The muddy, uneven path leading up to the home of the “Walayar mother” – as she is referred to in the local media – cuts through a largely arid desolate area with long, dry grasses and weeds on both sides, not far from the Walayar highway toll plaza on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border.
It was on the afternoon of January 13, 2017, a regular day when both parents were out for work at a construction site, the body of the 13-year-old was found in the asbestos-roofed small brick shed in which the family lived. The house beside it was under-construction at the time. While the postmortem report indicated that she was sexually assaulted, the police failed to make much headway in the case. On March 4 that year, the girl’s nine-year-old sister was also discovered in the same manner. The suspicious back-to-back deaths of the two sisters and the subsequent confirmation that both of them were raped repeatedly triggered widespread outrage and kicked up a major furore in Kerala.
The then Left Democratic Front (LDF) government handed over the probe to an SIT led by then Narcotic deputy superintendent of police MJ Sojan whose team arrested four men, two of whom were close relatives of the victim’s mother, and a minor, charging them with rape and sexual offences under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act, 2012. The Sojan-led police swiftly concluded that both girls died by suicide unable to bear the sexual assaults and harassment by the accused. However, the girls’ parents countered the police claim and maintained that they were murdered by those who sexually assaulted them. For this, they mainly relied on the younger girl’s testimony, registered before she met with same circumstances, to the police that she had seen two masked men leave the shed minutes before her sister’s death.
While hearing the case, the special Pocso court in Palakkad in 2019 observed, “…it is clear that prosecution evidence is insufficient to complete the chain of circumstances unerringly pointing towards the guilt of the accused.” The girls’ family and the civil society in Kerala were stunned as the accused walked free.
The sensational case then underwent several twists and turns as the family and the state approached the high court against the acquittal. In January 2021, a division bench of the HC set aside the trial court ruling and ordered a retrial. Two months later, the HC allowed the petition of the girls’ mother for a probe by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In August 2022, the charge sheet submitted by the CBI team under DySP Ananthakrishnan, arraigning the same accused and concluding that the girls died by suicide, was dismissed by the Palakkad sessions court citing that it was a “carbon copy” of the police charge sheet. In November that year, a new CBI team under DySP VS Uma began a fresh probe.
This year in January, the CBI filed its charge sheets before a special court in Ernakulam. It named the mother and father as accused 2 and 3 respectively for allegedly abetting the first accused to commit penetrative sexual assault on the elder child by providing him free access to their one-room shed. He is a relative of the mother. The parents were also arraigned under provisions of the Pocso Act for the “illegal omission” of not reporting to the police despite witnessing the first accused sexually assault the victim in April 2016.
The CBI formally filed a report in the CBI court in Kochi on March 5, including the cases in which the two of the accused have died. This was the first time the central agency sought to arraign the parents in the court. The next hearing in the case is on March 25 when the court will decide whether to issue summons to the parents.
And thus, eight years on, while justice has still eluded the two Dalit minor girls, their parents have now been accused in the sexual assault case and eventual deaths.
Meanwhile, the girls’ mother, when asked about the CBI implicating the parents, remained unperturbed. “For me, this is not greater than the pain I suffered when I lost my girls. When we hear that we are being implicated in the case, we are led to believe that there is politics behind it. Even a central agency like CBI is trying to protect the real accused possibly because they are important and powerful. It is a ploy to quieten us,” she told HT.
What CBI charge sheets say
Like the police before it, the CBI also ruled out homicidal hanging and found with the help of forensic reports that the two girls took their own lives after suffering sexual abuse from the accused which was abetted by their parents.
The CBI unit has not named any new accused, apart from the parents, in its six charge sheets filed before the Ernakulam court. Bodies of two of the original four adult accused were found in separate places in 2020 and 2023 respectively and their deaths were confirmed as suicides by the local police.
The central agency, citing witnesses, claimed that the parents used to regularly entertain one of the accused with liquor on weekends and holidays in the one-room shed, helping him gain access to the minor girls. It accused the parents of not informing the police even after witnessing the first accused “outrage the modesty” of the elder daughter on two occasions in April 2016. The parents, it said, did not raise any suspicions about the death of the elder daughter on the day she died and gave a statement to the police about him only 10 days later.
The acts are an “illegal omission and wilful concealment of a material fact” which the parents were bound to disclose, the agency said.
The mother also destroyed crucial evidence by burning the dresses, books and school bags of the elder child, the agency said, calling it “highly unusual”.
“The victim along with her elder sister was exposed to be raped and sexually assaulted by the first accused due to the wilful negligence of the mother and stepfather of the child,” the CBI alleged.
In the charge sheet against the fourth accused, the CBI claimed that he was acquainted with the parents while working in the construction field. It said that he stayed with the parents and their three children in the one-room shed “for about three years”, calling it unusual for someone who had no relations with the family to stay there. The agency accused him of sexually assaulting the girls as he had free access to the minor girls by staying in the same shed even when the parents were out at work.
