Thanks for reading The Caravan. If you find our work valuable, consider subscribing or contributing to The Caravan.
IT WAS A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER for Kailash Chandra Verma. At around 9 am on 22 April, he chatted with his son, Hemant Patel, on the phone. “Papa, I’ll come home in the evening,” Hemant told him. “You go to the court.” Kailash is a lawyer at the Varanasi district court. “That’s what he said, and that’s what I did,” he recalled to me. Nothing could have prepared him for the news that came less than six hours later: Hemant had been shot dead. “I felt like my soul had left my body.”
Kailash’s son was 18 years old. He studied at Gyandeep English School, in the Varanasi neighbourhood of Khushahal Nagar, and had just completed his twelfth-standard examinations. He had been living with Kailash’s brother CP Verma, a retired medical officer, so that he could be closer to the school. I met Kailash, in June, at his home in Marui, a village around twenty kilometres away from Varanasi. Apart from practising law, Kailash is also a farmer and lives in a five-room home along with his younger brother’s family. As we sat around their small courtyard, the teary-eyed father recounted the harrowing details of the day.
Around 1.30 pm on 22 April, Kailash said, Hemant received a call from Ravi Singh, the assistant director of the school and the son of its chairperson, Ram Bahadur Singh, who is also the convenor of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s good-governance cell for Varanasi district. “Ravi Singh sent two boys, Shashank Singh and Kishan Patel, to my brother’s home to bring Hemant.” Kailash did not know who the two boys were or whether they had an enmity with him. The three went to the school, and CCTV footage shows them and Ravi later entering the compound of Ravi’s house, which is next door. “There, at around 2.30 pm, under a conspiracy orchestrated by Ravi Singh, my son was shot dead with a pistol, point blank,” Kailash said.
When I asked him what might have been the motive, he said that neither Hemant nor the school authorities had told him about any issue. “If our son had made any mistake, he would’ve told us.” Moreover, he added, the school authorities had his phone number. “They could have talked to me. We had no such information that our son was doing something wrong.” Hemant had been studying in the school for eight years, since the fourth standard. “What the reason was, only my son could have explained it—but now he’s gone,” Kailash said. “Even if there was some issue, you can’t take someone’s life.”