The ferocity of the outrage against the CBI for submitting a closure report to the court in the case involving the murders of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj is understandable. A girl just into her teens has been murdered, and so has the household help, but there is no evidence, and, therefore, no killer. It has been over two-and-a-half years since the murder, and though the CBI in its closure report has repeatedly named Aarushi’s father, Dr Rajesh Talwar, as the suspect, they could not make a case against him and his accomplices, if any, because of a lack of evidence. This does not mean that the case is closed forever. When and if some clues are found and someone does come up with some information, the case can always be reopened. There were so many people involved in the process after the murders, such as the doctors who performed the post-mortem examination. The CBI has quite an exhaustive report of the circumstantial evidence against Dr Talwar and their relations, but this would not stand scrutiny in a court of law. The 30-page closure report has well-investigated circumstantial evidence that points to an inside job, examples being the surgical precision with which the girl’s throat was slit, and the fact that all evidence was deliberately and meticulously erased. The CBI also claims there is “evidence” that the Talwars tried to influence the post-mortem report of the girl. In view of this, it is more than perplexing as to why the CBI did not file a case against the Talwars under Section 201 for destroying evidence. There are overwhelming instances of destruction of evidence, or contamination of evidence, as they say. So why didn’t they act against the Talwars on this issue? Also, for 15 days after the murder, in 2008, the Uttar Pradesh police seems to have mismanaged the investigation. Why has the CBI not taken action against the UP police?
The public, and various commentators, cannot be blamed for ripping into the CBI on this case when in fact it has partly taken the burden of the incompetence of the UP police on its own shoulders. The CBI also carries the unenviable reputation of being the handmaiden of the government in power. More recently, the CBI’s role in delaying for over a year the booking of the accused in the 2G scam, despite overwhelming evidence, is a case in point. It was clear that the government did not want them to proceed against the accused and that is why they had to file a case against “unnamed persons”. It is a disgrace to the system that an agency as skilled and competent as the CBI is being misused by its political masters, and even more pitiable that it allows itself to be misused. But it is heartening that the people, and even the politicians, have not lost total faith in the CBI, as whenever the police bungles there is an outcry for the case to be handed to the very same agency. A lot of the misinformation in the Aarushi case is because of a lack of understanding of the law by opinion-makers like the media. It is strange that the people are not going after the UP police, who bungled the case in the first place. Now that the law minister and various women’s organisations have decided to see through the Aarushi case to its logical conclusion, a way can be explored to at least book the accused mentioned by the CBI for destroying evidence. For the rest, murder will out.