On Thursday, November 23, a judge will hear Chintan Upadhyay’s application for discharge in the case of the murder of his wife Hema Hirani Upadhyay. He has been in jail for nearly two years, and been denied bail despite the flimsiness of evidence against him. A discharge application is a long shot, but when standard methods of securing justice fail, it is reasonable to attempt long shots.
On December 11, 2015, Hema and her lawyer Haresh Bhambani were murdered in a warehouse by Vidyadhar Rajbhar and four associates. Rajbhar worked as a fabricator for artists, and his services had been used by both Hema and Chintan. While the four accomplices were arrested soon after the murder, the ring-leader has not been traced. Without custody of the main culprit, we are left in the dark about the motive behind the killings.
Like most in the art community, I was dumbstruck to hear of the murder. The violence involved was worlds away from the community’s genial spirit. Even as the horror of the news sank in, a thought crossing my mind: “I hope Chintan has nothing to do with it.”
The art connection
I first met the couple in 1998, when they were fresh out of Baroda, graduates of MS University’s famed faculty of fine arts, and I the newly appointed editor of an art magazine. We met at Prithvi Theatre, which used to run an art gallery in its foyer, and was hosting Hema’s debut solo show. A few months later, I visited their home in Vasai, but we never became close friends. Our meetings after that Vasai visit were largely restricted to exhibition openings and after-parties. A few years later, I wrote an unfavourable review of Chintan’s breakthrough exhibition. It angered him, but he took it in his stride and soon returned to his previous cordiality. His paintings and sculptures did extraordinarily well during the art market boom, and Hema flourished in a more internationally-oriented niche. Sadly, even as their careers soared, their marriage broke down.
I recall being upset when she lodged a police complaint about some drawings he had made in his room. At a time when Indian artists fight daily against censorship and threats to their freedom, it was distasteful for an artist to gain leverage in a marital dispute by laying an obscenity charge on her partner. The rational thing would have been to make a fair division of assets and cut off relations. Instead, their divorce battle grew bitter and ugly. All versions of what happened on the day Hema was killed agree on one fact: the bait that drew her and her lawyer to that warehouse was the promise of information that would be embarrassing to Chintan.
No evidence
Having failed to find the main suspect in a case that made headlines across the country, the police had to hang the blame on somebody. It couldn’t be the four dupes they’d caught. Settling on Chintan made sense. He had a diary full of griping about Hema, and though most of the entries were a number of years old, they could supply a plausible-sounding motive. Soon after he was arrested, one of the accomplices, Pradeep Rajbhar, confessed to meeting him in Chembur, in East Bombay, on the evening of December 8, 2015, along with his associates, to plot the murder. It would have been clinching proof, if true.
The problem was that the evidence didn’t stick. Chintan, who had shifted to Delhi during his divorce battle, was in Bombay on December 8, and had travelled to Chembur, but only to meet two close friends who lived there, the artists Vaishali Narkar and Sanjeev Khandekar. The two, who have worked tirelessly for his release, swear he was with them the whole time the plotting was supposed to be in progress.
There were cameras that could have backed up their statements, but the police never asked for that footage. Chintan had taken an Uber cab to Chembur that day and hailed an Ola taxi for his journey back. Had he stopped anywhere during these trips, the halt would have been logged. There was no such stop, and the taxi drivers confirmed the drop-off and pick-up happened at the housing society where he met Narkar and Khandekar.
To make matters worse for the prosecution, the phones of the accused, instead of being in Chembur during the time the meeting was supposed to have been held, were instead in distant spots like Malad. The final straw that broke the back of the police case was a retraction by Pradeep Rajbhar of his confession about the conspiracy. He stated he’d been pressurised into it by the police, who had threatened harm to his family. All that was left of the evidence against Chintan was some angry diary entries and the fact that he knew the main accused well.
Yet, 18 months since Pradeep Rajbhar’s retraction, Chintan Upadhyay is still in jail. If he is responsible for the murder of his estranged wife and her lawyer, he deserves to be there for much longer. But, as matters stand, the police have no believable proof he commissioned the killing, which makes his continued incarceration a travesty.
The tip of the iceberg
Chintan Upadhyay’s ordeal represents more than the unjust jailing of a single individual. It is the tip of the iceberg, one visible case among hundreds of similar or worse injustices that are submerged from our view. If a public figure with substantial resources and dozens of well-connected friends can be held for so long on such tenuous grounds, what hope is there for citizens who posses neither wealth nor powerful networks? Each prominent killing, from the Aarushi Talwar murder, to the Ryan International School incident, reveals the incompetence and brutality of our police forces. Yet, no improvement seems possible for one simple reason: impunity.
Despite the harsh comments the judge made on police procedure while acquitting the Talwars, I doubt if any of the investigators have suffered in any fashion. Unless police officers get sacked for framing innocents, they will keep doing it. A second way to make police liable for falsely implicating citizens is to provide adequate compensation for victims. But the innocent bus conductor Ashok Kumar, framed for Pradyuman Thakur’s murder in Ryan International School before the real killer was discovered, will have to bear with memories of his torture without receiving a rupee in damages.
Each time an innocent person is framed, a guilty man or woman goes unpunished. Somewhere, Aarushi Talwar’s killers are toasting their freedom, as, in all likelihood, is Vidyadhar Rajbhar, the man we know for certain was directly responsible for the deaths of Hema Hirani Upadhyay and Haresh Bhambani.