to be accessed. Shanti's mother says that there is only one mobile phone in the house. The girls were illiterate and did not know how to use a phone, she says. "We are very poor people. We can hardly manage food two times a day. Even thinking of giving phones to our daughters is far-fetched," says Bheroram.
Biases Unveiled
Surendra Kumar claims this is a part of a conspiracy. “Muslims are in a majority in Sarupe ka Tala and are also better off than the Dalit Hindus here. The Muslim boys attract these girls by spending money on them. The girls do not have any exposure to worldly things and little things like candies and soft drinks easily lure them,” he alleges.
When asked about the panchayat meeting between the families of the teenagers in 2017, he says that Madhu's father Kishan had approached the panchayat and that both families had arrived at an "understanding". “They concluded that children make mistakes and they will take care of the matter by handling their children.”
Hamir Khan, who was the sarpanch (village head) at the time, says that Kishan was unhappy at the fact that Madhu and Shanti were spending time with Desal and that it needed to stop. “I held a meeting and told the fathers that they could take any steps if they saw anything wrong. I called Desal’s father to warn them. I told them that we support the Meghwals,” he says.
“We told the Meghwals that if this happened again, they could take any step to nip it in the bud,” he said.
Kill them if you want to. We won’t say anything.Hamir Khan, former sarpanch, Sarupe ka Tala
Gossip Fodder For Residents of Barmer Village
The case has set tongues wagging in Sarupe ka Tala, where almost everyone seems to have their own version of the case. Dariya, a resident, told The Quint that Shanti and Desal were often seen sneaking around at night. They were once caught together behind a school, she alleged.
Another resident, Roshandeep, says all four – Desal, Shanti, Madhu, Hasan – were friends and that they spent their time together at Hasan's farm, which was near the field that Kishan Meghwal worked in. He says he suspects the deaths were a part of a suicide pact. He claims all four of them wanted to kill themselves but Hasan changed his mind at the last minute.
Another villager said the four must have coordinated with the boys over the phone.
Three Deaths, One Truth
Sarupe ka Tala is unlike most villages in India. The houses here are at least a kilometre apart, bunched together in clusters. Each house comprises a few thatched huts surrounded by a compound wall. It is in these simple homes that the three teenagers grew up, ate, slept, laughed and lived.
From Desal's house, you can see the Khejri tree he was found hanging from. Shanti and Madhu were his neighbours, their house was at a distance of two kilometres from his. With their deaths, the houses in Sarupe ka Tala are now perhaps even further apart from each other than ever before.
It is a suicide pact, say the police. An open and shut case. It is murder, say the parents. They were in a relationship, say others. Everyone has their own version of the story. Why are we hearing so many versions of truth? Did the parents’ version get coloured because of the shame and embarrassment that the case may have brought them? The families deal with the tragedy in their own way, while those around speculate about the events that cut short three young lives.
So how did the three die? We may never know. And at this point, the truth no longer matters, because we have all contributed to the deaths of these three young Indians.
The countryside is littered with bodies. Each one often a mystery. In a few days from now, this news will too be forgotten, and Sarupe ka Tala may even go back to being the sleepy village that it was. But what happened here on 13 April 2018 will always stand as a mirror to a society that drove three teenagers to suicide, with its rigid rules prohibiting contact between the opposite sexes.
This is a society that punishes youngsters for daring to break these societal norms — a society with blood on its hands. Friendship is frowned upon, while romantic relationships may even meet brutal ends in the form of abductions and “honour killings”.
Sarupe ka Tala may be isolated from the rest of the country, but how many similar stories have you heard from around the country? The case is an eerie repeat of the Badaun tragedy, where two sisters were found hanging from a tree in November 2014. In that case, the CBI later found that the girls killed themselves because they were afraid of how their families would react to them being in a relationship with a man.
Perhaps you remember the July 2017 case from Rajasthan, where two teenagers took their own lives because their families did not approve of their relationship.
Two weeks before the Sarupe ka Tala tragedy, two teenagers were found hanging from a tree in UP, with the police saying the two took the drastic step over their parents refusal to accept their relationship. The cases are far too many to count. Most of these cases also include a parallel story about the youngsters being pressured by their families into getting married at an early age.
Shanti was 14, but no one seemed to bat an eyelid at the fact that those around her harassed her over her friendship with Desal, while simultaneously pressurising her into what appears to be child marriage.
How can a child bear that much stress? How can anyone? From Badaun to Barmer, each case is a chilling reminder of our unwillingness, as a nation, to break free of the taboo that we've built around friendships among our young. How many more young lives will we sacrifice to this so-called tradition where hate is alright, but love and friendship aren't? There is no honour here, only a killing.
(Names and details of minors revealed with permission from the families)
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