A three-month pregnant woman with a speech and hearing disability was gangraped in a moving vehicle in the Capital in 2005. He is the man who claims he was witch-hunted for that rape he never committed and sent to jail for four horrifying years before being acquitted of all charges. His account of torture in the police station first and then at Tihar is spine chilling. Niranjan Kumar Mandal's acquittal and his demand for a Rs 4.6 crore compensation from the Government have brought the 2005 infamous Mayapuri gangrape case back into sharp focus. The real culprits, by the way, are yet to be caught. Deebashree Mohanty meets the man who insists the system should pay for destroying his life and family for no fault of his

Afer gang raping her for more than six hours in a moving white Maruti car, the three rapists dumped her in an area where waste and excreta is disposed. She lay there for an hour, writhing in pain, unable to move and wondering whether her baby was still alive inside her.

“Today, six years after the incident, Reena (name changed) has disappeared from the Capital. Her husband left her immediately after the horrific incident. She came under our care and gave birth to her husband’s child six month’s after the rape. She eventually left with her uncle for her native village. We don’t know how she is now,” Vandana Singh from the NGO Home for Women, Delhi, tells you. Reena spent over a year with this NGO, recovering from the trauma of being raped.

But while at the NGO, Reena could not get over the pain of the incident and the humiliation of her husband leaving her because of it. She was an orphan who met Raju and fell in love. “From what she told us, Raju was very excited about her pregnancy and had promised to look for a better job to provide well for the family. But after she was raped and found lying naked in a pool of blood, Raju couldn’t accept her. He left her when she was hurting the most. ‘Woh uss din gaya kaam par... phir wapas nahin aaya...’ is all that Reena told us,” Singh says.

After Reena left, her uncle would occasionally call to find out about how her case was progressing in court and if the culprits were behind bars. But now, eighth years hence, even that has stopped.

If Reena was the hapless victim of the infamous Mayapuri gangrape case of 2005, Niranjan Kumar Mandal claims to have become a hapless victim of a falsely implication in this high-profile case. Mandal, who has since been acquitted by the court and deemed innocent, says he was forced to go through hell for four years in his prime because of a “police witch-hunt”. If Reena suffered due to her husband leaving her, Mandal has been in trauma of losing his only son who walked away into oblivion to escape the stigma of his father being accused of rape.

Mandal’s wife was pregnant when he was in jail and had a very difficult pregnancy due to the stress. Mandal has now returned home after a four-year stint in jail for a crime he did not commit. His daughter hates him, his neighbours have boycotted his family and there was a time when even his wife doubted his character.

Sant Nagar’s Saraswati Mandal says her family will never recover from that one wrong arrest made on the night of January 17, 2006. “It was like any other day. We were having dinner. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door and my husband got up to answer the call. He never came back to finish his meal. The men took him away and it was only after four days that I found out that he was in the Hari Nagar police station, and was being suspected in the Mayapuri gangrape case. I had no idea he would not be back home for the next many years,” Saraswati, then expecting her third child, recalls from her hospital bed where she is currently being treated for a uterine infection. A major surgery awaits her, but she is happy that her husband is finally free from all charges and the accompanying torture. Their eldest son (Ajay), however, has been missing since 2006 and all efforts to find him have failed.

“Ajay was a bright student who passed out from Shaheed Bhagat Singh college with a distinction in Commerce. When his father was picked up, he had just got a job offer from Singapore. But none of our neighbours was willing to testify for his passport verification. He lost that chance and left home in sheer disgust. We have no idea where he is and if he is alive,” Saraswati says, adding that she has no tears to shed now.

As a lab technician, Mandal was doing well for himself when this tragedy befell his family. He had opened many collection centres in and around Bawana, including a small one in Hari Nagar. With a decent income, he bought a small one-room set in Sant Nagar for Rs 3 lakh. He sold some of his ancestral land in the village to open centres around his home. But all this changed in no time.

