The murder that shook a mountain

Dark clouds gather in the skies contrasted by the cold, distant snow-clad peaks of the Himalayas that show themselves once in a while to the 50-odd families who stay in Uttarakhand’s Doob Srikot village. Situated at a height of about 3,500 feet in the Pauri Garhwal district, Doob Srikot stands on the side of a mountain. A rough road leads to the village with little infrastructure. Many houses are abandoned; some have only women and children. The men have left to look for work in towns.

In a yellow house, pale with age, weariness, and poverty, Soni Devi sits in front of the picture of her daughter, Ankita, who was just 19 when she was killed by her employer in September 2022. It is May 30, 2025, just a few hours since the Kotdwar court accorded life sentences to three men accused of Ankita’s murder: Pulkit Arya, the son of an erstwhile Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader from Uttarakhand; and his friends Saurabh Bhaskar and Ankit Gupta.

“My daughter was one of the brightest girls in the village. She had dreams and she worked hard to fulfil them,” says Soni, adding that Ankita was supporting their family of four. The court did not register the family’s plea that this be treated as a “rarest of rare” cases, a Supreme Court doctrine, in which the death penalty is meted out.

On September 18, 2022, Ankita Bhandari, who had been working as a receptionist at Vanantra Resort in Yamkeshwar, Uttarakhand, for 22 days, went missing. Her family was told about this the next day. Ankita’s parents and younger brother rushed to the police to file a report. The revenue officer, who in Uttarakhand has the responsibilities of the police, had already lodged a complaint by then — registered by Pulkit, who owned the resort.

Soon, the locals began to protest, spurred by friends and colleagues, who said that Ankita had been murdered after being harassed to have paid sex with an influential person. When pressure mounted on the Uttarakhand government, they shifted the case from the Revenue Police to the regular police, on September 22, and a Special Investigation Team (SIT) was formed. After two days of a search, the police found Ankita’s body in a canal.

Pulkit and his friends were arrested. Soon after the postmortem of the body, the MLA from Yamkeshwar, Renu Bisht, ordered ‘bulldozer action’ on the resort, one of the most important crime spots, from where evidence was yet to be collected. Ankita’s phone, a key source of evidence, was never found.

The steep climb to justice

In the intervening years, 97 witnesses have come to court; the BJP has expelled Pulkit’s father, Vinod Arya from the party; and the patwari in-charge (revenue sub-inspector) of the case was suspended. Ankita’s parents live in fear that their son will be targeted by the powerful if he leaves the village to find work. Questions are again being raised about an outdated system of policing inherited from the British Raj, where the Revenue Department doubled as a police force in these difficult-to-reach areas.

Soni and her husband Virendra have run from pillar to post for over two-and-a-half years to get justice. But their relief was shortlived. “I got to know that the men are set to challenge the life term in the Nainital High Court. It took all our savings and multiple loans to get even this little bit of justice for my daughter. The court failed to get answers to questions like who the VIP was for whom my daughter was being forced into prostitution,” says Soni. She breaks down every few minutes while talking about Ankita and the way her life was cut short.

Anuj Pundhir, Pulkit’s advocate, confirms that they are preparing to appeal in the HC. “We had to approach the High Court even to get copies of the documents related to the police investigation. The lower court kept refusing our requests to call witnesses for re-examination,” he says.

The doctor described Ankita’s body as having been pushed from a height. Through the investigation, Pulkit and his friends maintained that they had taken Ankita out for a ride as she needed a breath of fresh air because of family problems. They went on two-wheelers, going around Rishikesh, 40 km from Yamkeshwar.

Back at the resort, Pulkit said he told the chef that he would take Ankita’s dinner to her room. The next day, he asked the staff to access the room for a charger, which is when they found her missing. The court, after hearing the case, asked Pulkit to prove that Ankita had returned with them, which he couldn’t.

Soni talks about how, at every point, there were challenges: they had little money to fight the case — farming is difficult on the rugged terrain. Even selling their land was not an option: “Who will buy this?” she says. Their village is so remote it takes a climb, three bus rides, and a walk to reach court. As a result they would sometimes arrive a few minutes late for a hearing. “Sometimes, I would be so tired my husband would leave me by the road side, rush to court and pick me up on the way back,” she says. They were up against wealthy, powerful people.

Ankita’s father remembers that government staff jeered at him saying his daughter would be back soon. “Pulkit Arya is the son of Vinod Arya, a former Minister in the (Uttarakhand) BJP government when Trivendra Rawat (2017-2021) was the Chief Minister,” he says. He adds that bulldozing the resort was one way of shielding the powerful.

“After Ankita’s death, many people in our village asked their daughters studying and working in towns to return home. Society fights for equal rights for a daughter, but fails to give her a secure atmosphere to exercise these rights,” Soni adds.

Support systems

Uma Bhatt, the founder of Uttarakhand Mahila Manch, an organisation which fights for women’s rights, stood by the family, showing up in court with them, speaking to lawyers, organising protests, and taking the matter to the media.

