When Chandrakant would visit us
he would tell us about his activities in Delhi.
And people from the village who worked with him
also told us stories about what he did in Delhi.
Chandrakant said that he likes to live dangerously.
"Kill or be killed."
"That's our game."
He started committing murders after moving to Delhi.
When news started spreading in Delhi about Chandrakant
and the murders that he was committing there,
he blatantly played with people's lives.
He showed no mercy to anyone.
If the whole village is afraid to talk about it,
and if he himself says that he'll go crazy
if he doesn't commit a murder,
that means it must have been much more in number.
And much more must have happened in his life.
All of them must have remained undetected.
People would say that he has murdered around 44 people.
But we don't really know the true count
because we did not see him doing it.
GHOSAI VILLAGE
Chandrakant was a clever boy.
He was cunning
from the very beginning.
He eventually began committing murders.
He specifically despised people who lied.
Those who lied to him
ended up getting killed.
He never spared anyone, no matter who it was.
Chandrakant has also killed some of his fellow villagers.
When I learned that Chandrakant was committing murders in Delhi,
I began keeping my distance from him.
He also murdered two people in the neighborhood.
It made us realize that we needed to keep our distance from him.
He killed Umesh Jha, an innocent man.
He also killed a man named Kapooridas.
Kapooridas was a decent man.
He ran a garment business.
He was a man of honor who worked hard to earn money.
He had no bad habits.
Once Champadevi, Chandrakant, and his brother Kalanand
went over to Kapooridas' house.
They took me along with them.
They had an argument related to a piece of land.
After having a conversation at length with Kapooridas,
Chandrakant lost his cool.
He threatened Kapooridas.
One evening, Kapooridas stepped out
to run some errands in the market.
Chandrakant and his brother were already there hiding in the bushes
waiting for Kapooridas to arrive.
As soon as they saw Kapooridas coming towards them,
they had an altercation with him.
And then, they shot him.
Kapooridas lost his life.
He might even kill me someday just like he killed Muralidhar in Delhi.
Word spread here
that Chandrakant murdered Muralidhar in Delhi.
I must say that Chandrakant was courageous and fearless.
He was extremely gutsy.
He worked as a laborer back then in Delhi.
He would lift and carry weights.
He knew a lot of people there as he used to live there.
He used to drive a rickshaw.
Back then, he would loot televisions from showrooms.
He would enter the market at night, break into the stores,
carry out robberies, and drop out of sight.
Back then,
I was a part of these doings along with Chandrakant Jha
and another man named Chandan Kumar Mishra.
I even served time for three and a half years in jail.
After that, I vowed not to do this kind of work.
He even tried to kill me once.
I refused to carry out robberies with him.
I decided to continue working where I used to work previously.
I told him I'd rather work hard all day than steal with him.
He didn't quite like what I told him, so he tried to kill me.
But before he could do anything to me, I jumped off the building.
I thought I'd rather have a broken arm or leg than end up getting killed by him.
So...
He was despicable and dangerous.
There's one thing I'm very sure of.
I don't think he must have gone in search of victims.
He must have screened the people that he met on a regular basis
and figured who was going to be his next likely victim.
And then he must have groomed them.
That is what it looks like.
In that grooming process,
the emotional relationship with the victim was
more clear in the sense that, "I am somebody who has control over you."
Maybe he figured how many days he would have to groom them.
He probably decided when their last day would be
and how everything was to be handled.
He probably did it in such a manner
that it looked like he was giving care to them
and helping them out...
in different forms.
But actually, his intention was not to do all that.
He was grooming them
to ultimately kill them.
Chandrakant would tie up the victim's hands and legs before killing them.
He had even tried to forcefully tie me up,
but I refused and got away from there.
That was his pattern of killing someone.
All the things he needed were in his room.
He always used to kill people only after tying them up.
SITA RAM
Even if I have to be so brutal in handling somebody,
I would know what it is.
Through my experience, I know how it is
to physically feel brutalized.
You are almost gasping for your own life.
And that is what I have been
seeing when I'm handling my vulnerable victims,
and where I don't have a bit of remorse.
I may feel guilty, but I don't have remorse.
That is where he now understands both
the lifeless and the life... Vulnerables.
When they undergo
an extreme amount of violence and torture.
He can very well understand what they can feel at that time.
