*Warning: This text contains information and images that may be disturbing
1 of 4 The mother was determined to punish her daughter’s rapist. — Photo: Swastik Pal/ BBC The mother was determined to punish her daughter’s rapist. — Photo: Swastik Pal/ BBC
In 2022, a woman in Bihar state, India, was told her daughter’s rapist had died and the case against him had been dropped.
She questioned the claim and discovered the truth, which led to the case being reopened until justice was done for his daughter. This is her remarkable story of endurance.
On a mild morning in 2022, possibly February, two men came to a cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges, the holiest in India.
They were there to perform a Hindu funeral rite. The men were carrying firewood, but oddly enough, they weren’t carrying a body.
When they got to the cremation ground, things got even more bizarre.
The men set up a pyre on the ground, and one of them lay on it, covered himself with a white cloak and closed his eyes. The other man piled more wood onto the pyre until only the first man’s head was visible outside the woodpile.
Two photos were taken of this scene. It’s unclear who took the photos or if anyone else was present.
2 of 4 The man allegedly killed in the photos was apparently Niraj Modi, who was accused of rape. — Photo: Swatik Pal/ BBC The man allegedly killed in the photos was apparently Niraj Modi, who was accused of rape. — Photo: Swatik Pal/BBC
The “dead” was said to be Niraj Modi, a teacher at a state school in the northern Indian state of Bihar. He was 39 years old. The other man was his father, lanky farmer Rajaram Modi, in his early 60s.
Rajaram Modi then traveled with a lawyer to a court about 100 km away and hired him affidavit and signed statement that his son Niraj has died on February 27 at her home in the village. He also provided two photos of the cremation and receipts for the firewood purchased for the ritual as evidence.
everything happened 60 days after police made rape allegations against Niraj Modi. He was accused of raping a 12yearold girl of legal age, who was his student, in October 2018.
3 of 4 Rajaram Modi, the father of Niraj Modi, is pictured next to the pyre. — Photo: Swastik Pal/ BBC Rajaram Modi, Niraj Modi’s father, is pictured next to the pyre. — Photo: Swastik Pal/ BBC
The girl had been attacked when she was alone on a sugar cane plantation and her rapist claimed he filmed the attack and will post the video online.
Modi was arrested shortly after the girl’s mother filed a complaint with the police, but was released on bail after two months in detention.
The case quickly changed following the “death” of Niraj Modi last year. Two months after his father testified to the court, local authorities issued his death certificate. And in May, the court dismissed the case because the “sole defendant in the case” was dead.
Only one person suspected that the professor had faked his own death. and went into hiding to avoid conviction the girl’s mothera frail woman who lived in a hut in the same village as the Modi family.
the search for truth
“From the moment I found out about Niraj Modi’s death, I knew it was a lie. I knew he was alive,” said the mother when I met her the other day.
Seven out of ten deaths in India occur in the country’s roughly 700,000 villages. In these villages, many more people die at home than in big cities.
A 54yearold law mandates mandatory registration of dates of birth and death, but not causes of death.
When a person dies in a village in Bihar, a family member of the deceased must provide their unique biometric identity number and obtain the signatures of five villagers who will act as witnesses to the death.
The papers must then be forwarded to the local panchayat or village council. Its members, including a local registrar, examine the paperwork and, if all is in order, issue a death certificate within a week.
“Our villages are dense and closely connected. Everyone knows everyone. A death never goes unnoticed or unreported,” said the victim’s attorney, Jai Karan Gupta.
4 of 4 Niraj Modi’s death certificate was canceled by the authorities in May 2022. — Photo: BBC Niraj Modi’s death certificate was canceled by the authorities in May 2022. — Photo: BBC
Rajaram Modi had provided the signatures and biometric identification numbers of five residents and a statement that his son was dead. And he received his son’s death certificate.
The document did not name the cause of death.. The receipt from the store that sold the firewood said the death was caused by “sickness.”
In May 2022, the mother learned from a lawyer that the case against Niraj Modi had been dropped because he had died.
“But why didn’t anyone know about the professor’s death? Why weren’t rituals performed after death? Why didn’t anyone talk about death?” she asks.
The mother says she went from house to house asking people if Niraj Modi had died. Nobody heard the news.
then she has went to court with a motion to investigate the casebut the judges wanted evidence to prove the professor was alive.
In midMay, the mother submitted another petition to a local authority, stating that the village council had issued a death certificate based on forged documents, which should be investigated. This petition expedited the process.
The agent ordered an investigation and informed the village council. its members Rajaram Modi has been asked for more evidence into his son’s death: Photos of the “deceased after death, cremation, burning at the stake, last rites and [novas] testimonies of five witnesses”.
Community councilors visited around 250 residents’ homes. No one seems to have heard of Niraj Modi’s death.
Aside from that, No member of the Modi family had shaved their heads in honor of the deceased. shaving your head a Hindu funeral traditionusually reserved for the death of a close relative.
