"Journalist Avirook Sen's book on the double murders of schoolgirl
Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj is a chilling expose of the systematic
subversion of investigative and legal procedure in order to frame the
innocent", says Gargi Gupta:
Many elements of the
Aarushi Talwar murder
investigations have strained belief. Journalist Avirook Sen's book (published by Penguin. HL) 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.........
Aarushi is a book that will go down as an incisive and chilling analysis of the ills of modern India's legal justice system."