Savages OF Modernity

Gajanan Khergamker Mumbai

When businessman, Moninder Singh Pandher, and his domestic
help, Surendra Koli, were arrested on December 29, 2006, after the
police found 15 skulls outside the businessman's bungalow in Noida on
the outskirts of Delhi, the entire nation was shocked. Investigations
revealed that the remains belonged to four women and 15 young girls who
had been raped, killed and mutilated. In the most eerie sections of a
charge-sheet prepared it was revealed that Koli allegedly suffered from
necrophilia - the deranged urge to have sex with a corpse - and
necrophagia - the perverse urge to eat flesh.

The findings rewrote the ground rules of crime. Criminals had fallen
to a new record low; a low that baffled basic human sensibilities.
Dismal psychiatric conditions coupled with innate brutal tendencies
formed the fundamental plinth of the new-age criminal; a plinth alien
to law-enforcers and legal machinery alike. And when, in the first of
the Nithari case judgments, a special CBI court in early February
convicted the two for raping and killing 14-year-old Rimpa Haldar who
had been allegedly strangled and then cut to pieces by Koli with two
kitchen knives and an axe, the nation heaved a sigh of relief. Finally,
a thin glimmer of justice appeared to light up the darkest chapters in
India's penal history. On February 13, 2009, convicts in the Nithari
killings, Koli and Singh, were awarded the death sentence for the
'rarest of rare cases' - spelling hope, or so it seemed.

In the very next month, on March 19, broke out a story of two minor daughters being forced to have sex with their father and a tantrik; a pre-marital relationship ending into a torrid threesome with the husband's acquiescence to the tantrik's
relationship with his wife and more. Brutally forced into silence and
subjugation, a 21-year-old girl continued being raped repeatedly over
the years since the tender age of 12 by her father and the tantrik
even as her 'naked' mother watched on. Her mother, investigations
revealed, had had consensual sex at the same time with both her husband
and the tantrik - her lover prior to marriage.

The elder daughter filed a complaint in a Mumbai police station that
she had been raped over a period of nine years by her 49-year-old
father, Kishore Chauhan, and a 55-year-old tantrik, Hasmukh Rathod, who has reportedly sexually abused other women as well.  It was only after the tantrik
began to rape her 15-year-old younger sister that the older sister
could take it no more and spilt the beans before her maternal uncle and
grandmother, who helped her file the complaint.

In a series of shocking revelations, the tantrik went on to
justify his act saying that he was "checking his masculinity" after his
wife's death owing to cancer. He added that while his wife was alive,
she had stopped him from having sexual relations with other women.

The younger sister, presently 15, had apparently been taken to the tantrik's
home in Juhu Gully in Mumbai last November by her mother. "Rathod
chanted something and tied sacred threads on our wrists, before he
stripped us," she said. He then had sex with them both. The tantrik
had allegedly encouraged the father of the family to rape his elder
daughter saying that he could become prosperous by doing so.