Book review: Aarushi

Book: Aarushi

Author: Avirook Sen

Publisher: Penguin

Rs 299

Pages: 302

Many elements of the Aarushi Talwar murder investigations have strained belief. Journalist Avirook Sen's book adds one more to the list. Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, Sen contends, are innocent; that they are in jail today for murdering their daughter and household help Hemraj is because the Ghaziabad district court judge chose to believe the CBI, which deliberately played up and fabricated evidence to prove them guilty, and suppressed those that would have proved otherwise.

Sounds incredible, but Sen makes a very convincing case, basing his narrative on what he saw and heard in court over the two-and-a-half year long trial, and on conversations with nearly everyone involved – he even sussed out the family that employed Hemraj before he came to work for the Talwars. To describe what Sen exposes in Aarushi as miscarriage of justice is understatement. It is far more heinous - a systematic subversion of investigative and legal procedure in order to frame the innocent. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.

Take the case of the purple pillow cover, which was seized from the room of Krishna, dentist Rajesh Talwar's compounder, on June 14, 2008, after a narco analysis test on him and his friends, Rajkumar and Vijay Mondol, indicated they were in the apartment the night of the murders. Aarushi was found with her throat slit in her room in the Delhi suburb of Noida on May 16, 2008, while Hemraj's body was discovered the next day.

The pillow cover was sent to the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad, which found Hemraj's DNA on it - fairly incriminating evidence. But far from playing it up, the information remained buried in CBI papers until it was discovered, quite by chance, by Dinesh Talwar, Rajesh's older brother, in 2011. But when the Talwars filed an affidavit in the Allahabad High Court, amazingly, the CBI lawyers' response was that there had been a typographical error by the CDFD, and the pillow cover with Hemraj's DNA was actually Hemraj's own, recovered from his room, while the one found in Krishna's room was a white one.

The pillow cases, like all evidence, were photographed and packed in sealed covers, which could only be opened on court orders. But, as Sen shows, the two pillow cases had been taken out of their sealed envelopes, captioned with handwritten scraps of paper and photographed again - in absolute violation of the due process. Incredibly, neither the Allahabad High Court nor the Ghaziabad district court judges heeded the grave impropriety, even after the Talwar's lead defence lawyer Tanveer Ahmed Mir, cornered CBI investigating officer A.G.L. Kaul on the issue.

Sen highlights several such improbabilities of the CBI's case against the Talwar couple - how their guilt was presumed by their not being found to grieve much; how a golf club suddenly became the murder weapon though there just wasn't space in the room to swing it that much; that a dentist's scalpel could never have made the deep cuts on the neck that caused the deaths, and so on.

Why were the Talwars framed? It isn't a question that Sen offers a clear answer to except to infer that there was something about Nupur Talwar's impassive reaction to the crushing tragedy that made the police and CBI, the media and viewers, to think she was unaffected, and thus guilty. Sen also implies that the Talwars' seeming poshness and liberal cultural values put up the backs of the lower-middle class, rural police force - so casual things like Aarushi's sleepovers with female friends was made out to be wild orgies. That seems a little far-fetched and points to Sen's biases - after all, his own background would align his sympathies with the Talwars rather than with the investigators or the Ghaziabad court officials. But this is carping. Aarushi is a book that will go down as an incisive and chilling analysis of the ills of modern India's legal justice system.