The parents, by wilfully abetting the main accused to commit rape on the minor girls, will attract the same serious charges that the main accused face. They include sections 17 r/w 16 (abetment of offence and punishment to abetment) of Pocso Act, section 109 r/w 376 of IPC (abetment and rape), section 201 of IPC (destruction of evidence), section 75 (punishment for cruelty to children) under the JJ Act among other offences.
An official close to CBI said, “The parents cannot feign ignorance of the law. It is inexcusable. They will be equally held liable as the main accused who raped the girls as they facilitated the commission of the crime. We have evidence and witnesses to back the claims.”
Voices against CBI charge sheets
The girls’ mother has countered the CBI’s findings on the question of whether she failed to provide a safe environment for her daughters and her association with the accused.
“We lived in a one-room thatched shed all these years and everyone knows how we struggled to live in it. As parents, we have tried to make them (daughters) feel as safe as possible. We struggled and worked hard to build the concrete house. The panchayat gave only ₹2 lakh as initial funding and we found the rest through our daily wages as construction workers. If we were hosting drinking parties and enjoying every week as they claim, would we have been able to build such a house out of our meagre earnings? It’s an attempt to defame us,” she asked.
She rejected the accusation that she and her husband abetted the main accused to assault the girls. At the same time, the mother said she had confronted one of the accused after her husband witnessed him behaving inappropriately with the elder girl.
“It was in March 2016 when he came looking for the girls’ father at the shed. At the time, my husband’s leg was injured and he couldn’t walk around. That day, he told me that he saw him pinning our elder daughter to the wall and covering her mouth inside the under-construction house. When my husband shouted at him, he ran away. When I heard this, I went to his house and slapped him. I told him to stay away from my daughter and threatened to tell the police. At the time, he and other family members begged me not to press charges as it would hurt the prospects of his two unmarried sisters. Thinking about them and my daughters, I chose not to take further action,” said the mother.
She claimed that she was not aware of her daughters’ sexual assault until the findings came in the postmortem report. She said she informed the police about his likely involvement on the night of the death of the elder girl.
“Since there was a past history, I told the police about him. They arrested him that night but then released him on bail hours later under pressure from CPI(M) local leaders. Two of the accused were active party workers,” she said, adding that the police even delayed giving the family copies of the postmortem report of the elder child.
“I got the autopsy of the elder child only after the death of the younger child. They deliberately delayed it. An officer at the station mocked me for being illiterate. He asked what was the use of the report when I didn’t know how to read,” the mother said.
Salil Lal, convenor of an action council formed in 2020 to fight for justice for the victims, pointed to the high court’s observations in 2021 on the victim’s social background vis-a-vis the CBI’s accusation against them.
“The HC observed that the parents did not inform the matter to anyone apprehending a blemish on the teenager. It said that the Pocso trial judge did not consider the acceptability of this version especially since the family was from a socially and economically backward background. Moreover, the police submitted conflicting statements about the parents seeing the accused assault the girl. The police added more ornamentation to the statements of the family and it was dismissed by the trial court,” said Lal.
The action council, he said, believes with all conviction that there was “an organised racket” in Walayar through which young girls were abused at the hands of prominent people. He said their explicit photos and videos would be shared leading them to be blackmailed.
“In our research, we found that there were 45 Pocso cases in Walayar police station within three years. There’s very little conviction. Even historically, there has been a trend of young girls, often minors, being abused in these areas and the police turning a blind eye. In this case too, the police and CBI have never explored the homicide angle despite evidence,” Lal said.
“The younger child’s testimony that she had seen two masked men leave the shed after her sister’s death was portrayed as her hallucination by the investigative agencies. The postmortem observation of the younger child that the homicide angle must be ruled out by the police was also not looked into extensively. So, it’s clear that they want to shut down the case as suicides and book the parents too,” he added.
However, Raymant Antony, an activist in Palakkad town who runs a spare parts shop, said: “In my independent research, I was able to find that there were gruesome lapses on the part of the parents in protecting the two girls. These are backed by testimonies from the extended family of the mother and others in the area. I am not trying to cast aspersions on the character of the mother, but if those lapses contributed to the deaths of the children, they must be probed too. The CBI’s findings now are consistent with what I believe.”
Advocate Jalaja Madhavan, who was the special public prosecutor in the case in the trial case for just over two months, said the CBI’s charges against the parents appeared to be aimed merely at “character-assassination” of the mother and ignoring the social realities.
“I am sure that those charges will not stand in court. The parents were both daily-wagers in the construction field and if they stayed at home to look after their children full-time, they wouldn’t be able to earn a living. Their social background must be acknowledged. Despite evidence pointing to the possibility of murder, the police and CBI have not probed it fully. Instead, they are out to prove that the mother is immortal. It’s wrong,” she said.
