Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunetra Choudhury

Author:Sunetra Choudhury [Choudhury, Sunetra]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B07ZJ3G8CS
Publisher: Roli Books
Published: 2019-11-06T18:30:00+00:00

THE MEN WHO KILLED INDIRA GANDHI

B illa and Ranga in 1982, Maqbool Butt in 1984, Kartar and Ujagar Singh in 1985, Satwant and Kehar Singh in 1989, and finally, Afzal Guru in 2013. This is the roll call of the hanged men that provide the most morbid highlights of my career, ensuring that they and I will always be inextricably linked. If I reflect upon these cases one by one, I can see evolving trends or patterns that are very recognizable in our society today. The sadistic duo of Billa and Ranga forever robbed Delhi of the innocent belief that young women and children could move freely without fear on its streets. Butt, the separatist anti-national, terrified the State so much that they removed all traces of him, even his last words. In the case of Kartar and Ujagar Singh, it showed how our justice system favoured the rich and powerful. All of these cases became leitmotifs for crime and punishment in India.

Justice Kochchar was a visibly distressed man when he signed the black warrants for the two brothers – Kartar and Ujagar Singh. I was the one who had to collect the warrant from him and it was apparent that he had misgivings. The two men were very poor, so poor that they could not even afford decent counsel. The two had been hired by Dr. Narendra Singh Jain (who was the personal eye surgeon to the then president, Dr. V.V. Giri) for only Rs 500 to murder his wife, Vidya. The murder was planned by Dr. Jain and his co-conspirator Chandresh Sharma, who was his secretary as well as lover. The two had worked together but their affair had been discovered by Vidya who had then got Chandresh fired. Dr. Jain with his paramour then made an elaborate plan to get rid of Vidya.

On 4 December 1973 as Dr. Jain and Vidya were leaving their home in posh Defence Colony in south Delhi, Chandresh, who was waiting nearby, signalled to the two hitmen to attack Vidya. While Kartar pinned her down, Ujagar used a knife to stab her 14 times, killing her almost instantly. The entire plot was soon unravelled by the prosecution because there were so many holes in the case. There was no apparent motive for the attack on Vidya. Why did Dr. Jain not raise an alarm when the killers attacked his wife? Why was he spared? The details of this case shocked us all but what was particularly strange is that the trial court’s life sentence for all the accused was amended by the high court, which gave the death sentence only to the hitmen and spared Chandresh and Dr. Jain, who were sentenced to life imprisonment instead.

It was apparent that Kartar and Ujagar, who spent their time peacefully in jail, doing mundane work such as carpentry, knew why they had met their fate while the others had got away. In their late fifties, they told me, ‘If we had a good lawyer representing us, this wouldn’t have happened.

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