It was a regular Friday evening after school. Two teenage siblings stepped out of their home — the only closed space that promised safety and freedom — in a city where crime lurked at most corners. With each tiny step they took, 17-year-old Geeta Chopra, a melomaniac, was growing closer to the musical journey that defined her world. Accompanying her was a tall boy, 15-year-old Sanjay Chopra. But their journey ended that day as the Chopra siblings were abducted and murdered.
This crime, committed on Saturday, August 26, 1978, shook not only Delhi, where it happened, but the entire country. From police navigating a web of investigation to the Parliament forming laws, which would set a precedent for safety and protection laws of the nation, Sudeep Chakravarti’s narrative non-fiction, Fallen City: A Double Murder, Political Insanity and Delhi’s Descent from Grace, traces the events of the evening to the execution of the convicts, while the capital was facing consequences of personal political gains. The book won the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman in the Non-Fiction category on January 2. The award included a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh, a citation, and a trophy.
Excerpts follow:
Why did the rape and murder of two children catch your interest for a book?
Geeta and Sanjay Chopra’s murder was horrific. Two people — Billa and Ranga — who were executed for it have become bywords in villainy in India. In fact, Billa and Ranga are used as descriptions of evil people to this day.
The people of Delhi couldn’t believe that it could happen to the children of a naval captain. In our country, people meet with tragedies very frequently. But only when it happens to somebody like us, or whatever describes people like us in urban India, does it become visceral. It becomes something that we can relate to.
The killings, trauma, investigation, judicial process, and execution, which spanned four years, led to a situation where the entire capital was transfixed. Delhi and the Parliament came to a standstill for several weeks. Thousands of school and college students from across town gathered at the Boat Club, to protest against the death and to demand safety and security for the children of Delhi, while they were actually speaking for the children of India.
It brought out the barbarity. Children had been killed. It was a very gripping story. That’s what drew me.
How did you go about researching and reconstructing the events in the book?
During my research for the book, I retraced the steps Geeta and Sanjay took before they were abducted and then murdered. I tracked the route, and I walked and walked several hundred kilometres in Delhi, because for me, it’s important to get that sense of memory of the time and place.
The brutal murder and the aftermath had a tremendous resonance across India. In fact, during my research, I read newspapers from Chennai of the time, as there were rumours that Billa and Ranga had run to Madras, as it was called then. It affected much more than the city and its citizens, and the capital.
What was the idea behind connecting the social and political history of the time to the murder?
I could have easily approached the book as a true crime. But I did not want to sensationalise anything. It was a story of a certain time in Delhi and India’s life. India was slightly unstable then and was looking for stability. Then this horror happened very quickly after the emergency, Sanjay Gandhi’s death, Operation Blue Star, and the Anti-Sikh riots. It was a dark arc of Delhi, a dark arc of India. So, I wanted to locate this story within that time, because it affected society, politics, law, criminal jurisprudence, legal matters, presidential crisis, and more. To me, Sanjay and Geeta Chopra’s death, and Billa and Ranga were more than an episode. It had far greater value, and I wanted to research that and set the killings in the context of a larger socio-political context.
How did you decide that this part of history needs to be documented in a book?
For me, telling a slice of life does not need a particular day. Important moments in the country’s time and trajectory are stories that can be told any time. If you make an interesting enough time, then a story, to me, can be told any time if it is told with honesty. As chroniclers, researchers, writers, or historians, we tend to go past, but we don’t look at these formative years of our journey as a country.
According to you, when did ‘Delhi’s descent from grace’, as the title mentions, start?
A capital is by definition a very self important place. It carries with it a certain arrogance and character. Delhi’s been the capital of India since the British days, after being the imperial capital of so many dynasties. It’s also witnessed a lot of violence — partition riots, the Geeta and Sanjay murder, the 1984 riots — even in the present day, there are explosions of violence, suppression, and oppression in the capital. It has its grace, but it can also be a very ugly place from a psychological perspective. And to me, this dignity that Delhi has as a capital began to disappear, and disappeared. I would imagine that it happened long before Geeta and Sanjay’s deaths. But for me, growing up then, it definitely felt to me that the deaths began that descent. And then it was accelerated with the events that I described in the book over the next few years.