My name is Bhidu Jadhav.
I live in Ghosai.
I'm 67 years old.
Chandrakant Jha once told me
that he had rented a house in Mangolpuri.
His former landlord had asked him to move out.
So, he rented another house in the same locality
and asked me to help him with moving his things into that house.
He took me to Mangolpuri
on the pretext of wanting help in moving out.
When we got there and Chandrakant Jha
opened the door...
I saw Murali Shah sitting in there.
There were two other men as well.
Murali Shah was also a resident of our village. We knew each other.
But I didn't know who the other two men were.
Suddenly Chandrakant shouted, "Bhidu Jadhav!"
"Don't say a word!"
"Do you see what I have done to them?"
"That's what I'm going to do to you as well."
I was shaken.
He took me into the room
and clicked a picture of his victims along with me.
Before he could capture my face, I turned around.
Chandrakant Jha had maintained a photo album.
In that album,
he had kept photos
of all the people he had murdered.
If he had caught a victim and there were others in the room,
then he would take a picture of all of them together.
And if anyone tried to intervene, they'd also get caught up as accomplices.
No one ever dared to speak up.
I was famished. I hadn't eaten anything.
I asked Chandrakant to get me some food
as he was going to kill me anyway.
And as soon as he stepped out of the house
to bring us some food...
Murali Shah also took
the camera that Chandrakant used.
There was a man named Ashok Shah,
whose brother was killed by Chandrakant.
He too had that album.
This man right here is Murali Shah.
This picture is ruined.
My name is Ashok Shah.
Murali Shah is my elder brother.
Murali Shah had taken the camera
from Chandrakant's house.
While he was alive,
he never thought of printing out the pictures.
And after he died,
his second wife printed out the pictures.
In all the pictures,
the victims were either gagged
or had wounded eyes.
Their lips were sewed.
Their lips were sealed shut. It was in the photograph.
You know, these three men in the picture
were all murdered.
It happened in Delhi.
Ashok Shah had shown the pictures in the album...
to the entire village.
His first interest is to silence the person.
Silencing either physically
or silencing emotionally.
And silencing them by killing them was his last resort.
Now there's one thing that I'm afraid of.
I've shared all the information I had about Chandrakant
till the time I was his victim.
I shared everything that I witnessed
and everything that I experienced.
What if Chandrakant learns that I ratted him out?
What if he comes after me
once he's out of prison?
I really hope that he gets sentenced to death
or simply rots in jail till he's dead.
It's unbelievable because I've never even slapped my child
for doing something wrong.
The album also had a photograph of the people of our village.
But no one couldn't say anything.
They were afraid that they would also be framed for murder...
because they were in the picture too.
They were just scared, that's all.
If the whole village is afraid to talk about it,
and if he himself says that he'll go crazy
if he doesn't commit a murder,
that means it must have been much more in number.
And much more must have happened in his life.
All of them must have remained undetected.
See, if three of them could sit like this...
They're physically disabled to do anything with him.
After all, he's alone.
He's just one single person.
If three individuals can be controlled that way,
how powerful he must feel?
You create terror in the mind of a person.
Terror, maybe verbally or through actions,
or maybe through communication.
Once the terror is communicated,
half of your work
is already done.
Then he can decide and choose whom he has to finish and whom he has to let go.
If you could put up this photo as fresh evidence before the court,
the police can still take back the custody
and the court can order further investigation.
At least that should be done.
Because once the investigation process begins to proceed,
many more unidentified
and undisclosed murders may come up.
Well, that will also help Chandrakant
in terms of his own recovery.
It will also help the police in solving the problem.
But it certainly is fresh evidence. It has to come up on record.
In a case like this, the accused is
either given life imprisonment or they're sentenced to death.
We have requested the court for a minimum sentence,
whereas the prosecution has requested maximum punishment
as this case falls in the rarest of rare category.
Chandrakant Jha has been accused of committing eight murders in Delhi.
He has been convicted for three of the murders so far.
On Monday, Chandrakant was sentenced to life imprisonment in one of the cases.
And on Tuesday, he was given a death sentence for another case.
Chandrakant was alleged to have killed seven people.
But due to lack of evidence
he has been convicted only for three murders.
Serial killer Chandrakant Jha has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
The court has declared this case as "rare" instead of "rarest of rare."
Chandrakant Jha will be spending his whole life in prison.
