Hell Comes Home

How a seedy nexus—involving a Muzaffarpur strongman, the state police, district officials and a minister’s spouse—flourished on CM Nitish Kumar’s watch

- Amitabh Srivastava

A crime of unimaginable brutality, a trail of complicity and collusion going all the way up to the highest echelons of the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) report highlighting the sexual abuse of orphan girls at a state governmentsponsored shelter in Muzaffarpur city was unforgivably ignored for a whole month after it was submitted on April 26. It was only on May 26 that Atul Prasad and Raj Kumar, IAS officers at the helm of the state social welfare department, found time to convene a meeting to distribute the document to district officials. Even then, it shockingly took them five more days to file an FIR.

Commissioned to conduct a social audit of all 110 state-sponsored shelter homes in Bihar, TISS had red-flagged the murky operations at Muzaffarpur’s Balika Griha, run by Brajesh Thakur, a local strongman. The TISS report sought immediate legal intervention to rescue the inmates, who had allegedly been subjected to “violence and sexual abuse”.

Police investigations, including the medical examination of 42 inmates that followed the FIR, revealed that 34 girls had been drugged, tortured and repeatedly raped over months. It was only then that Thakur, who runs the social welfare department-sponsored NGO Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti, was arrested and the children from Balika Griha were shifted to more secure shelters.