‘If Pandher is not guilty, Koli is not guilty, then who is?’: Family of Nithari murder victim

The killings came to light after the skeletal remains of eight children were found in a drain behind businessman Moninder Singh Pandher’s house at Noida’s Nithari on December 29, 2006. Koli was the domestic help at Pandher’s house at the time.

For the girl’s father and mother, now 63 and 60 respectively, the justice system has “routinely failed” them. “Even back then we kept telling the police that something strange was going on in that house and they would tell us that we were imagining things,” said the mother. They are among the families of the victims, which stayed back in the area. The rest, they said, moved back to their hometowns in Bihar or West Bengal.

The couple still run a small business from a shack where they iron clothes. It is not far from the house owned by Moninder Singh Pandher. Sunita recalled frequently receiving clothes from the house allegedly with stains, which would not fade. “I would ask him (Koli) about the stains and he would simply respond that sahab [master] had stood too close to the butcher when he had gone to buy chicken,” the mother said.

Their daughter had gone to a tailor behind Pandher’s house on a summer evening in 2006, but never returned. The parents still have a faded portrait of the girl at their shack. “She was good at studies. She wanted to be a doctor,” the mother said.

When asked about the SC verdict, the parents seemed more tired than angry. “I want the policemen who let them get out to suffer,” said the woman.
“If Pandher is not guilty, Koli is not guilty, then who is? If the policemen are responsible (for the acquittal) then they are the ones who should be hanged,” the father said.
“They were let out of jail because the children who were killed were poor.”

The mother was upset as she said the case fell through despite the police having all the evidence. “I saw the bodies being exhumed from the drain. Who put them there? The police found stacks of ID cards belonging to labourers and school children. Why were those there? Why did the police find my child’s clothes inside the house? How can the courts declare them innocent?”

The couple, however, said that they have resigned to their fate. “We had to sell our house to pay the lawyers. We now live in a jhuggi on rent. We can’t fight anymore. Nobody cares for us,” said the father.
For them, moving out of Nithari is also out of the question. “We have built our lives here. The rest of our family has shifted to different parts of Delhi. Our children are married and have settled here,” the father said. Thus, their wound continues to fester.

“She would have had her own family and children by now … I miss her the most when I serve food to my five children. I always tend to forget that one has left us … that’s when I cannot control my tears,” the mother went on.

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