“Niraj Modi’s own relatives were unaware of his death or whereabouts,” said police investigator Rohit Kumar Paswan. “They kept saying that if there had been a death, the last rites would have been held at home.”
The village council members questioned Rajaram Modi again. He had presented no new evidence of his son’s death.
“We asked him new questions, but he didn’t give satisfactory answers,” says Council Secretary Dharmendra Kumar.
The investigation revealed that Niraj Modi faked his death and that the father and son forged documents to obtain the death certificate.
Police discovered that the teacher had taken the biometric identification numbers of five of his students’ parents and forged their signatures on the paper to obtain his own death certificate. He told the parents that he needed their ID numbers to get scholarships for students.
On May 23rd, the The authorities canceled the death certificate by Niraj Modi. A The police arrested your father and accused him of forgery.
“I’ve never investigated a case like this in my career,” says Paswan. “The plan seemed perfect, but it failed.”
In July, the judiciary reopened the case, saying it had been “deceived and misled” so that the accused could “get away with it”.
In her tireless struggle to find the teacher, the mother went to court to request his arrest.
Niraj Modi turned himself in to justice in October, nine months after he was pronounced dead. He defended himself during the trial and denied the allegation of rape. Modi left the courtroom dejected and tied with rope.
In On January 1, 2023, the judiciary found Niraj Modi guilty of raping the girl and sentenced him to it 14 years in prisonin addition to granting a Compensation of 300,000 rupees ($3,628) for the victim.
The father, Rajaram Modi, is also in prison and is accused of fraud and dishonesty. The maximum penalty provided is seven years in prison. Father and son now have to answer for the false death certificate.
“I’ve spent more than three years traveling to court to ensure the man who assaulted my daughter is punished,” the mother says. “Until one day his lawyer told me he was dead. How could a man vanish like that?”
“The attorney told me that it would cost a lot of money to file a new lawsuit to prove the death was faked. Others told me that the accused would come out of prison and take revenge,” she says, “I didn’t care. He said he would get the money. I’m not afraid. I told the judge and the authorities, ‘Find out the truth’.”
“Paralyzed Life”
We drove the car for hours on bumpy roads. We drove through open sewers, slums, fields of yellow mustard and smoldering brickyards until we reached the victim’s chaotic village, deep in the interior of Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.
A narrow cobbled street meandered through a maze of small brick houses with satellite dishes on their roofs. The mother lived with her two schoolage sons and her daughter in a small windowless brick room with a corrugated iron roof and tiles. His eldest daughter married and lived elsewhere.
The dark, gloomy room contained few items: a wood and rope cradle, a steel grain bin, a clay oven buried in the ground, and an old clothesline. The family had no land to live on.
The village had electricity and running water, but there were no jobs, prompting the girl’s father to emigrate to another state further south, more than 1,700 km away. There he worked as a porter and sent money home.
In 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 100% of Indian villages had declared themselves open defecationfree following a major governmentled toiletbuilding program. But many houses including her mother’s did not yet have a bathroom.
For this reason, Her daughter had gone to a nearby sugar cane field to use as a toilet. Niraj Modi then approached her from behind, covered her mouth and raped her, according to Judge Kush Kumar in his verdict.
The judge claims Modi also told her to remain silent while he recorded video of the act and threatened to make the video viral.
Ten days after the attack, the frightened girl told her mother, who went to the police. In the days that followed, the daughter provided evidence. “Niraj Modi used to hit me at school,” she told police.
The girl returned to school after Modi’s arrest, but stopped going when he was released on bail. She hasn’t been to school for four years now. His school books were sold for paper recycling.
Pale and nervous, the girl now spends most of her time in the darkroom.
“Your life as a student is over”‘ says his mother. “I’m too scared to let her out of the house. I hope she manages to get married.”
Many questions remain unanswered. How did the municipal council issue the deed without examining the documents closely?
“When I questioned them later, they said they had made a mistake,” says the mother.
Professor Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto, Canada, conducted one of the world’s largest studies of premature mortality. He claims Niraj Modi’s case is “very unusual and rare”.
According to him, “we have not found any such case in our work.” Jha refers to his ambitious One Million Deaths Study in India.
“Overruns are very likely to be rare and we would need to be more careful when setting new restrictions or barriers on the death certificate as they could make the situation worse,” says the professor.
The reason is that it is becoming more difficult to transfer assets and undertake other endeavors as more women than men and poorer than rich are missing their deaths and medical records in India, which “likely contributes to the pitfalls”. Poverty”.
Back at home in the village, after fighting and stoic phases full of fear, life seems to unravel for the mother.
“I put pressure on the village and the authorities to find out the truth,” the mother recalls. “I’m glad the man who raped my girl and left a scar on her life is in prison.”
“But my daughter’s life came to a standstill. What will happen to her?”