On the evening of July 27, 2018, Naina (7) told her parents that she was going to a store close to their home in Rajasthan’s Mogyabeh village. She disappeared into the dusk. It was around the same time that Komal Lodha (then 17) was being served dinner at his home, his mother said. The next day, Naina was found 500 metres from her home — raped and murdered — and Lodha was arrested for her killing. He was convicted and sentenced to death by a trial court in a year.
Four years later, the State Police have been forced to reopen the investigation into Naina’s death and start from scratch after the Rajasthan High Court found that the DNA evidence in the case absolved Lodha and that he had been wrongfully prosecuted by the police.
As 21-year-old Lodha waits in a Kota jail for his conviction to be overturned, the residents of Mogyabeh, numbering less than 1,000, are clueless, just like the police, about who could have killed the tribal girl. But unlike the police, they refuse to believe that someone from their village could have murdered her. The villagers say they believed Lodha was involved only because the police had insisted that they had “test results” that pointed to his involvement. Today, despite the High Court’s finding, some still hold Lodha responsible, while others are confused.