“The ‘bulldozer action’ was done to save those VIPs for whom girls were being forced into prostitution in that resort. The resort was set on fire twice within a fortnight of the crime, just to destroy evidence,” says Bhatt. She feels that it was only due to the outpouring of people’s support to the family that the case couldn’t be suppressed despite strong political pressure.

“People had blocked the entry and exit ways of various roads in Pauri Garhwal as the case had shaken everyone. Some even say that they had seen such protests in the villages for the first time after the movement for Statehood for Uttarakhand (carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000),” says Reshma Panwar, who is pursuing a PhD degree from Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University in Pauri.

Reshma had joined the protests seeking justice for Ankita. “Every girl in the hills is struggling to break barriers. My father too is a poor farmer who cannot fund my education. I worked and studied simultaneously as I wanted to change my life and my family’s. Ankita too had the same dream,” she says.

P. Renuka Devi, who headed the SIT, says that the main challenge of the investigation was maintaining a balance between the media exposure and law and order because of the anger people were feeling. “The police worked hard to prepare the chargesheet. It is because of the foolproof investigation that the case reached its conclusion,” says Renuka, who is now a Deputy Inspector General with the Central Bureau of Investigation in Rajasthan.

Among the witnesses were Ankita’s friends and colleagues, who told the court that she was being forced to give ‘extra services’ to VIP customers who frequented the resort, and that she had refused. They also shared their WhatsApp exchanges with Ankita, who had once written that even if she were poor, she would never sell herself for ₹10,000 — the money she was allegedly promised for sexual acts.

WhatsApp chats also revealed that she had told a friend that Pulkit had tried to kiss her and that she had pushed him away. In another chat, she had said that she saw customers bring sex workers into the resort. The staff testified that Ankita would grow anxious when Pulkit called her. One of the witnesses testified that Pulkit treated her inappropriately. Another witness submitted that he received a call from Ankita on the day she was killed. She was wailing and asked him to pack her luggage so she could leave.

Politics over the dead

Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami assured the people of Uttarakhand as well as Ankita’s family that justice would be delivered. He spoke publically about the swift bulldozer action at the resort and how the government had formed the SIT under a female IPS officer.

After the judgment, Garima Dasauni, Congress spokesperson from Uttarakhand, called a press conference in Delhi, saying, “Mr. Dhami praised the bulldozer action on the resort which was tampering with evidence. So the CM and his MLA are above the law?”

She also alleges that the BJP government in Uttarakhand has done everything to save the so-called VIP, adding that the formation of the SIT was also one of the steps to save him from a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry, which Ankita’s family had demanded. The Congress also came down heavily on the BJP for releasing a poster soon after the judgement. “The BJP poster stated that CM Dhami had given Ankita’s father and brother government jobs,” Dasauni says.

Ankita’s father says he is a contractual worker at a government nursing college at a salary of ₹7,000 a month. Her brother currently has no job. The BJP poster, which was deleted from its social media handles, also claimed that the government had given the family ₹25 lakh, which Ankita’s father confirms they received.

Soon after Ankita’s murder, Vinod Arya’s older son Ankit Arya, a nominated vice-chairperson of the Uttarakhand OBC Commission, was removed from the post.

Dual doors for justice

The Ankita Bhandari murder case has not just sparked an uproar over the safety of women in the Himalayan State, but it has also once again brought to the fore the issue of the Revenue Police system in Uttarakhand. “Uttarakhand is the only State in India where revenue department officials like patwaris, kanungos (revenue inspectors), and naib tehsildars (at the Deputy Superintendent of police level) with hardly any police training, investigate crime cases. The ‘political will’ is the biggest reason why the State has failed to do away with Patwari Police system introduced by the British,” says former Director General of Police Aloke B. Lal.

Vijay Pal Singh Mehta, president of the Parwatiya Rajasv Nirikshak, Rajasv Upnirikshak Avam Rajasv Sewak Sangh, which works for the welfare of the Revenue Department staff in Uttarakhand, says that approximately 55% of policing in Uttarakhand’s 11 hill districts is done by patwaris. The State Revenue Department currently has 1,216 revenue police posts, of which 520 are vacant, and in the process of being filled.

According to data from the Uttarakhand police department, in 15 cases of heinous crimes which were transferred to the regular police from the Patwari Police since 2020, seven had a closure report due to lack of evidence.

The Nainital High Court in 2018 had asked the State to abolish the Patwari Police system. The court order detailed how Revenue Department officials were not trained to handle the scene of the crime, interrogation, voice analysis, fingerprints, track marks, and more. Neither were they familiar with criminal law, it had said. “Revenue Officers botch up the investigation resulting in acquittals,” the HC had said. Assembly Speaker Ritu Khanduri too had demanded that the government do away with this system immediately.

Five years after the order, the practice of Revenue Police continues.

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew

Published - June 07, 2025 09:04 pm IST