HELL COMES HOME
How a seedy nexus—involving a Muzaffarpur strongman, the state police, district officials and a minister’s spouse—flourished on CM Nitish Kumar’s watch
Acrime of unimaginable brutality, a trail of complicity and collusion going all the way up to the highest echelons of the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) report highlighting the sexual abuse of orphan girls at a state governmentsponsored shelter in Muzaffarpur city was unforgivably ignored for a whole month after it was submitted on April 26. It was only on May 26 that Atul Prasad and Raj Kumar, IAS officers at the helm of the state social welfare department, found time to convene a meeting to distribute the document to district officials. Even then, it shockingly took them five more days to file an FIR.
Commissioned to conduct a social audit of all 110 state-sponsored shelter homes in Bihar, TISS had red-flagged the murky operations at Muzaffarpur’s Balika Griha, run by Brajesh Thakur, a local strongman. The TISS report sought immediate legal intervention to rescue the inmates, who had allegedly been subjected to “violence and sexual abuse”.
Police investigations, including the medical examination of 42 inmates that followed the FIR, revealed that 34 girls had been drugged, tortured and repeatedly raped over months. It was only then that Thakur, who runs the social welfare department-sponsored NGO Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti, was arrested and the children from Balika Griha were shifted to more secure shelters.
The delay of more than a month after TISS handed in its report points to criminal complicity by government officials. It appears Thakur was given time to ‘fix’ things before the lethargic state machinery intervened. Consider this: a senior social welfare department official says that instead of promptly ordering action when the report was submitted, social welfare principal secretary Atul Prasad’s office insisted on an ‘edited and printable’ copy. After TISS handed in the reworked version of the report on May 9, the department floated a tender for printing copies of the report. All this delayed the eventual meeting in Patna.
At the meeting, the report was ritually distributed among district officials of the de-
partment. A day later, the state’s additional director of social welfare, Devesh Sharma, made a cursory visit to Balika Griha and met Thakur. Despite the incriminating information available, the officer chose to go alone, reveals the police supervision report prepared by Muzaffarpur Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mukul Ranjan.
While Sharma’s conversation with Thakur is now a matter of investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the officer failed to recommend any action for four days. And no one in the department, including Prasad, questioned the delay.
“He (Sharma) might have informed Brajesh Thakur about the impending action and offered him a deal,” alleges Shiba Singh, wife of Ravi Kumar Roshan, the district child protection officer who has been arrested in the case. “He might have lodged an FIR on March 31 only when Thakur, a man known for his political connections, refused to entertain him. These are gaps that must be probed by the CBI.”
The obvious backing Thakur had from bureaucrats is apparently because of his political connections. Shiba alleges that outgoing state social welfare minister Manju Verma’s husband, Chandreshwar Verma, was a frequent visitor at Balika Griha. Speaking to india today on August 5, Shiba proffered an audio recording of what she claimed was additional director Sharma talking about Chandreshwar’s visits to the shelter home. She alleged her husband was being made a scapegoat to shield the politician and her spouse.
Thakur’s call records show he had been in regular telephonic contact with Chandreshwar. Investigators say the two had 17 conversations between January 17 and June 3, the day Thakur was arrested and filmed by media cameras smugly walking out with the police. Investigators say that they are yet to track down a second mobile phone that Thakur is known to have used.
Manju Verma, who put in her papers on August 8, claimed Shiba’s charges were part of a political conspiracy to defame her Kushwaha community, Bihar’s second largest OBC group after the Yadavs. She said her husband accompanied her to Balika Griha just once. About the phone calls with her spouse,
BRAJESH THAKUR’S CALL RECORDS SHOW HE WAS IN REGULAR TOUCH WITH OUTGOING BIHAR SOCIAL WELFARE MINISTER MANJU VERMA’S SPOUSE CHANDRESHWAR
she said it was always Thakur calling for “official” purposes.
However, this isn’t the first time Chandreshwar has been accused of meddling in the social welfare department. In November 2017, Vineeta Kumari, a child development project officer posted in Manju Verma’s home district of Begusarai, alleged that Chandreshwar had threatened to get her suspended if a bribe of Rs 5 lakh was not paid. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes had ordered the Begusarai police to investigate Kumari’s complaint. In June, after the police negated the charges, the commission ordered registration of an FIR. The directive was ignored.
