The Girl from Kathua: A Sacrificial Victim of Ghazwa-e-Hind

Contents

1. Bare Facts & Trajectory of the Case

2. The Murder of #GhazwaVictim & the Mysterious Conduct of

Her Family

3. The Setting of Rasana, the Targeted Village in Kathua District

4. Charges against Shubham Sangra Read Like a Juvenile Crime Thriller

5. Mehbooba Mufti Removes Jammu Team, Brings in Kashmiri Officers

6. PDP Spoon-Fed BBC Report Sets the Template of the Fake Narrative

7. From Shubham Sangra as the Sole Accused to Sanji Ram as the “Mastermind”

8. Reasons for Targeting Rasana Village, Sanji Ram & Deepak Khajuria

SECTION III

Gross Misjudgement

22. Compromised Credentials of the Trial Judge

23. Ignorance & Arrogance of the Judge

24. Crucial Witnesses Dropped & Fake Witnesses Propped Up

25. Reluctant Acquittal of Vishal Jangotra Despite Irrefutable

Evidence

26. Sanji Ram Convicted in Defiance of Verifiable Evidence

27. Hindu Cops of Jammu & Teenager Parvesh Kumar Convicted

on Phoney Evidence

28. Trial & Conviction of Parvesh Kumar: A Violation of the JJ Act

29. Government Supports Mohammad Yousuf ’s Noxious Appeal

SECTION IV

The Wheel of Karma

30. Nemesis Strikes Mehbooba Mufti & Other Culprits

31. The Kathua Case Meltdown An Update as of October 2022

32. Tragic Consequences of Hindu Dhimmitude

Section I

The Kathua Conspiracy

&

The Bizarre Charge Sheet

CHAPTER 4

Charges against Shubham Sangra Read Like a Juvenile Crime Thriller

A minor named Shubham Sangra from a poor working-class family was the first to be taken into police custody after the recovery of #GhazwaVictim’s body. He was “arrested” on January 19, two days after her body was claimed to have been found in a culvert beside a pathway in Rasana hamlet. Shubham Sangra is Sanji Ram’s nephew (sister’s son), and had come to live with Sanji Ram’s family about three months prior to #GhazwaVictim’s murder. His father works as a peon in a higher secondary school and his mother is a housewife. Shubham’s family lives in Ward No. 10, Hiranagar, Kathua district.

As per his birth as well as school certificates, Shubham was a minor at the time of #GhazwaVictim’s murder. Therefore, he is referred to as a “juvenile” or “JCL” in the charge sheet. However, during the trial, the police raised doubts about his age and insisted that he be tried as an adult, despite the fact that there was no provision in the J&K Criminal Procedure Code, also known as the Ranbir Penal Code, to try a minor as an adult. The J&K Assembly had not passed or adopted an amendment in the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), which is necessary to apply such a provision to the law in J&K. Shubham’s trial as an adult was, therefore, against the law.

Soon after Shubham’s arrest, the police claimed they had “cracked” the case and that the “juvenile” had confessed to committing the crime. The reason for the arrest, as mentioned by Sub-Inspector Anand Dutta, is that the team came to know the following facts from Head Constable Tilak Raj. As discussed in Chapter 27, SI Dutta did not have any role in the investigation of this case since he was the officiating SHO there for just one day—on January 11, 2018. Therefore, it is likely that these statements were also coerced out of him by the crime branch, which later implicated him as one of the eight accused in the murder of #GhazwaVictim:

One young boy namely Shubham Sangra who is a resident of Hiranagar and is presently putting up in the house of his maternal uncle Sanji Ram located at village Rasana who is an addict and rusticated from Hiranagar school whose maternal uncle’s house lies near Rasana forest where A**fa was seen last time on 10-1- 2018. On the basis of this suspicion the said Shubham Sangra was brought to the police station Hiranagar for interrogation on 19.01.2018. [Statement of SI Anand Dutta under Section 161, CrPC, pp. 303–304.]

This suspicion was allegedly fed to SI Dutta by HC Tilak Raj. Should a police sub-inspector blindly accept a head constable’s suspicion as truth, without even asking him for the rationale behind such an accusation, before implicating a person in a heinous crime? No real evidence is presented in the charge sheet, or in any other form, that points to Shubham as a suspect. He is charged solely on the basis of his “confession” while in police custody. Firstly, a “confession” extracted from a person while in police custody is always suspect because such confessions are routinely extracted through third-degree torture. That is why, courts are not supposed to admit confessions extracted by the police as “concrete evidence.” Instead, they require corroboration.

Moreover, in this instance, the circumstantial evidence cited by the police trashes their own case because, within days of arresting Shubham, the new SIT roped in seven others as accused for the same crime. This is discussed in detail in the following chapters. In fact, subsequent events proved that the police were looking for a soft target which would help them reach their primary targets—Sanji Ram and Deepak Khajuria. That is why a highly misleading story about Shubham being a drug addict and a hooligan was added to the “clinching evidence” of his roguery—apparently confirmed by the fact that he was suspended from his school. SI Dutta also stated the following when Shubham was brought in for questioning:

He confessed that on 10.01.2018, he took a Bakarwal girl along with him in Rasana forest during daytime and took her to his maternal uncle’s shed located at Rasana village in the evening where he tied her hands, feet and mouth and locked her inside the shed and left. [Statement of SI Anand Dutta under Section 161, CrPC, pp. 303–304.]

