Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

This strategy — of choosing not to think about the enormous reservoir of human suffering off which the Indian boom fed — was mostly successful. Wealthy Indians did not spend too much time thinking about the plight of poor Indian workers, anymore than wealthy Americans or Australians did, for the level of remoteness was the same. But there were moments when the feeding frenzy came back to them in unexpected ways.

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The suburb of Noida was conceived during the slum demolitions of the 1970s as a modern extension to the capital that would be able to absorb its population growth and industrial expansion. It lay just across the Yamuna river in the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose chief ministers gradually acquired land for the project and laid out the kind of grid-like structure suited to a rationally planned new town. By the late 1990s, Noida was a fully realised city, bustling with the new middle classes and their flats, offices and shopping malls.

In 2005, migrant labourers living in a slum area of Noida called Nithari began reporting to the police that their children were going missing. The police did not file these reports: these were poor people with no influence, tens or hundreds of thousands of such children were missing across the country and no one was going to spend time trying to track down these ones. Among the Nithari community, however, there were suspicions that some methodical predator was at large, and these suspicions began to close in on a house inhabited by a businessman and his domestic servant. Behind this house was a large drainage ditch, and some were convinced that the remains of the missing children had been dumped there.

In December 2006, two men who had failed to interest the police in the story of their missing daughters approached the head of the local residents’ association, who agreed to accompany them on an inspection of the ditch. As they began clearing out accumulated trash, they found a severed hand and called the police. Over the following days, the police retrieved from the drain evidence of a series of terrible murders: the complete and partial remains of four women, eleven girls and four boys, packed up, mostly, in some forty plastic bags. In the house were found surgical knives and gloves, blood-stained clothes and the school bags of several children. The businessman and his servant were both immediately arrested.

As it happened, a different lead had already led the police to start asking questions of the fifty-two-year-old businessman who lived in the house, Moninder Singh Pandher. Pandher was from a well-connected family in Punjab: he had attended Delhi’s prestigious St Stephen’s College and counted many members of the north Indian elite among his friends. Most people who knew him had only good things to say: he was life-loving and ‘normal’, they said — though his family relations were strained. He was separated from his wife and was entangled in a bitter land dispute with his brother which involved half-a-dozen separate legal cases; the brother’s family, fearful of Pandher’s political influence, had filed complaints to the police about possible abuses of justice that they suspected Pandher might commit.

Pandher lived as a bachelor in Noida, where his house was the venue for various politicians, bureaucrats and policemen to retire for late-night drinking sessions. In addition to this, he frequently invited call girls to his house for what journalists later called ‘orgies’. A woman named Payal had not been seen since one of these assignations. Her concerned father, who received a fee for her services directly from a local madam, and knew about her movements, had alerted the police to Pandher’s possible role in her disappearance. The police had seen that Pandher had spoken to Payal several times a day right up to her disappearance and had questioned him about her on three occasions over the previous six months, even, most recently, searching his house. Later, there was suspicion as to how Pandher had made this investigation go away: was it because the police were themselves involved in — beneficiaries of, even — his patronage of local prostitutes?

As DNA tests linked the recovered human remains to missing Nithari children, residents from the area gathered in large numbers outside Pandher’s house. Parents carried photographs of their dead children. The crowds shouted abuse at the police and bombarded Pandher’s residence with flower pots and bricks, breaking doors and windows. The police realised this was a situation of the greatest sensitivity and they quickly attempted to make up for their past omissions: various policemen were suspended for their failures to respond to complaints, and the drainage ditch was dug up in accordance with the demands of the Nithari residents.

The investigation was handed over by Uttar Pradesh officials to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which followed leads across state lines. They searched Pandher’s properties in Ludhiana and Chandigarh, and re-opened the investigation of a series of child kidnappings in the latter place, which was Pandher’s hometown. Pandher’s well-documented patronage of prostitutes made it seem to some that he might be capable of any kind of perversion, and there was speculation that the mutilated bodies might be the leftovers of a pornography operation of a particularly horrifying kind. Police announcements that they had recovered photographs showing Pandher surrounded by naked children fuelled this speculation. But the children in the — perfectly innocent — photographs were revealed to be Pandher’s grandchildren, and this line of enquiry led nowhere.

But the sheer number of corpses led to the widespread suspicion that this affair centred not on the spasms of perverted desire but on some altogether more systematic, even industrial, enterprise. For many it was evident from the beginning that the remains in the drain were the detritus of a large-scale organ-stealing enterprise. It was discovered that one of Pandher’s neighbours was a doctor who had been accused — though never convicted — of such a trade some years before, and Nithari villagers, for whom organ stealing was a convincing explanation for what had happened, surrounded this second house and pelted it with stones.

Organ stealing was in the air at that time: a year after the Nithari discoveries, and while the trials were still going on, a multimillion-dollar kidney-stealing scheme was uncovered in Gurgaon. Poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh were lured to a private house on the pretext that they would be offered work; when they arrived they were offered money, reportedly Rs 30,000 [$600], for their kidneys. Those who refused were drugged and their kidneys were forcibly removed. These kidneys were then transplanted into wealthy patients from all over the world for a fee of some $50,000. It was later estimated that the racket had been going on for six years, during which time some six hundred transplants had been conducted. The doctor in charge, Amit Kumar, owned a large house on the outskirts of Toronto, where his family pursued the global bourgeois dream: SUV, swimming pool, children at private school. In 2008 he was arrested in Nepal, where he had gone into hiding.

When this latter case hit the Indian newspapers, the residents of Nithari became convinced that there was a connection with their own tragedies. They declared that they had seen Amit Kumar visiting Moninder Singh Pandher on several occasions; they also said that they had seen ambulances parked outside the latter’s house and nurses emerging from inside. It was observed that many body parts were missing from the remains found in the ditch. As one father said, commenting on the remains of his eight-year-old daughter, “They found only the hands, legs and skull of my daughter. What happened to the torso?” 35

The police quickly abandoned the idea that this was an organ-stealing operation. They found enough intact organs to make it unlikely, and they did not feel that the risk and inefficiency of such an operation fitted with Pandher’s highly successful business in heavy machinery. But suspicions of organ-stealing persisted for a long time. It was a story that fitted many people’s picture of the society in which they lived: a rich man with brutal indifference to the personhood of the poor steals their organs to give to people of his own class and to enrich himself. Indian journalists and their readers alike were used to seeking out the financial motive, which they felt was the prime mover in most mysteries. They were often unconvinced by mystical explanations such as psychopathologies, which seemed to them excessively American. It was in this direction, however, that things began to move.