E-Paper
Gokulraj murder case: 10 get life sentence for killing Dalit man
A special court of third additional judge T Sampathkumar convicted 10 people on March 5, including prime accused S Yuvaraj, then president of Dheeran Chinnamalai Peravai, a caste outfit. It acquitted five others, citing inadequate evidence.
Ten convicts were sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday by a special Madurai court for killing a 21-year-old Dalit man, whose beheaded body was found on railway tracks in Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal district in 2015.
During the investigation in the caste murder, police had claimed the convicts from the Gounder community, a backward yet powerful caste, were enraged by V Gokulraj, a Dalit, talking to a woman of their community at a temple in Namakkal.
A special court of third additional judge T Sampathkumar convicted 10 people on March 5, including prime accused S Yuvaraj, then president of Dheeran Chinnamalai Peravai, a caste outfit. It acquitted five others, citing inadequate evidence.
While Yuvaraj and two others — Arun and Kumar — were sentenced to life imprisonment on three counts, four others got two life terms each. Two convicts got one life term with a fine, while the last was sentenced to one life term.
All 10 were present at the time of sentencing. Special public prosecutor Bhavani P Mohan’s junior S Ganesh Kumar said they have been convicted under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 120 B (punishment with death or life imprisonment for criminal conspiracy), 302 (murder), 364 (kidnapping in order to murder), along with relevant sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
“Every day I have cried,” Gokuraj’s mother Chitra told reporters in Madurai after the verdict.
She thanked political parties and the police for not giving up on her son’s case over the years. “The CB-CID cooperated a lot with us. They wanted this (case) to be a deterrent so that it does not happen again,” Chitra, a widow, added.
In June 2015, Gokulraj was last seen with a woman from the Gounder community at the Arthanareeshwarar temple in Namakkal district’s Tiruchengode. On June 23, he was blindfolded and abducted from the temple by Yuvaraj’s men, and the next day his beheaded body was found on the railway tracks.
Special public prosecutor Bhavani Mohan said his severed head was kept on the railway tracks and his body was placed in between the tracks, with a note to make it appear like a suicide.
The woman Gokulraj spoke with confirmed that he was taken to meet Yuvaraj. A postmortem report said it was a case of culpable homicide.
A total of 17 accused, including Yuvaraj, were named in the complaint filed by the complainant Chitra, Gokulraj’s mother. Two accused, Sankar and Kumar, confessed to the crime before a court in Srivaikundam, However, Yuvaraj remained at large for over three months after the crime as district police could not track him down. Yuvaraj kept moving from Tamil Nadu to Karnataka to other states, all the while releasing audio clips on WhatsApp, instigating his community.
In a further embarrassment to police, Yuvaraj appeared on a Tamil news channel, Puthiya Thalaimurai, claiming innocence and blaming police for targeting him.
In another turn of events, then deputy superintendent of police, Namakkal, R Vishnupriya, who was investigating the murder case, was found hanging in her official residence in September 2015. Police found a suicide note in which she hinted at work pressure. The note, however, added that her death should not be linked to the sensitive murder case.
The murder case and Vishnupriya’s suicide case were shifted to the CB-CID, a special wing of the criminal investigation department. Vishnupriya’s suicide case was later handed over to the Crime Bureau of Investigation (CBI) based on her father’s petition. The federal agency closed the case in May 2017, concluding that there was no foul play and that she died by suicide.
Days after appearing on the TV channel, Yuvaraj surrendered before the CB-CID in Namakkal. The Madras high court granted him conditional bail in May 2016. The Tamil Nadu government moved the Supreme Court challenging the bail, citing the accused was threatening witnesses and tampering evidence. Yuvaraj was again arrested in August 2016 after the Supreme Court denied his bail.
Trial in the case began in 2018. The high court in 2019 shifted trial to a special court in Madurai for cases booked under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989.
Of the 17 accused in the case, one person died while another is undergoing trial at a Namakkal court. On March 5, the remaining 15 accused were produced in the court, which convicted 10 of them, identified as Yuvaraj, his brother Thangadurai, Arun, Kumar, Sankar, Arul Vasantham, Selvakumar, Sathishkumar, Raghu alias Sridhar and Ranjith. It acquitted the remaining five accused — Shankar, Arul Senthil, Selvakumar, Thangadurai and Suresh — citing lack of evidence.
