A decade after the Nanavati case, another crime of passion jolted and fascinated India

By the time the police finally reached 23, Kandhari Lane on the night of July 11, 1968, it was 2 am. It had been nearly three hours after the gunshots had echoed through the neighbourhood. A small crowd lingered outside the house and inside, a body lay splayed between the drawing room and the verandah. The cause of death was a single bullet from a double barrel shotgun, shot straight through the temple. And if the verdicts of the sessions court, the high court and the Supreme Court are to be believed, weeping inconsolably in the drawing room, not too far from the body of Dr Hari Om Gautam was Shamim Rahmani, the victim’s lover and the principal accused in what is regarded as “the love case of the 1960s”.

The murder of Gautam, according to many, was the first of its kind that Lucknow had witnessed. It was sensational, causing a stir not only in the city and state, but all over the country.

Scandalous affairs

Crimes, their coverage and reporting, have always served as catalysts in India’s history. In the 1950s, the Nanavati Case led to an increase in circulation of newspapers. The 1968 case, too, had it all – Rahmani belonged to Lucknow’s erstwhile elite taluqdari (landowning) class and, at 22, her beauty was the talk of the town. Even today people remember her “long, dark hair and almond eyes”. Gautam was a tall and dashing young doctor on the fast track and was allegedly a member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad with connections to the top. In addition, he was a married man with three children.

The case was everywhere – in the press, on the radio. The BBC sent reporters to cover the case, while the Illustrated Weekly of India devoted several pages to reconstructing the crime. A pulpy paperback called The Shamim Rahmani Case and other famous trials was published by Hind Pocket Books, authored by the eminent legal mind KL Gauba.

According to Gauba, Rahmani and Gautam met in 1966 when her father Raja Azizur Rehmani, a taluqdar from Lakhimpur Kheri, suffered a paralytic stroke. That May, he was admitted to Lucknow’s Balrampur Hospital. Gautam, who was 33 at the time, was one of the doctors treating the ailing raja and if the judgement of the Supreme Court is any reference to what happened, “The love affair started between the voluptuous doctor and the unscrupulous Shamim.”

Once Raja Rehmani was discharged from the hospital, he stayed in a house on Kandhari Lane, where the doctor became a regular visitor. “The love affair of Gautam and Shamim went on progressing and reached a scandalous height,” said the Supreme Court, again happily passing a moral judgement. Gautam started visiting Rahmani at her house almost daily and sometimes more than once a day.

The love affair became an object of public consumption. “It was a matter of the mohalla (neighbourhood), so discussion was rife around the issues. Kafi cheeni goya hoti thi (a lot of gossip was exchanged). People would ask, ‘Why is this doctor coming here so often?’ I know of people who had followed the doctor to his residence,” said the real Nawab Ibrahim Sheesh Mahal, a member of the Royal Families of Awadh Association.

Changing world

This openness, and complete disregard for the mohalla’s morals, was unheard of in the Sixties and even Justice Untwalia, in his Supreme Court judgement, commented that “records do not show resentment or protests on the part of the family members of Shamim although being unmarried she was carrying on almost openly with an elderly married person”. As the Nawab reiterated, what was peculiar was that it involved one of the taluqdari families – the doyens of Lucknowi high society and, in many cases, at the helm of maintaining conservative moral codes.

The rajas and the taluqdars of Awadh were the wealthiest and most influential sections of society and were the baronial class of India. They had large havelis in the countryside and owned agricultural land, mango orchards and schools in Lucknow. The Colvin Taluqdar College, for instance, was exclusively for them. They helped build the princely state but during Partition, a large number of taluqdars left for Pakistan. Those who were left behind were faced with their land, wealth and status being threatened by the actions of the state, which first implemented the Zamindari Abolition Act, 1950 and then removed the privy purse. Now with their land and lifestyle under threat, the exclusivity and access also began to wane – spheres earlier reserved for the taluqdars were opened up to anyone with wealth.

Many of the taluqdars were transitioning and making the jump to electoral politics or the administration. The Rahmanis were one such family. Rahmani’s two elder brothers, Amir Ahmed Rahmani and FAA Rahmani, had become influential people in Lucknow. Amir ran a business, and was involved in the politics of the time, and the latter was working with the government of India. To have a doctor come home with such regularity, to be invested in the health of the family could only be seen as a boon.

“Lucknow was a small city back in the 1960s, its population would not have been more than five lakh,” said Saqlain Shanney Naqvi, a poet, journalist and performing artist in the city. “You could count the number of lawyers, the number of doctors and the number of engineers. Small thefts would cause a stir in the city. To have a crime this big was something else.” Saqlain Naqvi is the brother of journalists Saeed and Jawed Naqvi and is the son of Barrister Ghulam Hasnain Naqvi, one of Rahmani’s lawyers.