Chandrakant once quoted,
"The Bhagavad Gita says that it is not a sin to kill a bad person."
"And hence, some of our wrongdoings aren't really wrong."
When I heard his statement, I thought that maybe
he said that merely to justify his actions.
Because as per the prosecution's story,
the people who were murdered
weren't good people either.
Someone was a thief...
Someone was a womanizer...
Someone used to trouble him by eating meat and leaving unwashed utensils around him.
So, maybe...
he took offense at them.
One of my inferences was that maybe he is accepting his guilt.
But he never admitted his mistakes or accepted his guilt openly.
It's not morally correct to be so rigid.
But Chandrakant had extreme opinions and he was a stubborn man.
When we talk of genetics,
when we say that when he was born,
he genetically inherited,
from his parents,
some amount of violent environment,
violence, and the environment he had seen.
And because of that, he must have had some kind
of a gene or an allele in his body which has given rise
to him getting attracted to violence.
He must have had the seed of it there,
but it wouldn't necessarily grow into a plant...
unless it is nurtured, nourished, and taken care of.
And this nurturing, nourishing, and taking care of has happened
in the process of cultural and social environment conditioning
that has happened with him.
It may be in the prison, maybe in the custody,
maybe in his own social environment where he lived
with the kind of people around him.
When we talk about Chandrakant Jha...
I must say that the man already knows a lot about how investigations are done.
And he has a sharp memory.
All of us have been surprised at the amount of knowledge he possesses.
He knew that his life was at stake
as he was charged with three serious murder cases
and he would certainly be sentenced to death
if he gets convicted in court.
He used to study his own case.
He even asked me to arrange for some law books for him
that were written in Hindi
so that he could study and defend his own case.
He used to try and figure out the entire case but...
there's always a difference between a layman and a professional.
Some of the questionnaires he prepared would weaken his case.
Convincing him to refrain from doing something was very difficult.
He was kept in prison during his trials. There were no complaints about him.
I had a feeling that he was doing that intentionally
so that he could use his good behavior at the time of disposal of the case.
He wanted to show he had a clean record
and that he didn't even pick a fight with anybody.
He wanted to practice good behavior.
He had a sharp intellect and it seemed like he had everything figured out.
He was planning everything he had to prove in court,
and all the possible support he could get from people.
He kept up good behavior in prison and also changed his handwriting. So...
He was an intellectual man.
His whole preoccupation in the jail was just this.
He was going round and round in circles.
So, this meaningful engagement...
According to him, this is a meaningful engagement
because the day he wins, he will win over the system as well.
And his identity will be established.
He bought some groceries for me.
He bought me a stove and even water.
He asked me to cook food
while he was gone.
I was done cooking food and he still hadn't returned home.
My name is Bharati.
Anil Mandal was my husband.
We moved to Delhi with our kids
and started selling garlic and other vegetables.
My husband sometimes worked in the market,
and sometimes he went to Punjab for agricultural work.
When I was pregnant with my son,
Anil sent me over to my parents' house for a few days.
When I came back, I found out that
someone had framed him for some criminal activity.
When I came back home, he was locked up in prison.
Someone else had to bail him out.
He returned home in the evening
and told me that he had to attend a court hearing.
He said, "Cook food for us, Bharati."
"I'm going to the court, but I'll be back soon."
But he never returned home.
I thought he must have gone somewhere
in search of work or to make some money.
Or maybe he was put behind bars once again.
I thought he would at least get enough food in prison,
and he'd come back soon.
I thought if my father was in prison,
he would be alive.
Maybe the police weren't letting him go.
I had to find some work so that I could bail him out with the money.
That's all that came to my mind.
So, I started working in the market.
I started rag picking. I would sell bottles.
Sometimes, bottles and plastic bags.
Or scraps of vegetables.
The money that I earned covered up the house rent
as well as the bribe that cops took from us for visiting.
I used to earn only around five to ten rupees after working all day.
I could never earn more than that no matter how hard I tried.
My mother often visited the prison to search for my father.
One day, I asked her to take me along with her to the prison.
So, she used to take me with her.
Every time we went there,
the cops would take money from us and ask us to wait outside for some time.
The cop then came out after some time and said that he couldn't let us see Dad,
and told us to visit some other day.
We went to Rohini in search of Anil.
