Free Aarushi by Avirook Sen Page B

interesting in a dense little bit which appeared a few lines above it.
    If anyone had bothered to look at item number two, on the preceding page, they would have found the hard evidence required to charge Krishna:
     
. . . Exhibit R (two razors, articles said to be of Mr Hemraj), Z20 (one pillow cover, purple coloured cloth) and exhibit Z30 (one bedcover, multicoloured) with suspected spots of blood are from the same male individual . . .
     
    Stripped of the numbers and the jargon, this is what it meant. The razor and the multicoloured bedcover belonged to Hemraj, and his DNA was detected on these. Hemraj’s DNA was found in the traces of blood on an item that did not belong to him: the purple pillow cover belonged to Krishna.
    This was a potential case-cracker: it suggested that Krishna was at the scene of the crime. It could have been the proof Arun Kumar and his team were looking for against Krishna. But for that it would first have to be noticed.
    Arun Kumar and his team were instead preoccupied with trying to limit the damage to their reputations. They now came under pressure to subject the Talwars to narco and brain-mapping tests. In January, the Talwars travelled to Gandhinagar and were from then on in the hands of Dr S.L. Vaya, who put them through a polygraph test as well as a brain-mapping test. The results cleared them of any suspicion. Dr Vaya looked at the test reports of the three servants, one of whom, Rajkumar, she had personally administered the test to, and the contrast between the two sets of tests was definitive: she told me that the Talwars clearly appeared innocent and the servants guilty. As far as Dr Vaya was concerned she felt no need to put the Talwars through the invasive narco analysis test, particularly because Rajesh Talwar was on anti-depressants and Nupur Talwar was on medication to help conceive another child; the chemistry of the narco test would interfere with the chemistry of these separate medications. Arun Kumar accepted Dr Vaya’s recommendation.
    ***
     
    The curious case of the vaginal swabs and other errors of omission probably cost the first CBI team its assignment. In mid-2008, Arun Kumar had jumped the gun and as good as held the servants guilty in a press conference, even though all he had to go on were brain-mapping and narco tests. His team could not file a charge sheet, or take the investigation forward. The confusion over the swabs threw the investigation off by a number of months and was the final straw. The boss wasn’t happy.
    Unnamed CBI sources spoke on Ashwani Kumar’s behalf to share the director’s views. As the team was reconstituted in September 2009, the
Indian Express
wrote: ‘The CBI director was unhappy with Arun Kumar’s “line of investigation” ever since he joined last year. “The case was transferred to Dehradun since no development has emerged in the investigation even after all these months,” the source said. “The forensic reports have also gone against CBI’s line of probe.”’ Ironically the very evidence that would have helped the CBI had been sitting on the investigators’ desk for more than two months.
    How common is it for the CBI to reconstitute a whole team? ‘My successors are the ones who need to answer this,’ Vijay Shanker told me later. ‘Either you have sacked a person for not having done his job properly, and you reconstitute. Or you give good reasons why you are reconstituting. These are matters of life and death! And you are laying down the foundation of justice.’
    The reason here ostensibly was that it was sixteen months after the murders and the case was going nowhere. So the CBI brass advised a change in the line of investigation. In effect it was really saying: ‘It’s got to be the parents, get them, close this damn thing.’ Why did the CBI go after the Talwars? This is a complex question, the answer to which comes in distinct parts—parts that may have nothing to do with each other.
    For me it started with