The 1960s were changing Lucknow rapidly. Close on the heels of nearly three years of student protests, the university was burning with riots, picketing and violence. The 1967 elections had thrown a verdict that very few expected. The Congress had lost its footing in the country and in Uttar Pradesh, Chaudhary Charan Singh of the Samyunkta Vidhayak Dal took oath as the first non-Congress chief minister. (Though in just a matter of a few months the SVD lost support and the state lapsed into President’s Rule.)

Tumultuous relationship

It was perhaps this time of uncertainty that drew Rahmani and the doctor together. Saqlain Naqvi remembers her vividly – “The room that you’re sitting in is the same room where for a week Shamim, her mother and younger brother were brought to by my father to shield them from the press. She was a very beautiful girl, I remember her hair – it was very long – and she had big eyes. She enchanted Dr Gautam; he became crazy about her.”

For over a year, the two were involved in what seems to be a torrid love affair. When the investigations began, love letters exchanged between them were found and these made their way into the courts and the media. The letters revealed an intimacy that had reached, in the words of Justice Untwalia, “low levels of sexual lust also”. The correspondence revealed that Rahmani was possessive about Gautam, but was fine with him being married. On the other hand, the doctor was a serial philanderer and, according to the verdict, it seemed he had lost interest in Rahmani. The letters also showed that at a certain time Gautam had used his connections to stop a transfer and at another point promised to convert to Islam.

Things between the two had been on the decline for two weeks before the murder. She had publicly accosted the doctor and slapped him in the middle of Hazrat Ganj’s Kwality Restaurant, accusing him of having another affair. Later, Gautam was seen riding around on his scooter with another woman and this bit of information was passed on to Rahmani by her brother’s manservant.

It was these two facts that found themselves again and again in the court verdicts. Rahmani was enraged and scorned, which is what motivated her to plan the murder. Though the facts were loosely stitched together, their irrefutability was aided by the perception that Rahmani was unable to process her anger after having a “physical relationship” with Gautam.

Controversial case

KL Gauba insists that anguish, horror and disbelief swept through the courtroom when SN Shukla passed the verdict as guilty in the sessions court. The judge seemingly accepted the prosecution’s case that it was a premeditated murder, overlooking evidence that left doubts. But as Gauba writes, “Judges in lower courts hope that higher courts will upturn their verdicts.”

That did not happen. The Supreme Court said:

“The murder of the Doctor was the culmination of the wrong and vicious path of love and lust between him and appellant Shamim. As is not uncommon in such type of love affairs, the girl found the arms of her lover getting loose and cold. It resulted in her frustration. In a jealous and revengeful attitude she used her arms on a gun and shot her lover dead.”

There were several loopholes in the case, as KL Gauba points out. There were three broad areas of concern – one, whether the gun that the police found was truly the gun that was used to murder Gautam. The gun, according to the case diary, had not been fired, because it did not smell like it had been. In addition, Rahmani’s fingerprints were not found on the trigger and it was said that her brothers handled it after her, but that cross verification did not take place. The defence was also trying to point to another possible culprit – a cousin who had been in love with Rahmani and had been there during the day.

Gauba’s biggest concern, however, related to how two extrajudicial confessions allegedly made by Rahmani found their way into the court’s decision. The most important of the two was heard by Kalika, a tailor who was having a conversation with someone outside the house. He said he heard the gunshot and right after that, he heard Rahmani confess to her mother, “Doctor had deceived me. He had ruined my life. I have done no wrong in murdering him.” Kalika allegedly said he heard another confession – “Bhaiya take this gun and shoot me because I do not want to live any longer.”

One after another, editorials, newspapers articles and opinion pieces recreated and re-enacted the murder case. One such was the Urdu magazine Bano, which ran a story titled Shamim ki Kahani that sought to give a motive to the murder, giving hearsay the weight of fact. Rahmani took the author and the magazine to court and won, but the highly imaginative retelling of the case was enough to swing the verdict against her.

Rahmani was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court in 1975. In May of the same year, she was out after being given a pardon by Chenna Reddy, the governor of Uttar Pradesh. While in prison, several members of civil society and even a group of Members of Parliament, led by the Communist Parvathi Krishnan, submitted a memorandum to grant Rahmani reprieve.

Out of the six years the case went on for, she only spent two years in jail. The rest of the time she was either out on bail or, between 1974 and 1975, being treated for a chest infection. As soon as she was pardoned, a peculiar bunch of offers came her way – chances to star in Bollywood films, though “of which nature” she said she did not know. Rahmani left Lucknow shortly after and moved to Delhi, where she still lives.

“When a man kills a woman it’s almost normal, but when a woman takes the life of a man it is something that people don’t forget,” said Syed Husain Afsar, an eminent journalist in Lucknow and the son of another of her lawyers, Barrister Afsar Husain. While the house at 23, Kandhari Lane no longer exists, one can find the location only by asking for “Shamim ka Hatta”, or Shamim’s house.