Exclusive: Our Child Would Have Been Alive...

THE WEEK traces the biological parents of the Bakarwal girl whose horrifying rape and murder has shocked India. Having lost their loved one and their home, they now live in fear and unfathomable agony

- Tariq Bhat

It was 2010. Eight years had passed since Aisha Hassan lost her three children in a bus accident. A member of the nomadic Bakarwal community, Aisha was still struggling to recover from the tragedy. She had given birth to two sons after the accident, but continued to mourn the death of her daughter, Shehla.

That year, Aisha adopted the two-month-old daughter of Fatima, the sister of her husband, Javed Hassan. The infant grew up to become the family’s darling.

By the time she turned seven, the child had been helping Aisha in her daily chores. She loved the company of sheep and horses, with whom she had grown up in the pastures of a village around 60km from Jammu. Sometimes, she would chase horses to see them gallop. Her favourite horse was Sunder, and she had a pet dog, Billu.

On January 10, as was her routine, she left her home with the horses. The horses returned at 4pm, but the girl did not. Hassan began a search, but could not find her. He then lodged a complaint with the police, suspecting that she had been kidnapped. The police, too, could not locate her.

A week later, her body was found in the woods. It bore signs of extreme torture.

Aisha was shattered, again. The girl who had helped her overcome a tragedy was gone. Like a lost soul, Aisha has been wandering the hills and meadows ever since. “I miss her a lot,” she told me. “When I close my eyes, I see her.”

She said Billu is gone, too. “After she was killed, Billu would go searching for her every day,” said Aisha. “One day, the dog left home and did not return.”

The girl’s murder, though gruesome, did not initially attract attention outside Jammu and Kashmir. It began making news after the police interrogated Shubham Sangra, the juvenile nephew of Sanji Ram, head of the local temple and a former revenue official.