Post midnight, the six-lane Delhi-Agra National Highway is mostly quiet where it passes through Badkhal, in Faridabad’s Sector 21, except when the occasional truck or car races in, the horns piercing the stillness of the halogen-washed night.
It was on one such night on August 24 that 19-year-old Aryan Mishra and his friend Harshit Gulati’s family set out for a drive from their home in NIT Faridabad, a neighbourhood in Delhi’s satellite town — five people in a red Renault Duster, out to satiate their midnight craving for noodles.
Less than two hours later, Aryan was dead — shot by a group of cow vigilantes who, police said, had allegedly mistaken the occupants of Harshit’s car for cattle smugglers.
Police have so far arrested five people in the case, all residents of Faridabad — Anil Kaushik, 38, who runs a real-estate business and has two earlier cases, of extortion and snatching, to his name; Aadesh, 32, a bus driver; Saurabh, 26, who did odd jobs; Varun, 26, who works as a lab sample collector; and Krishan, 26, who owns a clothes store. On August 31, all five accused were remanded in judicial custody.
Aryan Mishra and his friend Harshit Gulati’s family set out for a drive from their home in NIT Faridabad, a neighbourhood in Delhi’s satellite town — five people in a red Renault Duster, out to satiate their midnight craving for noodles. (Express Photo)
While the Faridabad Police initially said it was the first time the five had indulged in cow vigilantism, The Indian Express found at least four FIRs that showed Kaushik contacted police with information on cow smuggling and in at least one case, chased the alleged smugglers.
30 km, 2 districts, a dead man
Around 1.15 am on August 24, Aryan Mishra came home for a change of clothes — he had been spattered with cake at a friend’s birthday party. His mother Uma says he stepped out soon after, telling her that was going out for a drive with his neighbour Harshit and his family to get some noodles. “I will be back in 15 minutes,” the 19-year-old said.
Aryan and his family — his mother Uma, father Siya Nand Mishra, and elder brother Ajay — lived as tenants of Harshit’s family, who lived a floor below them.
The group left in Harshit’s family car, heading to a mall 5 km away — Harshit, 22, took the wheel and Aryan sat in the passenger seat, while Harshit’s brother Shanky alias Sagar, 29, their mother Sujata and neighbour Kirti Sharma sat in the rear seat.
According to the Crime Branch of the Faridabad Police that’s investigating the case, the five — Kaushik, Aadesh, Saurabh, Varun, and Krishan — sat in Adesh’s car, a Swift Dzire with a detachable red beacon on top, and left soon after. (Express Photo)
A few hours earlier, around 11 pm, five men had met at the market of Parvatiya Colony in Faridabad, around 6 km from Aryan’s house. According to the Crime Branch of the Faridabad Police that’s investigating the case, the five — Kaushik, Aadesh, Saurabh, Varun, and Krishan — sat in Adesh’s car, a Swift Dzire with a detachable red beacon on top, and left soon after.
“Kaushik had shared an input with the other men that some cattle smugglers would be spotted in the area. So they all set out to find them,” said a senior police officer, citing Kaushik’s interrogation report.
The Palwal-Faridabad route is among the hotbeds of cow vigilantism in Haryana, where self-anointed gau rakshaks aggressively waylay trucks and other vehicles in the name of protecting cows.
Kaushik and the others then began patrolling the highway, slowing down at Badkhal. It’s here, at 1.57 am, that their paths crossed that of Harshit, Aryan and the others who were then cruising along the six-lane highway.
Back at their home in NIT Faridabad, Aryan’s family is grappling with questions as they deal with the pain of his death. (Express Photo)
The friends had spotted the car with the swirling red beacon on the opposite carriageway. Sitting in the rear seat, Sagar, who is absconding in an attempt to murder case, asked his brother Harshit to step on the gas, police said. Almost on cue, the white car in the opposite carriage started, took a U-turn a few metres ahead and started chasing their vehicle.
“Since Sagar was absconding in a case of attempted murder of August 15, he panicked when he saw the vehicle with the red beacon. He assumed that it was a special team of Faridabad Police that was out to get him. He asked his brother Harshit to speed up,” the officer said.
What followed was a dramatic chase that lasted an hour, across 30 km and two districts of south Haryana. As the two cars sped through the highway, past several malls and showrooms of Red Tape, Adidas and Skechers, the vigilantes fired at least two shots in the air. The vehicles screeched past the Sector 58 police station, past the bottleneck at Sanjay Colony and scores of CCTV cameras. Even where the malls and showrooms gave way to the fringes of Faridabad, where the lit-up highway is surrounded by open grounds plunged in darkness, the cars kept racing.
