by Arlene Chang Apr 23, 2013
New Delhi: When 12-year old Navaruna Chakravartty
hugged her father goodnight and retired to bed on the night of 18
September last year, he didn’t know that he would not see his daughter
again. That the months ahead would be spent in an agonising wait for a
child, never knowing if she was dead or alive.
“She had just finished her exams and had put mehendi on her
hands or she would have slept with us that night,” he says,
second-guessing the details of that fateful 18 September, 2012 night
when Navaruna Chakravartty, a class seven student of St Xavier’s School
in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, went missing from her house on Jawaharlal Lal
Road.
At around 5 am the next morning, Chakravartty and his wife went to the town’s police station to file a first information report (FIR) for the incident.
The then Station Head Officer (SHO) of the Muzaffarpur Police Station,
Jeetendra Prasad (who was to take over as investigation officer for the
case later) filed the FIR and handed its investigation to Senior
Inspector, Amit Kumar.
It marked the beginning of a nightmare of police obstruction, misdirection and intimidation.
“The police did not take it seriously at all – they didn’t get dogs
to pick up tracks, they didn’t come and seal off the bedroom or issue
alerts on the border. They did not even come and survey the room,”
Chakravartty says, adding, “We didn’t touch anything in the room for at
least 30 days after the incident, hoping that the police would come and
want to survey it. But, nobody came.” The police finally visited the
Chakravartty’s home on 22 October, more than a month after Navaruna’s
disappearance.
Amit Kumar, the investigation officer assigned to the case, had been a
police officer for only 2.5 years and recently joined the Muzaffarpur
Police station. He handled the case in its initial stages for a little
over a month. Kumar told Firstpost that he pursued the case from three angles: elopement, personal enmity and property dispute.
“The police called us to the station and told us it was a case of a
love affair. We disputed it. This was despite interrogating and
harassing my daughter’s two closest and best friends about it,
Chakravartty told Firstpost, “My daughter was only 12. Three 12
mm thick window rods were bent from outside – and the police expect us
to believe that my daughter would have had that done?”
The forensic team which visited the Chakravarttys for the first time
on 4 November, too, was a farce, says Chakravartty: “They came and told
us, ‘We have come only for formality’. They then took a pic of the
pulled out rods and left.”
“My daughter always stood in the top 3 in class and she was very
homely and studious. She used to study till 8.30 pm every night and she
never went out much. How could the police have accused her of having
disappeared in a case of a love affair?” Chakravartty said.
Chakravartty proved to be right. After months of interrogating family and friends, the police ruled out the love angle.
Navaruna’s father alleges that the Police have all along known where
his daughter was being held – and by who. But, that, till date they
haven’t taken any action because the culprits were rich and powerful.
“It became a routine for me to call the police station everyday to
ask about the progress of my daughter’s case. On 13 October when I
called the then Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Rajesh Kumar, he
told me, ‘I promise you. I will recover your daughter very soon’,” the
father said, adding, “He kept saying things like ‘I’ll give u a Navratra gift’, ‘I will give u a gift on Vijay Dashmi‘ – but my daughter never came back.
The local media, by then had started covering the case and the police
expressed concern over it. They told Chakravartty not to tell spread
word about the incident or to talk to the media, claiming that news
coverage would endanger his child.
“On 28 October, when ADGP Gupteshwar Pandey visited us he told us ‘If
you make noise, your daughter will be killed’,” Chakravartty said.
“They make us feel like we made a mistake by filing an FIR. Instead
of finding the real culprits the police instead got the call records of
relatives we regularly spoke to and went to their homes and threatened
them. The police even went to Delhi and threatened our older daughter
who is studying to be a chartered accountant and told her that if we
made a scene about it Navaruna would die,” said Chakravartty.
Faced with police stonewalling, Chakravarttys got help from an
unlikely source: students from Delhi University, among them final year
Law student, Abhishek Ranjan who hails from a small town 40 kms away
from Muzaffarpur, where Navaruna’s incident took place. He also spent
close to four years in Muzaffarpur doing his graduation at the LS
College between 2006 and 2010. On 20 October, soon after he heard of
Navaruna’s case on Facebook, he and 19 others held a symbolic protest at
DU’s North Campus against police inaction in the case. Encouraged by
the response, they organised another protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi
through Facebook, which was attended by around 50 people.
On 5 November, former investigation officer of the case at the time,
Amit Kumar, visited Delhi and met with students. In a conversation that
Ranjan recorded on his mobile phone, a copy of which Firstpost
has, Kumar said to Rajan: “I have nothing to do with what you do or
don’t do. I am only come to make you understand that do only as much as
is good (for you). If you do it (conduct protests), it will create
pressure on us (police),” Kumar is heard telling Ranjan. “If there’s any
problem or inconvenience we face, we will clip the wings of those
flying high.”
On asked about the recording by Firstpost, Kumar said, “I
didn’t say anything to the students or didn’t threaten them. I only
asked them to cooperate with our investigations by not causing us
trouble.”
On 27 November , Abhishek Ranjan Kumar, Aaditya Kumar, Rahul Maurya,
Nikhil Kumar had filed a criminal writ petition and a PIL in the Supreme
Court against the Union of India, Bihar government, the DGP, SSP, SHO
and Amit Kumar among others. The petitioners prayed that the Supreme
Court direct the respondents to a) produce Navaruna before the Court; b)
to restore law and order in the State and c) to hand over the
investigation of the present case to CBI among others.
On 7 January this year, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the
Bihar Govt and Union of India asking them to reply to the petition
within 6 weeks. The Bihar government’s reply only came on 12 April
saying that the SSP has made full efforts for the search of Navaruna and
also constituted a special team to find her, but, there has not been
any relevant clues.
When asked about it by Firstpost, Muzaffarpur’s now Senior
Superintendent of Police (SSP) Saurav Kumar said, “I can’t comment. I
just joined the station and the case is anyway transferred to the CID.
Only they can comment on the same.”
No comment, no trace, no justice. Navaruna has become a statistic,
one of the 90,000 Indian children who disappear from their homes each
year.
Website Link- http://www.firstpost.com/india/tales-of-the-disappeared-the-story-of-12-year-old-navaruna-721139.html
