Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Both Pandher and his housekeeper and cook, Surender Koli, were interrogated under the influence of a ‘truth serum’. Since these statements were not admissible as evidence, they were not made public. But it seems that both men implicated themselves in the murders, and both were charged. The media engaged in endless speculation as to the nature of the relationship between the two men. How extraordinary, that two serial killers should find each other in this manner! A psychiatrist from Chennai commented, “In this case, it is probably coincidence, where an ordinary employer — employee relationship developed into a mutually beneficial one. The affluent one with the power and confidence to blatantly express himself, and the other, also with poor scruples and a dark side to match his master’s, and who got the chance to find a dangerous outlet.” 36Stories went like this: Koli was given the responsibility of fulfilling Pandher’s insatiable need for sex with poor and powerless women and girls. He went out to look for anyone he could find and brought them home. After Pandher had finished with them, Koli raped them and then killed them. Sometimes Koli brought boys by mistake, and they simply killed them.

A psychological profile compiled by the Directorate of Forensic Sciences described them as “emotionally deprived and sexually deviated men, separated from their wives and family, living in a single house and trying to cope on their own in their different ways, without feeling concerned for, or bothered about each other”. 37

In February 2009, Pandher and Koli were found guilty of the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl named Rimpa Haldar and both were sentenced to death. Koli was subsequently found guilty of other murders, and awarded further death penalties.

But doubt was growing as to the contribution of the employer, who had at first been assumed to be the evil ringleader of this bleak circus. Though as the Supreme Court judgement later put it, house number D-5, Sector 31 “… became a virtual slaughter house, where innocent children were regularly butchered,” 38and though it was therefore impossible to believe that Pandher was ignorant of what was going on, despite the fact that he had been able to provide evidence that he was out of the country at the time of some of the killings, Koli’s confessions had been so lurid as to remove all need for a second man’s involvement.

In his statement, which he made voluntarily in court because he needed, he said, to “lighten himself”, Koli described how he used to lure children, usually girls, into the house by promising them work or sweets. (Two girls from the community testified that he had attempted to lure them into the house, but they had refused to go with him.) Once they were inside the house he would strangle them. He would often attempt to copulate with the dead bodies, but by his own admission he failed to do so. He would then cut up the bodies, sometimes taking organs from them, cooking them and eating them. The first time he tried the liver of one of his victims, a young girl, he said, he vomited; but he continued to make meals of his victims. The remains he put in plastic bags and dumped in the drain outside.

In this statement he offered to take the police to places where they could recover more knives, personal effects and body parts; he later did so, and his leads turned out to be authentic.

Koli came from a small town in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand where his wife — eight months pregnant at the time of the revelations — and young daughter remained while Koli worked as Pandher’s housekeeper and servant. During Pandher’s absences he had the house to himself; while Pandher was there he was frequently witness to debauched gatherings and, of course, the comings and goings of prostitutes. He cooked meals for Pandher’s guests and knew exactly what was happening in the house. Sometimes, he said, Pandher spent the night with two or three girls in his bed. He claimed that all this used to build up in him an intense pressure of arousal and desire. As he said in his confession, “once Pandher’s wife moved away to Chandigarh, Pandher started bringing call girls to the house daily. I would cook for the girls, and serve them. I would see them and crave sex. Later, bad thoughts entered my mind: to kill them and eat them.” Mostly it was not these girls but others whom Koli killed: with Payal, however, Koli satisfied his urge to kill and “consume” one of Pandher’s own sexual partners.

During one period of six months when the presence of a house guest made it impossible for Pandher to entertain prostitutes at home, Koli said that peace returned to him and he felt no impulse to kill.

Koli also told the police that he would often dream of a girl in a flowing white dress who laughed at him and taunted him. Each time he dreamt about her, he would tremble, lose his appetite and be unable to sleep until he found a victim, and relief.

Despite all this, when Pandher was acquitted of murder by the High Court in Allahabad at the end of 2009, there was widespread scepticism. One magazine pronounced, “despite the manner in which the Noida police bungled the case, there is little doubt that Pandher is as guilty as the man who actually carried out the serial killings, his accomplice Koli.” 39Journalists had their own class prejudices, according to which the poor had no vision of their own and could only obey the orders of their superiors, and Pandher’s leadership was necessary to this conception. That the servant would end up taking the punishment for both of them was consistent with a widely accepted idea of Indian society, according to which the elite always managed to export the blame to a scapegoat when things went wrong. Pandher’s much-documented connections to the political and commercial elite of Punjab and Delhi, as well as the frequent presence at his parties of senior policemen, made it easy for many to imagine how he would have engineered his own acquittal.

Surender Koli’s guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt. If Moninder Singh Pandher had an active role in these deaths, it has yet to be proved. But perhaps he had nothing to do with them. Perhaps the truth is just what it appeared to be. Perhaps Pandher was so inattentive to the lives of his subordinates that he really did not notice anything amiss, even as the domestic servant with whom he lived enticed at least seventeen young people from the surrounding streets into his home, murdered them, cut them up and disposed of the body parts behind the house.

But perhaps there is still hidden meaning in the story. Perhaps it is an allegory, and perhaps it is more terrible than anyone even thought.

Moninder Singh Pandher ran a JCB dealership in Noida. He supplied the kind of earth-moving equipment so much in demand in the Delhi region at that time — the equipment with which Delhi’s slums were destroyed and the ground was prepared for the new landscape of elite housing and shopping. From this dealership he allegedly made some 30 lakhs [$60,000] a month. With this money he enjoyed raucous evenings with his club of influential men, the sexual services of as many poor women as he liked and, of course, the labour of Koli himself.

What erupted in Koli in reaction to all this was not some democratic sentiment whereby the privileges of the rich would be abolished. Quite the reverse: Koli wanted exactly what Pandher had, which was the power to consume the poor. And if he could not consume them with Pandher’s abstract appetites, he would — literally — eat them.

Pandher’s son, visiting his father during the months of Koli’s crimes, observed a change in his father’s servant. “When we hired Surendra, he was docile and obedient. But there was something amiss about his behaviour lately. When I went to Noida in November, I found him cocky and rude, which was not what I had known him to be. Most of the times I found him talking on his mobile on the roof. I had told my mother about his cocky behaviour.” 40Perhaps Koli had ingested something of the spirit of the speaker’s own class. Perhaps he wanted to be as cocky as the tiny percentage of crowing, wealthy, endlessly consuming elites with whom he had some acquaintance. Perhaps he wanted to emulate the appetites which defined those elites, and placed them so securely above everyone else.