The first toll after Badhkal, from where the chase began, is at Gadpuri in Palwal. Here, the two vehicles crashed through the barriers and sped on. A call went out from the plaza staff to the Gadpuri police station in Palwal.
Six kilometres later, near the Baghola flyover project, another shot was fired. This time, the bullet broke the rear windshield and struck Aryan on his head, behind his ear.
At 3.10 am, a rattled Harshit finally gave up and pulled over near the upcoming Baghola flyover as the cow vigilantes blocked their way. Kaushik, the main accused, got out of the driver’s seat and walked up to Harshit’s SUV and fired again, this time pointing at Aryan, who sat slumped in the passenger seat, striking him below the left shoulder.
The accused chased the occupants of a red Renault Duster from Badkhal inFaridabadtoBaghola in Palwal (Express Photo)
By then, the other occupants of the SUV, including Harshit’s mother, got out, screaming that Aryan was dead. “It was when they saw the women that the cow vigilantes realised that they weren’t chasing cow smugglers,” said a senior police officer, adding, “During questioning, Kaushik told us that they assumed the people in the SUV were cattle smugglers who were passing on alerts to the main gang.”
Minutes later, the accused fled the spot, say police, while Harshit’s family took Aryan to two hospitals in Palwal, both of which refused to take him in. They then took him to the SSB Hospital in Faridabad, where he died around 12.30 pm on August 24.
The Indian Express took the 30-km stretch from Badkhal in Faridabad to Baghola at night and spotted at least one CCTV at each of the traffic signals on the way. Of the two police chowkis on this route, the one near the Ballabgarh bus stand stands below the elevated highway, leaving its personnel with little insight into the drama that played out on the road above them. SSB Hospital, where an unconscious Aryan was declared dead minutes after he was brought here, is on the same stretch.
The Indian Express took the 30-km stretch from Badkhal in Faridabad to Baghola at night and spotted at least one CCTV at each of the traffic signals on the way.
The Sikri police post in Faridabad is on the stretch of the highway where the chase took place. One of the officers here says they were not aware of what happened that night. “We have just one Emergency Response Vehicle which often gets deployed for VIP duty. We have nine villages under our limits and most of the time, the manpower is spent on patrolling on the interior roads. Once in a while, we get calls from highways due to the accidents that take place.”
The investigation
At the Gadpuri police station in Palwal, which was informed about the shootout at 4 am by one of the two hospitals in the district where Aryan was initially taken, SHO Prashant refused to comment. Palwal Police spokesperson Sanjay, said they received the information in the early hours of August 24. “We were aware of it, but it was not in our jurisdiction and the case was filed in Faridabad. We will cooperate in their investigation,” he said.
Police say that since Sagar, one of the occupants in the SUV in which Aryan was killed, was involved in an attempted murder case, their investigation initially focused on a possible contract killing case.
The FIR lodged at the NIT Faridabad police station, based on a complaint by Aryan’s father Siya Nand Mishra, too, takes this line. The FIR names two individuals, Piyush Bhatia and Yogesh Rajput, who had filed the attempt to murder case against Sagar. “Aryan was caught in this dispute despite having no involvement in it,” the FIR states.
But as they probed this angle, they hit a dead end. “We questioned the complainants in the case against Sagar, but found out they were not involved in this incident. Over the next few days, we pulled out footage from hundreds of CCTV cameras and tracked the Swift car that we saw in the images. It was a car without a registration number,” said an officer in the team.
The police team hit upon their first clue — the white car had been spotted at Parvatiya Colony’s market, where Kaushik lived. CCTV images showed the five men, including Kaushik, getting into the car.
“A team headed to the market, and started speaking with several shopkeepers and residents. We got our first lead when one of the shopkeepers shared some inputs about Kaushik,” the officer said, adding that four of the accused were arrested on August 28, four days after the incident. The fifth accused, Saurabh, was arrested two days later. Police said their questioning of the accused revealed their cow vigilante activities.
“They disclosed that after killing Aryan, they fled the scene. They later decided to stay together and even travelled to Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow together to meet Kaushik’s friend,” an officer said.
Back at their home in NIT Faridabad, Aryan’s family is grappling with questions as they deal with the pain of his death. The family has cut off ties with Harshit’s family and rarely steps out. “Why was he killed in a car with four others? How could he be singled out? He was kind, spiritual, and loving. He would sleep on my lap every night until we lost him. I am yet to wash the shirt he wore that night,” says his mother Uma, standing beside a newly framed photo of Aryan from 10 years ago, cutting a cake on his birthday.