“I was closing shop early one day when I saw a few local goons passing lewd comments on a girl. She looked harassed, so I decided to step in. That was my big mistake something I will regret for the rest of my life. She told me that the boys had been trying to get fresh with her for a long time. I took her to the Hari Nagar police station to report the matter. But the cops there started abusing me and blamed me for the girl’s condition. I lost my temper and abused them. They let the girl go but warned me. ‘We will get back’, one of them said. And they did so in a big way,” Mandal says, insisting that he was ‘picked up’ for the Mayapuri gangrape case in retaliation to that day.

His lawyer Wills Mathews says that both vengeance and pressure led to the arrest of his innocent client. “As a criminal lawyer, I have seen many such cases in which the cops come under tremendous pressure to land results. In their hurry, they often pick up the wrong guy. In the Mayapuri gangrape case that’s what happened. The police had no leads for 70 hours after the incident. The pressure was piling up and they were on the lookout for an ideal prey. The prosecution had no evidence to prove that my client Niranjan was anywhere near the place of the incident (when it happened). They couldn’t even prove that he had any connection with the other accused. When Reena failed to identify Mandal in the identification parade, I knew the case was wide open,” Mathews says.

On his lawyer’s advice, Mandal has now filed for a Government compensation of Rs 4.6 crore for mental and physical torture endured in the jail and at the police station. While Mathews and Mandal speak openly about alleged police callousness, Government Counselor, Anjum Javed feels the cops were merely doing their duty and the compensation they were seeking would never be granted.

“Mandal was acquitted for lack of evidence. The police had taken him in for questioning because they believed he was involved in the crime. Also, Mandal had some connection with key accused Ram Kumar which the cops established by tracing cell phone call records. It is unfortunate what happened to him in Tihar Jail and at the police station. But you can’t blame the police for doing their duty,” Javed insists.

For Mandal, however, the torture he endured and the suffering his family has been subjected to are enough grounds for compensation. “The torture and humiliation began when they dragged me to the Hari Nagar police station and kept me in the lock-up for four days. In the interim, no one bothered to inform my pregnant wife and when she came looking for me, one of the constables told her that I had been released three days earlier. All this while, I was lying unconscious in the lock-up due to the torture. After stripping me down to my underwear, the constables took turns in beating me up. They pinned by legs apart and the woman SHO would use a stick on my private parts till I numbed in pain. This happened at least 13 times in one night. I was denied food or water and when I pleaded for water, they told me to drink my urine.

“The SHO made me sign on 15 sheets of blank paper and took my fingerprints which were later implanted on the crime scene,” Mandal says, adding that during all this, he was not even informed about why he had been picked up in the first place. “I thought they were beating me for the previous encounter I had had with them. I had no idea that a brutal gangrape had happened in Mayapuri,” he tells you.

What he says he suffered at the police station was just the beginning of endless trauma. “I was accused of having a connection with rape accused Ram Kumar but I met him for the very first time in court when our case came in for hearing. The police said that Kumar had gifted me a mobile phone and that we were in constant touch. But I have the receipt of the shop from where I bought my phone. I was not even allowed to speak for my innocence in court. I was thrown into Tihar Jail as an undertrial. That was when my wife abandoned me for a while, thinking I was guilty of rape. I was all alone, facing the inmates,” Mandal, who spent four years in the jail, recalls.

While he was in jail, his family could not sustain themselves. Bills were not getting paid, the tuition fees of both my children was long overdue. Neighbours and relatives started misbehaving with them and to top it all, tragedies came visiting. “First my father passed away due to heart attack and then my father-in-law. Just months after I was thrown into Tihar, my brother-in-law, who retired from the Indian Army, died of a brain haemorrhage. He had visited me in jail and promised to hire the best lawyers to see me through. With his death, all hopes of ever getting free were gone. That is when I decided to end my life,” Mandal says.

According to his lawyer, Mandal tried to commit suicide at least five times in jail. Each time it was a narrow escape. A stout man of 96 kg, after the first year of imprisonment weighed only 46.

When Mandal was dealing with his physical sufferings in jail, his son was harassed by friends and classmates who taunted him about his father’s involvement in a rape case. His job came and went, the family situation deteriorated and there was a time when Saraswati contemplated selling the house to pay for a good lawyer. All this was too much for Ajay who decided it was best to just go away.

