Akku Yadav

Bharat Kalicharan Yadav (1971 – 13 August 2004), also known as Akku Yadav, was an Indian gangster, robber, home invader, kidnapper, serial rapist, serial killer, and extortionist. Akku grew up in the Kasturba Nagar slum, which is located in the Indian central city of Nagpur, Maharashtra. He lived and did business in the slum which housed a number of criminals and two rival gangs.

Akku's earliest known crime was a gang rape in 1991. Akku and his gang committed crimes consisting of rape, murder, home invasion, and extortion in Kasturba Nagar for 13 years, until his death. Akku tried to create a small business empire; he extorted money, harming and threatening those who resisted him. During his life as a criminal, Akku murdered at least three individuals. He tortured and kidnapped people, invaded homes, and raped over 40 women and girls. He bribed police, giving them money and buying them drinks to convince them to let him continue committing crimes. As a result, the police not only refused to stop Akku for many years, but supported him. Akku and his associates gang-raped women and girls as young as age 10 as a "warning" to those who resisted him.

After a woman named Usha Narayane resisted Akku and his gang, a mob burned down Akku's house. Akku went to the police seeking protection, and was arrested for his safety. During his bail hearing, on 13 August 2004, he was lynched in the courtroom by several hundred women who stabbed and stoned him. He had chili powder thrown in his face, and his penis was hacked off. The women all claimed responsibility for the murder, and although some were arrested, they were eventually acquitted. Although hundreds of women were involved in the lynching, the State CID had a different version of the events. Senior police sources said the lynching was carried out by four men and that the women who had claimed responsibility were protecting them. None of the women agreed with the police version. Police said that both men and women were present when the lynch mob appeared. On the day of the lynching, BBC News initially reported that about 14 women and several children forced their way into the courtroom and stabbed Akku to death. A film based on the incident, 200: Halla Ho, was released on 20 August 2021 digitally on ZEE5. A limited web series called Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom was released on Netflix depicting the story and interviews of the victims.

Biography Early life Akku Yadav grew up in Kasturba Nagar, a slum of Nagpur, Maharashtra. He had two younger brothers—Santosh and Yuvraj. According to author Mitzi Szereto, Akku's father, a milkman, had formed a criminal gang consisting of his sons, their cousins and family friends. Since childhood, along with several relatives and other neighbourhood boys, Akku extorted local vendors and shopkeeper for money or their products under threat of violence. In his teenage years, Akku was noted as a voyeur who spied on female residents defecating in the bushes.

In her book Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur, author Swati Mehta wrote: "by all accounts, a child of the neighbourhood, Akku had graduated from milkman's son to local menace".

Crimes Akku's first confirmed rape occurred in 1991, when Akku and his gang kidnapped a woman who passed by their hideout inside an abandoned building. After the rape, the woman reported the assault to Jaripatka police station, where she was initially ignored by the officers, who were receiving bribes from Akku from his extortion operation. Ultimately, a complaint was filed and Akku was arrested, but the case was never taken to court. Following his release by posting bail, Akku broke into the woman's home and beat her and her husband. The instance remained the only time where a rape led to a criminal complaint against Akku. who face a disproportionate level of difficulty in receiving justice for cases of sexual assault.

Pratibha Urkude and her husband Dattu ran a small grocery shop and Akku harassed them for years. He would pick up goods from the shop and refuse to pay or would simply pay much less than was owed. Sometimes he would demand money and become violent if they were unable to pay. Akku often worried he was being plotted against. As a result, he did not permit men or women to gather and talk. He made sure young boys did not play together, and if they did, Akku would break up their games. Suspicious that people were asking questions about him, he would warn people against reporting his crimes to the police, threatening them if they did so. Killing left inconvenient corpses that required him to bribe the police to prevent them from stopping his crimes.

Rape, however, was very stigmatizing and, as a result, the victims could be relied on to remain silent. Akku raped people to silence them far more frequently than murdering them. The women who killed Akku claimed that he had been raping and abusing local women with impunity for over a decade. They alleged that local police had refused to help his victims or pursue charges because Akku was bribing them. Yadav's crimes encompassed rape, murder, robbery, extortion, home invasion, assault, and criminal intimidation. Before his death, Akku had been arrested some 14 times. In late 1999, he was detained for a year under the Maharashtra preventive detention law—The Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Slumlords, Boot-leggers, Drug Offenders and Dangerous Persons Act 1981.

Akku allegedly raped so many people that according to residents of the Kasturba Nagar slum, a rape victim lives in every other house there. One person described Akku as "the Gabbar Singh of Kasturba Nagar" saying, "We stayed mostly indoors when Akku was around". Women have said Akku and his gang would invade homes any time of the day. and tortured her in front of her daughter and several neighbours by cutting off her breasts. Akku then sliced Bhagat into pieces on the street, killing her. A man named Avinash Tiwari, one of the neighbours, was horrified by the murder and planned to report Akku to the police. As a result, Akku butchered him. Akku and his men gang-raped a woman named Kalma ten days after she gave birth. After what happened to her, Kalma committed suicide; she burned to death after dousing herself with kerosene and lighting it. Akku's gang pulled another woman from her house when she was seven months pregnant. They stripped her naked and raped her on the road in public view.

Akku ordered his men to drag girls as young as age 12 to a nearby derelict building to gang rape. Akku's mother vacated his house.

Death

After the police arrested Akku for his own protection, a bail hearing was scheduled for him on 13 August 2004 in India's Nagpur District Court. Word spread through the adjoining neighborhood that he would be released. The police planned to keep him in custody until everyone had calmed down and then release him. The bail hearing was supposed to take place miles away in the centre of Nagpur.

Hundreds of women marched from the slums to the courthouse carrying vegetable knives and chili powder, walked into the courtroom and took seats near the front. Akku walked in and was confident and unrepentant. At about 2:30 to 3:00 PM, when Akku appeared, he saw a woman he had raped. Akku mocked her, called her a prostitute and said he would rape her again. The police laughed. The woman started hitting him on the head with her footwear. She told Akku either she would kill him or he would have to kill her saying, "We can't both live on this Earth together. It's you or me."

The women claimed the murder was unplanned. One woman said: "We didn't have any formal meetings, but it spread by word of mouth that we had to take united action."

Aftermath

The women returned to Kasturba Nagar to tell their husbands and fathers they had killed Akku. The slum celebrated, and families put on music and danced in the streets. They bought food and handed out fruit to their friends. Five women were arrested immediately but released following demonstrations in the city. Every woman living in the locality claimed responsibility for the lynching. In 2012, Narayane was acquitted. Twenty-one others, including six women, were also arrested; in 2014 it was reported that all had been released due to lack of evidence.

A judge noted a lack of reliable witnesses to the lynching, including unreliable police statements, and cited Akku's autopsy report, which showed alcohol in his system, as proof that he was receiving preferential treatment from police. ACP Dalbir Bharati said: "There are 200 women who say we did it. The investigating officer found no weapon or blood marks on the five women who were arrested, we found no evidence against these women." The grandmother, who was in her 50s, was harassed and menaced by Mukri. The grandmother told the teens about this and the teens warned Mukri, but he continued to victimize the grandmother. Mukri, like Akku, also had a history of crime.

In fiction and media In 2011, a documentary about Akku called Candles in the Wind was released. In 2015, a movie inspired by Akku called Keechaka was released. It was controversial and women protested against the movie because of the graphic violence against women depicted in it. The movie's director, N.V.B. Chaudhary, defended the film, saying it supports women. 200 Halla Ho, a crime thriller film released in 2021 featuring actor Amol Palekar, was based on Akku Yadav.