In Rajasthan, a frame-up most foul

Nearly three years after Komal Lodha, a young farm labourer, was sentenced to death by a trial court for the rape and murder of a tribal child in his village, the Rajasthan High Court has found that he was wrongfully prosecuted in the case. Abhinay Lakshman reports on the police investigation that led to the conviction

On the evening of July 27, 2018, Naina (7) told her parents that she was going to a store close to their home in Rajasthan’s Mogyabeh village in Jhalawar district. She disappeared into the dusk. It was around the same time that Komal Lodha (then 17) was being served dinner at his home, his mother says. The next day, Naina was found 500 metres from her home — raped and murdered — and Lodha was arrested for her killing. He was convicted and sentenced to death by a trial court within a year of the incident.

Four years later, the State Police have been forced to reopen the investigation into Naina’s death and start from scratch after the Rajasthan High Court found that the DNA evidence in the case absolved Lodha and that he had been wrongfully prosecuted by the police.

As 21-year-old Lodha waits in a Kota jail for his conviction to be overturned, the residents of Mogyabeh, numbering less than 1,000, are clueless, just like the police, about who could have killed the tribal girl. But unlike the police, they refuse to believe that someone from their village could have murdered her. The villagers say they believed Lodha was involved only because the police had insisted that they had “test results” that pointed to his involvement. Today, despite the High Court’s finding, some still hold Lodha responsible, while others are confused.

The men in the village recall how the police had arrived at their conclusion within hours of finding Naina’s body. “They stormed the village after the girl was found. The police called for every man aged 18 to 50, gathered us all at the government school here and started stripping us down. They checked our private parts for signs of injuries. Lodha was also there,” recalls 35-year-old Vimal as he lights a bidi in the village square.

Lodha’s older brother, Biramchand Lodha, was also picked up. “They kept saying they needed to identify anyone who was acting ‘nervous’. We were naked and the police kept touching our private parts. As far as I could see, everyone there was nervous,” Biramchand Lodha says.

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Vimal, Biramchand Lodha and at least two other men in the village who describe having been subjected to the same unnerving process say that the police eventually pulled out three or four men from the line of suspects. They allegedly noticed a mark on one of them, Komal Lodha. As per court records, Lodha was arrested on July 28.