The very idea that a minor Hindu boy would dare abduct a Muslim girl in a politically volatile region like J&K is absurd beyond belief. Both the Bakarwals and the Gujjars are feared by the Hindus. A large section of the Muslims of J&K has been on the warpath against the Indian state as well as the Hindu community, and the administration under Muslim leaders of every hue who ruled J&K has been brazenly anti-Hindu from the very start. In such a situation, after 1947, the Dogras have been forced to accept second-class status and survive as a timid community.

The J&K Crime Branch took two months to prepare a charge sheet after taking Shubham into custody. It is noteworthy that the first recorded statement of Shubham before M. Suleman Choudhary, IPS (JK: 2007), senior superintendent of police (SSP), Kathua, on January 19, 2018, and reproduced in detail in the following pages, contains no mention of Sanji Ram or any other person as partners in crime. It pins the entire burden of the crime on Shubham alone. Soon after making Shubham’s alleged statement public, the police declared they had cracked the case. M. Suleman Choudhary was transferred from Kathua (vide J&K Government Order No. 536-Home of 2018 dated April 21, 2018) and posted at the police headquarters at Jammu in a relatively unimportant post for an IPS officer. According to sources within J&K Police, this IPS officer, the son of a judge, was humiliated with this “punishment posting.” Is it because he did not agree to bend beyond a point in cooking-up an outrageous fake narrative on the murder of #GhazwaVictim, after having booked Shubham on the basis of a cheap, filmy script?

Version 1 of Shubham’s role: Pages 1–3 of the charge sheet provide Version 1 of the crime. It reads like the script of a fourth-rate Bollywood thriller—a product of infantile fantasy. Starting on page 4, an altogether new version is presented. This version is even more bizarre and laughable than the previous one. Neither of the two can hold in any court of law, where the judge is committed to a fair trial. Even a person lacking any knowledge of legal intricacies would find it hard to swallow either of these fantasy tales. I invite readers to read the narrative presented in the charge sheet and judge for themselves:

During investigation conducted by P/S Hiranagar one individual namely Shubham Sangra S/O Om Prakash R/O Hiranagar, Ward No. 10, A/P Rasana, residing with his maternal uncle Sanji Ram in village Rasana, was taken to police station Hiranagar for questioning. During questioning he divulged that his father is working as a peon in Hr. Sec. School Chagral and his mother is a housewife. He further divulged that he used to take alcohol, cigarettes, gutka and other intoxicants and had been expelled from Modern Public School Sikdi Hiranagar, because of his unruly behaviour with girls of his school. Fed up with his conduct the family shifted him to the house of his maternal uncle, some three months back, where he used to take care of their cattle by getting leaves, etc from the nearby forests. In the forests he had met a girl of Bakarwal community 7/8 times and most of the times she used to enquire about the whereabouts of her horses which she usually would take to the forest for grazing.

On 10-01-2018, the same Bakarwal girl met him in the forest area near a Bahari Balish tree and he asked her to accompany him on the assurance that he would help her in tracing out her missing horses. Around 1830 hrs he took her to a shed of his maternal uncle meant for keeping the cattle where he gagged her with a handkerchief and also tied her hands with a rope which was already lying in the shed.

He further divulged that he took out the drawstring (Nara) from her trouser and tied up her legs with the same. Thereafter, he locked the door of the shed and proceeded to his home. After an hour he took some meals for her secretly and on reaching the shed un-gagged her and made her to eat the food that he had brought for her. Next he again gagged her with the same handkerchief, locked the shed again and went home. He continued doing the same till 16-01-2018. [Charge sheet, p. 3.]

The above account makes it clear that Shubham’s track record as an indifferent student who allegedly got into trouble for being poor in his studies, and getting into occasional quarrels with his classmates at school, proved a convenient peg to hang whatever crimes the J&K Police wanted to attribute to him. Sanji Ram’s elder daughter Madhu Sharma told me the following when I interviewed her for this book:

They have fabricated a whole story that Shubham was some kind of criminal. True, he had started smoking cigarettes, which got his parents very upset. True, he had a fight with a boy in school due to which he was suspended. Most young boys quarrel with each other during their school days, but that doesn’t turn them into rapists and murderers!

Absurdity of the cowshed being the site of captivity: Monika Sharma, Sanji Ram’s younger daughter, further nails the absurdity of this narrative when she told me:

What kind of brains do the J&K Police have? How could Shubham have kept the girl in the cowshed that is in the middle of the village and where Rasana residents go in and out all day long? When one of the local reporters, Vinod Kumar, published a story challenging the veracity of the cowshed story, saying there was no way A**fa could have stayed hidden in that place, they then cooked up the devasthan story.

Even a cursory visit to the village would convince anyone that Monika is right. Rasana village has fifteen households in a row, on the left side of the narrow road that branches off at Kathua from National Highway 44. All the dwellings in Rasana share boundary walls with each other. It is a close-knit community because most of the families are related to each other. A small plot of land used for keeping cattle has half a dozen cowsheds. It is situated opposite to the row of houses in the middle of the village and not in an isolated spot outside the hamlet. Those in Rasana who own buffaloes or cows, tie their animals in this common plot. If #GhazwaVictim had been held captive in this cowshed, which is not an abandoned structure but one that is in regular, daily use by several families, the families owning those cattle would have noticed her presence, since they come to feed and milk their animals at least twice daily. Therefore, a girl being kept confined there for six long days could not possibly have gone unnoticed. But the J&K Police Crime Branch would have us believe that no one noticed that a young girl, with her hands and legs tied with her salwar string, had been kept confined in one of the sheds!