With CBI arraigning parents, where does justice for the Walayar girls stand?

The muddy, uneven path leading up to the home of the "Walayar mother" — as she is referred to in the local media — cuts through a largely arid desolate area with long, dry grasses and weeds on both sides, not far from the Walayar highway toll plaza on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border.

- Vishnu Varma

WALAYAR: The muddy, uneven path leading up to the home of the "Walayar mother" — as she is referred to in the local media — cuts through a largely arid desolate area with long, dry grasses and weeds on both sides, not far from the Walayar highway toll plaza on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border.

It was on the afternoon of January 13, 2017, a regular day when both parents were out for work at a construction site, the body of the 13-year-old was found in the asbestos-roofed small brick shed in which the family lived. The house beside it was under-construction at the time. While the postmortem report indicated that she was sexually assaulted, the police failed to make much headway in the case.

On March 4 that year, the girl's nine-year-old sister was also discovered in the same manner. The suspicious back-to-back deaths of the two sisters and the subsequent confirmation that both of them were raped repeatedly triggered widespread outrage and kicked up a major furore in Kerala.

The then Left Democratic Front (LDF) government handed over the probe to an SIT led by then Narcotic deputy superintendent of police MJ Sojan whose team arrested four men, two of whom were close relatives of the victim's mother, and a minor, charging them with rape and sexual offences under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act, 2012. The Sojan-led police swiftly concluded that both girls died by suicide unable to bear the sexual assaults and harassment by the accused. However, the girls' parents countered the police claim and maintained that they were murdered by those who sexually assaulted them. For this, they mainly relied on the younger girl's testimony, registered before she met with same circumstances, to the police that she had seen two masked men leave the shed minutes before her sister's death.