Ajmer 92 movie trailer out: What was the 1992 Ajmer rape and blackmail case

The case came to light after a local journalist, Santosh Gupta, reported on it in April 1992. Some court cases surrounding the incident are still ongoing.

The crime

Gupta’s story detailed a cycle of abuse carried out over the course of multiple years, ending in 1992. School- and college-going girls were lured to remote locations, where they were repeatedly sexually assaulted by one or many men.

According to the police, one girl would be used to lure in her friends, and so on – creating a widespread cycle of abuse. The girls were then all blackmailed into submission and silence using their explicit pictures that the rapists clicked while committing the crime.

The crime came to light when the photo lab, where the exploitative pictures were being developed, leaked some of the photos. Santosh Gupta broke the story for local daily Navajyoti News along with blurred-out pictures of survivors that he had managed to get a hold of.

The accused and the court cases

“The accused were in a position of influence, both socially and financially, and that made it even more difficult to persuade the girls to come forward and depose,” retired Rajasthan DGP Omendra Bhardwaj told The Indian Express in 2018.

After a lengthy investigation, a total of 18 men were charged, some of them from families of the influential Khadims, who serve at the dargah and identify themselves as descendants of the original followers of the Sufi saint.

A timeline of events.

Of these 18 men, the most prominent were Farooq and Nafis Chishty. The duo were Youth Congress leaders and almost local “celebrities” – flaunting their power and wealth in the small town.

Gupta notes that it was the clout that these men enjoyed – and openly flaunted – that helped them in trapping their victims. These men would first groom and then prey upon young girls. It was reportedly Farooq who first trapped a girl from Sophia Senior Secondary School in Ajmer and took obscene photos of her. He would later be declared mentally unstable in the courts.

In 1998, a sessions court in Ajmer sentenced eight men to life imprisonment but the Rajasthan High Court, in 2001, acquitted four of them. In 2003, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences of the other four convicts, Moijullah alias Puttan, Ishrat Ali, Anwar Chishty and Shamshuddin alias Meradona, to 10 years. Six of the men are still facing trial and only one accused, Almas Maharaj, is absconding and is believed to be in the US. The CBI has issued a red corner notice against him.

A continuing ordeal for survivors

Once details of the case became public, Ajmer found itself on the verge of chaos. Protests shut the city down for two days, threatening to turn communal since most of the men accused were Muslim and many victims Hindu.

However, even as the trials began, a majority of victims turned hostile. While the police suspected that there were between 50 and 100 victims, only a few came forward to depose; and fewer still have stuck to their statements.

“Unfortunately many of the victims who appeared as witnesses turned hostile and one can appreciate the reason why they did not want to depose against the appellants as that would have exposed them as well, and would have adversely affected their future life,” noted a 2003 Supreme Court order in this case.

Such has been the social stigma around the victims, that even institutions where the girls studied were looked down upon, author Anuradha Marwah, a former Ajmer resident who has written a book on the case, told The Indian Express in 2018.

“My mother was the vice-principal of one such college. I remember she came home in tears one day, saying that a young girl, who was one of the victims, had committed suicide. The case was like a wound that wasn’t allowed to heal,” Marwah said.

Santosh Gupta blames the ordeal that victims faced (and are still facing) on the approach of the authorities in the case. Right from the start, the police focused more on preventing what they believed would lead to “a law and order situation” as a result of the scandal, rather than ensuring justice for the victims, he said.