“He would never ever be late. So, the night he did not return, I was scared. I thought he had been murdered or killed in a road accident. There was no news of him for weeks. I filed a missing person report and even went looking for him in the morgue. There was no trace of him anywhere. We have searched for him in all possible places. He was not an irresponsible boy. I don’t know where he went away,” his 49-year-old mother says.

Mandal was not informed about the disappearance of his son because his family didn’t want him to get more traumatised than he already was. By the end of the second year in jail, however, he became a nervous wreck. “Being beaten up by rival inmates till I bled profusely was as routine as was being made to lick the toilet seat with my tongue,” Mandal recalls.

“The ragging continues as long as the inmates want it to. They don’t care if you die being ragged. There is no point in not agreeing to do what they want you to because they can just beat you to pulp. The jail superintendent always reaches the spot after the fight is over. There is no help coming from authorities. If you have to survive there, you have to fend for yourself. There were two groups in Tihar — one comprised falsely implicated undertrials like me and, the other, hardcore criminals. During my time, there were at least 75 of us who had been falsely implicated in a rape or murder case. One such person had been an undertrial for 12 long years,” he recalls.

Mandal had given up on freedom because no lawyer was willing to fight his case sincerely. “The lawyers I could afford all ended up taking a bribe or returning a favour from the police to show me up in bad light. They would suddenly not appear for the hearing or ask for a date that was not decided on before,” Mandal tells you.

“When the Mayapuri rape victim failed to identify me in the ID parade, I thought I would be free. But the public prosecutor sought another date on grounds that the victim was under immense pressure and thus could not identify me. Six months passed before the next identification was done. She yet again said I was not there during or after the rape. Yet the judge said he was not fully convinced. The next date came after eight months. The torture only increased in jail. I lost all hope of ever getting away. I was tired of washing inmates’ clothes and listening to tales of how they committed a murder or a rape. They used to go into graphic details and were proud of their feat. If you didn’t want to listen to their exploits, they would beat you up,” Mandal says, adding that the innocent, too, have their way of retaliating. They just wait for an opportunity to lash out.

“There was this one incident. When I was at the chemist’s shop in the jail premises, a seasoned criminal had come to get some pills. A group appeared from nowhere. They gagged him and beat him up for five hours. His head was bleeding profusely. The men with the lathis this time were the innocent undertrials,” he tells you.

Tihar Jail spokesperson Sunil, however, refutes all such accounts as figment of imagination. “It is not possible to keep tab of each and every undertrail in Tihar. I do not recollect who Mandal was and I cannot say that the stories he is telling you about of the goings-on inside the jail are true. There is no way to verify his claims,” he says.

Mandal was finally acquitted of all charges by trial court judge IP Verma who found no evidence against him. “For the compensation case, Justice Bharihoke is going to ensure that there is no travesty of justice,” Mathews who is busy preparing for the final stages of the compensation suit, tells you.

As for Justice Bharihoke, he says, “we will take everything into consideration before taking a decision in this case. It is a sensitive matter and we will deal with it accordingly. If Mandal has been harassed and humiliated intentionally, his perpetrators need to be punished. As for the compensation sum, we need to get into the case before talking about it being too much or what part can be paid,” he concludes.

The Mayapuri Gangrape

• Hearing and speech impaired Reena (name changed), who was three months pregnant, was abducted by three men at 4.30 am on July 20, 2005, 500 metres from the Mayapuri police station. She was gangraped in a moving white Maruti car for six hours before being dumped at Keshavpuram

• Reena’s husband, who worked in a factory in Hari Nagar before the incident, left her immediately after the incident

• The Delhi Police came in for scathing criticism by the court, the National Commission of Women and several NGOs for delayed action despite having received a PCR call. The inability of the police to trace the accused came in for intense scrutiny

• The Hari Nagar police station showed reluctance in registering an FIR but had to finally do so due to public furore. The car used in the crime was never recovered

• Mastermind Anil is absconding. Ram Singh and Niranjan Mandal have been acquitted of all charges