We also stopped by at Tis Hazari Court.
We tried to look for him in every possible place.
Once every month we would have to spend.
They took at least two thousand or so every time we went there in search of Dad.
Every time we went to a police station,
they sent us to another one.
It was a never-ending loop.
We were just being played.
It's only been three years
since the police informed us that Anil was dead.
They told us that his dead body was found.
We don't know when this incident took place.
We don't know the time he was murdered
or even the date is unknown.
My mother told me that
Chandrakant Jha killed my father
and left his body right outside Tis Hazari court.
When the police discovered the body,
they should have at least let us identify the body once.
If the police had already made the death certificate,
that means they had identified the body.
It couldn't be made otherwise.
Now we just believe in the certificate and what the police have told us
-about Anil being murdered. -Yes.
Couldn't they inform us about it earlier?
What was the big deal in letting us know?
Why did they unnecessarily make us run from pillar to post?
We are humans too.
-We have stopped thinking about all this. -Yes.
-We have left it in the past. -We don't think about it anymore.
We have left it behind.
When we got a call from you guys
we agreed because we wanted to hear what you had to say.
We wanted to hear what you knew about all this.
We have left all this behind.
Delhi is a place
where a lot of migrants come to settle down.
These migrants come to Delhi
to earn a living, and not to die.
They do not have enough money
or a family to care for them.
They didn't have anyone influential to help them out.
So, they didn't get the support that they actually needed.
And that was really unfair.
Just because they were migrants, they went unnoticed.
It may not be the same in this case,
but there are many cases where such things go unnoticed.
I am not a mental health expert,
but I can tell you using common sense as a social scientist that
if someone is working continuously for 12 to 14 hours
and has grown up in the open air of a village...
Here,
most of the migrants are impoverished
and live in cramped conditions.
Some don't even have a roof over their heads.
They have to live on the streets.
Living in such conditions must have impacted their mental health.
Most of the Bihari migrants are working in the lowest occupation.
Generally, the word "Bihari" is used as a bad term.
Apathy. I'll call it apathy.
When a certain accused belongs to a particular
segment of society,
we often tend to shut our eyes.
We don't look at those cases very minutely or very closely.
We don't even bother about the conviction.
We just take it for granted
and this person is going to get convicted.
He perhaps could have done it.
And even when there is weak evidence, people get convicted.
The media never reports about cases like these.
Chandrakant's case was lost.
Similarly, several hundred cases get lost every year.
And the high-profile cases are
what the media and journalists focus on.
But in cases like this when somebody's life,
liberty, or perhaps somebody's family is involved,
because of their background,
we often tend to lose focus.
For people like him,
if you can go deep enough to try to understand him and help him out,
they're the people who turn overnight.
That is possible by introducing
pro-social thinking,
pro-social feeling,
pro-social behavior,
and a pro-social value which can give can an identity to him.
Otherwise, he will not change.
That is more important.
But that is where I said
for me to be hopeful for people like this is...
once again, is the way he defends himself.
It is his good behavior in the social control environment.
That means he is capable of that.
To become what he is permanently.
So, if courts are so considerate to send
this kind of people to rehabilitation programs,
we can try out and come out with research
and say whether it helps or it doesn't help.
If you give me a chance,
I could prove if it works.
He was not a man who would have really mattered a lot
either to society or even to the media.
People had forgotten about this case.
Society perhaps does not even know that Chandrakant
is currently out on parole.
He's meeting people, he's going to the market, he's buying vegetables.
He's doing everything that every common man does.
It's the same man who was supposed to be dangerous to the entire society.
He has been out on parole,
but he still remains an invisible man.
All that was going on in my mind was that
Chandrakant made a huge mistake by killing my father.
Had I ascertained the situation earlier, I would have killed him
without any hesitation.
I could have done it.
How can I spare someone
who has ruined my entire life and my future?
I wouldn't mind bearing the consequences.
SITA RAM
For everything, you know, what is his mental preoccupation?
At the present moment, his isolation,
should be the criteria to decide
whether he should be allowed to go or he should not be allowed to go.
If you ask legally, then yes, it is his right and he should be allowed.
Today, if the court decides to free him and let him out...
What is the aim of his life? What is the goal of his life?
Is it to really take care of his family, or is it to go out and commit more crimes?
I have a feeling that it is the latter.