Major Gogoi Case: Wary Silence In Girl's Village, Family Wants Case Buried

In a village just half a km off a Srinagar-Gulmarg highway, several women were huddled together talking loudly on Thursday afternoon outside a baker’s shop. Their conversation is about the girl who, on Wednesday, May 23, was spotted with Major Nitin Gogoi at a local hotel in Srinagar.

The Major and the girl were briefly detained by the police on Wednesday after a Kashmiri armyman, Sameer, accompanying the Major, had an altercation with the hotel staff. The hotel staff had refused to provide a room to the Major and the girl after they found the girl was a local Kashmiri. Sameer entered into a brawl with the hotel staff, leading to a crowd gathering, and later the intervention by the police.

Major Gogoi is the same army officer who had been at the centre of the controversial 'human shield' incident last year.

This whole rural swathe seems caught up in the current controversy now. Asked where the the girl lives, the village women said in unison, “Not in this village.” She is from a neighbouring village, around one and a half km away, they said.

In that village, of course, everyone knows the case -- the women gathered at the baker’s shop are talking about it. Local boys accompany reporters to the girl's house. The houses in the village are like elsewhere in the Valley, big and with a lawn in front.

The house in which the the girl lives, though, has only two tin-shed rooms at present: the family has brought down the old house, which was damaged in the floods of 2014, and is constructing a new one. The girl’s father is a labourer.

In one room, a thin and stricken woman sits in a corner responding to the queries of reporters. Her son, about 13, is in another corner, silent and dumbstruck.

The mother says Major Gogoi and Sameer visited her tin-shed house twice in recent evenings. “First time when he visited, I was terrified and I fainted,” she says, in a low pitch. “The Major asked us whether anyone was harassing us. We told him no one was. After that, he left," the mother says. They had come in civvies.

On Wednesday, her daughter left in the morning to visit a bank, the mother says. “We were in our fields when at about 3 pm villagers informed us about the incident,” she adds.

While her Aadhaar card shows the girl was born in 1999, the mother is unsure about her daughter’s age. One of the boys who introduces himself as her cousin says the girl was a good student but failed in matric. She is working with a self-help group, he adds.

Nothing is secret in the village.

The villagers know the police have handed over the girl to the family and the family has shifted her to some relatives who live around 10 km away, on the Bandipora-Srinagar highway.

There, at a two-storey house, the girl's temporary residence, a man who introduces himself as an uncle of the girl tells off reporters, saying he is not interested in any conversation. “We want to bury this case. We have other girls in the family; we don’t want this case to bring a bad name to them as well. This will tar our reputation. We have to think about our family,” says the bearded uncle.

Other male members of the family join him and talk aggressively. They say the same thing: they are not interested in pursuing the case. The female members are listening in to the conversation silently; the air is tense.

"What will happen ultimately? Nothing at all,” say the males. They blame the media for highlighting the case. “The betterment of all of us lies in burying the case and that is my advice to you too,” says an uncle.

They didn’t allow reporters to meet the girl.

According to the police, this is a case of “two adults” being together. “We have not filed any case as there is none," says a senior police official. He says the Major and his accomplice Sameer have been handed over to their army unit and the girl to the family.

“The probe has not concluded. The police are yet to see the statement the girl gave before the executive magistrate,” the official says.

Police sources say the girl told the magistrate that she had gone with Major Gogoi of "her own free will" as he was known to her. The statement was recorded before the magistrate under Section 164 of the CrPC. But the police say they are probing the case from all angles and would come up with report and hand that over to the army.