By SURESH NAUTIYAL – Greenananda
SOME murders refuse to remain isolated events. They refuse closure. Instead, they return again and again—as moral disturbances, as unfinished questions, as mirrors held up to the state. They expose not only individual brutality but the slow corrosion of institutions meant to protect life. Such killings do not merely end lives; they fracture public faith.
The brazen murders of Kiran Negi (2012) and Ankita Bhandari (2022) belong to this disturbing category. Separated by a decade and unfolding in different geographies, these cases trace a single, chilling arc: the steady erosion of India’s criminal justice system—from negligence to complicity, from procedural failure to consequence-free power.
Kiran Negi, a migrant from Garhwal in Uttarakhand, was abducted in February 2012 while returning home from work in Dwarka, a rapidly expanding urban zone of the national capital. This was not an ungoverned periphery. It was a space dense with police jurisdictions, CCTV promises, and the rhetoric of urban safety. Yet Kiran disappeared with frightening ease. Her body was later discovered in a mustard field in Rewari, Haryana—across a state border, as though her death itself anticipated the administrative evasion that would follow.
For migrants from Uttarakhand living in Delhi–NCR—government employees, teachers, journalists, IT professionals, professors, bureaucrats, call-centre workers, guards, students, and domestic workers—Kiran’s murder struck with particular force. Candlelight marches emerged in Dwarka and other localities, often after working hours, cautious and fragile. The grief was real, but so was the fear: fear of losing employment, housing, or becoming politically visible in a city that treats migrant lives as interchangeable. No major political party sustained the agitation. No institutional platform translated mourning into sustained pressure.
When the trial court and later the Delhi High Court awarded death sentences, many believed justice had been delivered. That belief collapsed a decade later, when the Supreme Court acquitted all the accused. The judgment itself was constitutionally sound and legally necessary. What it revealed, however, was devastating: the investigation had been fundamentally defective. Identification procedures were unreliable, forensic chains were broken, and evidence was poorly preserved. The state had constructed a case heavy on suspicion and light on proof. Justice was not denied by the judiciary; it was rendered impossible by the state.
Kiran Negi’s murder thus became a crime without a convict—not because the courts failed, but because the investigative apparatus ensured collapse long before the matter reached final adjudication.
Ten years later, history repeated itself—this time not with greater brazenness, but with deeper shamelessness. Ankita Bhandari, a young woman from Garhwal, working at a resort near Rishikesh, went missing in 2022. Uttarakhand projected itself as spiritual, serene, and safe. What followed exposed how hollow that narrative was.
From the outset, the administrative response was lethargic. Crucial early hours were lost. Then came the act that permanently scarred the case: the demolition of the Vanantra Resort, the primary crime scene, by the state itself. This was not a procedural error. It was institutional sabotage. Destroying a crime scene during an active investigation ensured that forensic certainty would never be possible. No bureaucratic justification can cleanse this act of either its intent or its consequence.
Unlike 2012, public anger in 2022 was immediate and widespread. Protests erupted across Uttarakhand and spilled into Delhi–NCR. Hill migrants who had once protested hesitantly now gathered with sharper political language—at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, Uttarakhand Bhawan, university campuses, and residential clusters. This time, slogans named what had earlier remained implicit: political patronage, administrative shielding, and police subservience to power.
Ankita’s murder laid bare how women working in tourism, hospitality, and the informal economy are treated—as disposable labour, protected only until they inconvenience those who wield influence.
Read together, the cases of Kiran Negi and Ankita Bhandari reveal not coincidence but pattern. In the first, the state failed through negligence and incompetence. In the second, it failed through complicity and protection of power. In both, evidence was compromised. In both, early warnings were ignored. In both, accountability dissolved as it moved upward through the hierarchy.
The Uttarakhand connection is not accidental; it is consequential. Migration from the hills has produced a workforce that is economically indispensable yet politically negligible. Young women from this community occupy spaces of labour where vulnerability is structural and justice conditional.
Over the decade separating these cases, the migrant community’s response has evolved—greater awareness, sharper articulation, and wider participation. Yet mobilisation remains episodic. Without sustained legal collectives, independent watchdog institutions, or meaningful political representation, outrage risks becoming ritual rather than reform. Memory survives; mechanisms do not.
The Supreme Court’s acquittal in the Kiran Negi case reaffirmed a foundational principle: suspicion cannot replace proof. But it left a deeper question unanswered—one that haunts both cases. Who is punished when the state itself delays action, destroys evidence, or conducts defective investigations?
In neither case has there been serious accountability for police officers, administrators, or political authorities whose actions—or deliberate inaction—crippled the pursuit of justice. Courts can only judge what the state places before them. When the state fails, courts cannot manufacture justice.
The Philosophical Question: Why Such Murders Matter Beyond the Crime
These murders compel a philosophical reckoning. Such killings are not only crimes against individuals; they are assaults on the moral architecture of society. When the state fails to protect its most vulnerable citizens—working women, migrants, young employees—it sends a silent message: some lives are negotiable.
There has been speculation about whether youth, visibility, or beauty played a role in these women’s vulnerability. This question must be addressed without denial, and without sliding into victim-blaming. In patriarchal societies, women’s bodies often become sites of projection—but they are never causes of violence. Beauty does not invite murder; power converts visibility into entitlement.
In unequal societies, women’s independence, confidence, and presence in public spaces can provoke resentment. When that resentment is paired with entitlement and protected by impunity, violence becomes possible. What should be celebrated as dignity is misread as provocation. Responsibility never shifts—to appearance, profession, or origin. It rests squarely with patriarchal conditioning, abuse of power, and institutional collapse. The question is not how women are seen, but who is allowed to act without fear of consequence.
Towards a Citizen’s Charter for Women’s Safety
If the deaths of Kiran Negi and Ankita Bhandari are to mean more than recurring grief, society must move beyond ritual outrage and moral lament to durable structures of protection and accountability. A Citizen’s Charter for Women’s Safety must become a non-negotiable civic guarantee—one that mandates immediate registration of FIRs and time-bound investigations in all cases of missing women, with criminal liability fixed for delays; that treats the destruction or tampering of evidence as a grave criminal offence rather than an excusable administrative lapse; that ensures automatic transfer of investigations to independent agencies whenever political or economic power is involved; that makes accountability travel upward, fixing responsibility not only on constables but on supervisory officers, administrators, and ministers wherever institutional failure occurs; that legally recognises migrant and informal-sector women as structurally vulnerable citizens entitled to assured legal aid, safe housing, and enforceable workplace protections; and that establishes permanent, citizen-led watchdog bodies with statutory authority to oversee investigations into crimes against women.
Kiran Negi and Ankita Bhandari were not killed because India lacks laws. They were killed because institutions have been allowed to function without consequence.
From Dwarka to Rishikesh, the geography changes. The outcome does not.
Until this cycle is broken, these names will not rest in history. They will return—again and again—as accusation, as warning, and as an unanswered demand upon the conscience of the state.
Justice is not charity. It is obligation. And until it is enforced as such, every assurance remains hollow, and every verdict incomplete.
( Suresh Nautiyal is a senior journalist formerly Consulting editor, UNI. The views expressed in this article are his personal )
