A ‘corpse’, jailed kin, a false case and a murdered woman’s second coming

The MP police have been accused of fabricating the murder of a tribal girl, as part of an initiative to reunite girls who had gone missing with their families.

In June 2014, Kanchan Uike, a 14-year-old tribal girl from the village of Jopnala in Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara district went missing from home. The family filed a case of abduction at the Amarwada police station, 30km away, but there were no immediate leads, the village was remote and the family were poor farmers; the case soon faded from police memory.

In January 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government and the state complete began an exercise called Operation Muskaan. (Representational)

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Seven years later, Uike’s disappearance seemed to find some late, albeit unfortunate, closure.

In January 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government and the state complete began an exercise called Operation Muskaan, looking to reunite young girls that had gone missing from their homes with their families. The outcome was staggering, and the government congratulated itself, terming the operation a singular blow against trafficking. The state government said it “recovered” as many as 2,444 girls from different parts of the country, reuniting them with their families in the month of January 2021 alone.

During the course of the investigation, one of the cases that caught the state police’s attention was that of Kanchan Uike. She was not reunited with her family, though; the police investigated the case and said that she was murdered by them.

In a 42-page charge-sheet signed by the then sub-divisional officer of police (SDOP), Santosh Deheria, and submitted to the judicial magistrate(first class) in Amarawada on March 12, 2021 the police said that she was murdered by her 54-year-old father Sannu Uikey, and her 18-year-old brother Sunny. They were angered by an alleged relationship she was in, beat her to death in anger when she resisted, and buried her body under a mango tree in the village. The two men confessed under Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act; pointed investigators to where they had buried the body; a body was recovered with Kanchan’s belongings next to it; and the two men were sent to jail for murder, kidnapping and destruction of evidence. Sunny is still lodged in jail; his father only got bail in January 2023.

The case was watertight, open and shut; every loose end tied up, according to the police.

It was all of that, until Wednesday morning.

That’s when a very alive Kanchan Uike, now 23, returned home, a mother of two children with a husband in Agar Malwa, unaware till this week that her father and brother were accused of her murder.

Her re-appearance laid bare, Sannu Uike’s lawyer MR Belwanshi said, something that the family has been claimed for these two years — that the police concocted an entire version of events to boost numbers, and extracted a confession through extra judicial means. In truth, evidence of the fabrication existed right from the beginning of the re-investigation, he said. In the FIR filed on January 23, 2021 the police said they found 210 bones in Kanchan Uike’s body. The human body has 206.

THE POLICE STORY

On January 22, 2021, six and a half years after Kanchan’s disappearance, the police arrived in Jopnala and took in Sunny Uike for questioning. Santosh Deheria, now Additional Superintendent of Police, Jabalpur said that the young man told them that their father was a habitual drunkard, and often hit his sister. “We detained him, and during the interrogation, he confessed to the crime,” Deheria said.

In the police charge sheet, Sunny’s confession reads like this. “Seven years ago, in the summer, my sister Kanchan was watching a movie on a mobile phone at the home of Ramswaroop at 9 pm. Kanchan had been going to his home for the past three to four days. I had tried to stop her but she did not listen. That night, I brought her back from Ramswaroop’s home and slapped her twice or thrice. I asked her to sleep in the room at the back of the house but when I checked later, she was not there.”

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The confessional statement further says that he spotted Kanchan attempt to leave the house, and confronted her. “She told me she was going to Ramswaroop’s again and challenged me to do whatever I wanted. I grabbed her and dragged her inside, picked up a teak stick used to herdr cattle, and hit her on the head. She fell on the ground bleeding and died. I called my father Sannu, after which we took off her clothes and wrapped her in a white dhoti. I carried her body on my shoulder and we took her to Rahiwada, and buried her in a field with mango trees. We dug a pit in the ground with a spade and shovel and lowered her body inside. The spade was left in the field, and I only brought it back two to three days later,” the statement said. There were two witnesses to the confession, the documents, which HT has seen, show.

On January 23, 2021 the police went to the spot with the area tehsildar, and recovered the 210-bone body, and four bangles that Kanchan wore when she went missing. Her mother, Lakshmi, identified the bangles as her daughter’s, and the bones were sent to the Regional Forensic Science Laboratory in Bhopal for testing. A report is still awaited, police officials said.

That is where the case stood, until Wednesday, when Kanchan Uike returned home, stunning her family, embarrassing the police, and destroying the narrative.

THE RETURN

Kanchan Uike, now 23, told HT that she did run away from home in June 2014 to escape an abusive father. She ran away with another man, not Ramswaroop, to a town called Agar Malwa, 475km away, changed her name to Krishna, started a fresh life, and forsook her family. Over the course of these nine years, she left this first man, married another, and now has two children.

Then last week, in a market in Agar Malwa, her eyes locked with a familiar face, a man from the village she grew up in. “He was an extended uncle, and identified me. He asked me if I was Kanchan, and I said I was. Then he told me that my brother and father were in jail for my murder. I told my husband, and rushed back to Amarwada on Wednesday,” she said.

When she arrived, the village was stunned. The Kotwar, a term for a representative of the civil police in villages, was called, and she was taken to the Amarwada police station. “We questioned her, and found that she was indeed Kanchan Uike,” said Dharmendra Kushram, sub inspector, Amarwada.

Her re-appearance unleashed a torrent of emotion, and the re-confirmation of a stance the family had always maintained; that the story put forth by the police was entirely fabricated. The body that was ostensibly hers, for instance, was taken from the burial ground where every single member of their tribal family has been buried. “The police thrashed us to confess to a crime we never committed. We only signed the confession papers to protect ourselves from further torture. If they were to dig some more in that field, they will recover more bones because that is where we have always buried our dead,” Sannu Uike said.

Asked why she had identified the bangles recovered next to the body as Kanchan’s, Lakshmi Uike said, “I identified the bangles because that was the only way to save my son and husband from torture. The bangles belong to my aunt who died a few years ago and is buried next to my uncle in the field.”

THE POLICE EMBARRASSMENT

On Friday, stunned by these developments, the Chhindwara police moved court for a “re-investigation”. Vinayak Varman, Chhindwara Superintendent of Police said, “The case is stunning because it does seem the claims of the woman are true. But it is difficult to understand why the police did what they did because this is not a high profile case. Stories should not be fabricated under pressure from an operation like Muskaan.”

He said that he has also written to the forensic laboratory for the long awaited DNA report, and a team has been formed under additional superintendent of police Sanjeev Uike who will probe the case and submit a report before April 15. “The team will interrogate eyewitnesses and will also find whose carcass was recovered on January 22, 2021,” the SP said.

The prosecution lawyer in the case maintained that the investigation was carried out based on the available evidence. “The police concluded the case based on evidence and confessions. A body was recovered and someone was killed so the reinvestigation will resolve some other case,” Manish Nema said.

SDOP Deheria, who signed the chargesheet said, “The accused did confess. I do not know why they lied.”

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Madhya Pradesh child rights activist Prashant Dubey said that while Operation Muskaan reunited several missing girls with their families, this incident has laid bare the dangers that come from forced investigations. “There are many police officers that worked hard to recover girls. But it is also clear that in this case, the police cooked up a false story. The pressure to perform cannot mean they do anything. The government must investigate the case thoroughly.”