Nitish Kumar, on his part, was initially reluctant to act against Manju Verma. His July 26 decision to hand over the case to the CBI came after nearly two months of a snailpaced probe by the Bihar police. With the opposition mounting pressure, the chief minister had to give in. “If the minister is found to have helped the NGO or its proprietor Brajesh Thakur, then she will have to go. All those connected with the case will have to go,” the chief minister said on August 7, a day before Manju Verma’s resignation.
So did Chandreshwar Verma use his clout as a minister’s spouse to protect Thakur? Five months before the TISS report, officials had disregarded the findings of a three-member committee of the Bihar State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (BSCPCR). Its chairperson Harpal Kaur had, in November 2017, recommended “immediate shifting” of the shelter home. Despite this and a subsequent reminder by Muzaffarpur’s district magistrate on December 27, the social welfare department chose not to act.
Thakur evidently wields a lot of influence. In local circles, he is known to be a strongman and a ‘fixer’, with connections to several Bihar politicians. Besides two arms licences and a hand in several government contracts, he owns three local dailies—the vernacular Pratah Kamal, News Next in English, and the Urdu language Halaat-e-Bihar. Listed as a correspondent for Pratah Kamal, Thakur even managed to get Press Information Bureau (PIB) accreditation and was also appointed as a member of the Bihar government’s press accreditation committee.
Clearly Thakur is a man who has learnt to milk the system. He has been raking in crores from the state and central government ads to his newspapers as well as through the health and social welfare projects so generously allotted to his NGO. He even tried his luck in politics, albeit unsuccessfully. Known
to be close to Anand Mohan, founder of the erstwhile Bihar People’s Party, who is serving a life term for the lynching of former Gopalganj district magistrate G. Krishnaiah in 1994. Thakur contested the 1995 assembly elections from Kudhani (Muzaffarpur district) as a BPP candidate, polling a mere 202 votes.
Contesting in 2000 as a BPP candidate and part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, Thakur polled 32,795 votes, finishing second in the constituency. His son Rahul Thakur lost in the panchayat samiti elections held in 2016. Locals say Thakur has been preparing to contest the next assembly elections and is devoting time in Kudhani.
With the help of state government funds, Thakur opened Balika Griha in November 2013, in a building adjacent to his residence on Muzaffarpur’s Sahu Road. As per documents seized by the police, of the 471 girls who have stayed at the shelter since then, three died and four fled. His NGO also ran a second shelter home, Swadhar Griha, for destitute women.
Thakur’s clout is also evident from the fact that despite receiving the adverse TISS report on Balika Griha, the social welfare department sanctioned his NGO yet another project—a shelter for beggars—on May 31, the day an FIR naming him was registered. The project, which would have brought Thakur an additional Rs 1 lakh a month, was cancelled soon after his arrest.
Social welfare department sources say Thakur was granted the Balika Griha project despite objections by local district officials. They were against the shelter sharing the premises with his newspaper publishing unit, and pointed out that the building had a very narrow entrance and lacked the mandatory CCTV network. The social welfare department’s official policy on real-time monitoring of child care institutions unambiguously maintains that such premises must have high definition cameras with night vision facility. It also maintains that the surveillance hard disk drive must maintain footage for about 30 days. Balika Griha had no such facilities.
Senior social welfare officers in Patna chose to disregard the objections raised by the department’s selection committee and awarded Thakur the contract. Department officials say Thakur has been receiving over Rs 1 crore annually to run five shelters for girls and destitute women in Muzaffarpur. He was also sponsored by the state government to run a handicraft training centre for women in Samastipur and a women’s home in Bettiah.
With Thakur in jail, more skeletons are tumbling out of his cupboard. Inspections by the social welfare department since June 3 have revealed that 11 women and four children are missing from Swadhar Griha. It has led to the registration of a second FIR on July 31. A day later, the Muzaffarpur police recovered a large quantity of sedatives and condom packets from the shelter home. The roof of the building was reportedly scattered with used condoms and empty liquor bottles.
But Thakur’s ability to ‘fix’ things appears to be serving him even after his arrest. Within a week, he was rather conveniently moved to the Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital in Muzaffarpur, and taken back to jail only on June 27. Even in prison, he appears to be well looked after, spending more time in the comfort of the jail hospital than in the barrack assigned to him.