Absonding Accused, Retraumatised Survivors: A Verdict After 32 Years in Ajmer Serial Rape Case

By Kshitiz Gaur

Ajmer, Rajasthan: She was gangraped at the age of 18, but the verdict in the case came when she turned 50. By then, she was residing alone. Her husband had divorced her. The last time she saw her son was when he was 10 months old. Now he resides in some other country. She manages her food by renting her house, the storeroom of which is her home now.

There were 19 accused in the Ajmer blackmail rape case of May 1992, wherein around 100 school and college-going girls were blackmailed and raped. Eighteen accused were tried in the court, while one is still absconding. A red corner notice has been issued against him. Initially, the gang lured a girl, took her to their farmhouse outside Ajmer, raped her, clicked her naked photos, and forced her to bring her friends with her. The case took a political turn as one of the accused was Nafees Chisty, the then president of Ajmer Youth Congress.

The FIR in the case was registered at Ganj Police Station under sections 292, 254, 376, 120B on May 30, 1992, and later more sections were added. The first chargesheet was filed on September 3, 1992, against Kailash Soni, Harish Tolani, Faharooq Chisty, Ishrat Ali, Moinullahdin alias Sultan Ilahabadi, Pravez Ansari, Naseem alias Tarzan, Purshotam (committed suicide on February 2, 1998), Mahesh Lodhani, Sayeed Anwar Chisty, Shamshu Chisty alias Merodona and Zahoor Chisty. 

The second chargesheet was filed against Nafees Chisty, Naseem Chisty, Iqbal Bhati and Saleem Chisty on June 23, 2001, but they all absconded during the trial. Sohail Chisty, Jameer Hussain and Almas Maharaj alias Babli were absconding from the very first day. Nafees was arrested in 2003, Iqbal in 2005, Saleem and Hussain in 2012, and Sohail in 2018. Thereafter, a third chargesheet was filed in 2018 with the same allegations against Sohail and Hussain and trial was started. Maharaj is still absconding and a red corner notice has been issued against him.

The first verdict came on May 18, 1998, in which 12 accused were sentenced.  The second came on February 1, 2007, in which all were declared absconding. The third verdict came on August 20, 2024, in which the accused who were chargesheeted in 2001 were also sentenced, including two (Sohail and Jameer) who were charged in 2018. 

“In the last trial, 16 victims were called, of which only six reached the court, and three of them turned hostile. The prosecution had to work hard to bring this verdict,” Additional Director of Prosecution Virendra Singh Rathore told 101Reporters. Rathore fought the third trial and secured life imprisonment for the six accused who had absconded.

See Also: 100 girls raped and sexually assaulted for months, some as young as 11. What was the Ajmer Rape Case (1990-1992) About?

Rathore said that the team of prosecution worked day and night. “As for the first verdict of 1998, the Supreme Court on December 22, 2003, reduced the sentence of four accused to 10 years and reverted the sentence of one accused to the lower court.”

According to Rathore, the major task was to bring the victims to court as now those rape survivors have become mothers and grandmothers. “They did not want to be identified as rape survivors of the 1992 Ajmer blackmail scandal, and therefore they had to be called and re-called, convinced, and brought one by one to the court to record their statements,” he said.

Rathore added that 32 rape survivors were identified in 1992, but only 16 could be retraced for the third trial and the police could reach only six of them. “They did not want to re-appear in the court fearing that they will be identified, though it was an in-camera proceeding. Police had the task to convince the 16 identified victims to reach the court. However, only six could be convinced, and three of them later turned hostile.”

“The difference between the two previous trials and the third trial was that it started after 30 years, which means we had to start a search for witnesses and recreate the scene of crime again in the court with the same evidence such as bed sheets, DNA reports, medical reports etc.”

“The rape survivors who came to record their statements were brave. It was painful for them to narrate their stories repeatedly when those accused were standing in front of them smiling,” he added.

Rathore could have appointed any other prosecutor in this case, but being the additional director of prosecution, he took up the case himself. “I belong to Ajmer. At the time of this incident, I was a law student and knew about it... The two trials were managed by the previous public prosecutors and when the third trial was initiated by the court, the file was transferred to me…When the verdict came, I felt that the aim of my life was completed by delivering justice that was so hard to come.” 

Dalbir Singh Fojdar, the then station house officer of Dargah Police Station and now posted in Jaipur, told 101Reporters, “It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that summons were issued. Prosecution directed that we bring these witnesses to the court. Their addresses had changed, but I along with a special team started tracking them down. At last, we found some of them. Police protection was given for them to reach the court,” Fojdar recalled.

He further said, “It was like working hard to provide justice to those rape survivors. When we identified them as witnesses, one of them said that she is not the one whom police were looking for and that her name was not tallying with the one mentioned in the summons.” 

Recalling another incident, Fojdar added, “We reached the house of one of the witnesses in Jaipur in plain clothes and her granddaughter opened the doors of the house for us. Her daughter-in-law brought us water to drink, and asked the reason for our arrival. We told her that long ago, her mother-in-law had lost her money purse and now we have found it, so we wanted to talk to her. When the rape survivor came and we stated the real reason, she started crying with folded hands and pleaded us to not destroy her family.”

Quoting one of the rape survivor’s words, Fojdar said it was like a panic attack for her. “She told me that she feared the in-laws of her daughter would come to know about the case. However, she gathered courage because she wanted the accused to be punished,” he said.

See Also: Karnataka : CBI court acquits accused college student rape, murder case after 11 years

Rathore said it was of utmost importance that the identity of victims remained a secret, considering the social stigma involved. “Rape survivors had to come to court to register their statement a third time because the advocate of the accused wanted to cross examine them, and without that the statement is not maintainable… The law says that the testimony of the witness should be in front of the accused so that their advocate can cross them to get the truth before the court.”

Rathore added that it is not a flaw in the law or its process, but technicalities that the accused wanted to take advantage of. “We had to bring again and again those bed sheets and pillows that the police seized after registering the FIR on May 30, 1992,” added Rathore. 

On the issue of the accused absconding, he said that according to police and law agencies, some devotees of Ajmer dargah had helped the accused by arranging hideouts at different places. 

In his order sentencing eight accused to life imprisonment, Ranjan Singh, Special Judge of the designated POCSO court number 2 of Ajmer, kept the provision to compensate the victims and directed the District Legal Services Authority to deposit Rs 7 lakh in the bank accounts of each victim in the case within 30 days. The judge, in his order, said, “Though the pain of the victims in this case will not end, some pain will be subsided.”

The court also imposed a penalty of Rs 5 lakh on each accused, “so that the fear in the people and in the society related to such types of crimes is eliminated and those related persons or any people in the society have faith in the judicial process.”

This article was originally published in 101 Reporters under Creative Common license. Read the original article.

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