Organ trade, missing piece in Nithari puzzle?

There can be no closure in the Nithari case till the connection between missing children and organ trade is further investigated

October 29, 2014 01:23 am | Updated May 23, 2016 07:11 pm IST

It is no longer a secret that thousands of children go “missing” every year and that Delhi has an extraordinarily high incidence of missing children. In August 2012, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, responding to a question, said in the Rajya Sabha, “NCRB [National Crime Records Bureau] data registers that a child goes missing every eight minutes. About 40 per cent of these children remain missing.”

Who are these children? In 2010, the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights set it out in some detail. It said: “Of the 2,503 missing children in Delhi, 760 are from North-East Delhi, 572 are from East Delhi, 354 from West Delhi, 242 from North-West Delhi, 225 from Central Delhi, 130 from North Delhi, and 230 from Outer Delhi. In Sangam Vihar alone, more than 112 children had been reported missing… The maximum number of children reported missing was from areas where people from economically weaker section reside.”

Till a few years ago, it was understood that children ran away from home as they were pushed to the edge by extreme poverty or violence at home. However, it has been acknowledged for some years now that a sizeable number of those who go missing are trafficked for prostitution, slavery and beggary.

Registering complaints The Nithari episode reveals how little we know. In Nithari village in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, the police refused to register complaints in 2005 and 2006 by parents of missing children. Remains of these children were found later near the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher. Both Pandher and his domestic servant Surinder Koli were arrested and Koli was given the death sentence by the Supreme Court for murdering one of the children, 14-year-old Rimpa Haldar. On October 28, the court dismissed Koli’s review plea against his death sentence.

Children disappeared in Nithari even after Koli had been arrested; the MWCD report speaks of this

When we visited Nithari with a team of students to understand what took place there, parents spoke of their helplessness when the police refused to register their complaints. These families largely comprised migrant workers. Some of them, Bengali speaking, said they were told that they were ‘Bangladeshis’ and the law would be used against them if they persisted with their complaints. This clearly shows that registering a complaint of a missing child is itself not a straightforward task. Take the case of Rimpa for instance. Her parents say she went missing in February 2005. In July that year, her father filed a missing person’s report which was then entered in the ‘general diary’ in the police station. It was not until the disappearance of another girl, Payal, in 2006, and when skulls and bones and clothes were found, that a storm was raised in Nithari. Only then were the complaints of the missing children’s parents taken seriously. The FIR in Rimpa’s case was registered in 2007, close to two years after she went missing.

In January 2007, a committee was set up by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to probe all that was emerging from the drains of Nithari. The committee observed “police apathy and indifference to the reports of missing children.” It was surprised that despite reports that a number of children who went missing were from one locality, the police “were in the dark.” It felt that the police’s apathy may have been because “many of the victims’ families came from poorer sections of society.”

The organ trade angle A second scary possibility was raised in the report and was indicated in passing in the Allahabad High Court’s judgment. Only skull and bones were found together, the report stated, while “the flesh of the torso was disposed of separately from the rest of the body.

In fact, this portion of the bodies has only been discovered after a thorough search carried out under [the] CBI’s supervision.” The motive for this is yet to be found. The committee suggested that “the CBI should look into all angles including organ trade ... [and] there is a need to study the organ transplant records of all hospitals in Noida over the last few years to study the pattern and trend of these operations and trace the donors and recipients.”

Was this anxiety about organ trading followed through? Was something found? There is no saying. What we only know is that in Paragraph 52 of the High Court’s judgment, there is a reference to a prosecution witness who deposes that a doctor, who was a resident in the house adjoining the house in which Koli is said to have committed the crimes, had been arrested in 1997 “in some kidney scam matter.” The construction of Koli as a cannibal has wiped out all other images from our minds understandably; yet, is there more to it than meets the eye? What was done to follow up on the purpose for which the torsos had been severed from the skull, and which suggested organ trade?

Rimpa Haldar’s case is the first among many cases in the Nithari murders. V. Venkatesan writing in Frontline has cited a 2007 report in Amar Ujala that says Rimpa may not be among the dead, but may have run away, got married and moved to Nepal. That too will have to be investigated. And then there are still the rest of the victims. Further, children disappeared in Nithari even after Koli had been arrested; the MWCD report speaks of this. There are also questions on who else was involved and what was done with the torsos of the missing children. Koli has been implicated in the other murders too. The Supreme Court has, gratuitously, while confirming the death sentence on Koli for the death of Rimpa, referred to him as a serial killer. We are unlikely to know if he is indeed one till the other cases go to trial.

But that a connection between missing children and organ trade has cropped up in this case is indubitable. Till this is investigated and we know what is found, there can be no closure in the Nithari case.

(Usha Ramanathan is an independent law researcher based in New Delhi.)

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