As news broke on Friday afternoon that here is where Sohanlal Valmiki, the alleged attacker of former nurse Aruna Shanbaug, stays, the village suddenly came to the attention of the outside world.
Sohanlal, then a ward boy at King Edward Hospital in Mumbai, brutally assaulted Aruna in November 1973, leaving her in a vegetative state for about four decades till she died in the hospital earlier this month. He was jailed but released in 1980. But he was not to be heard again until Friday.
As a big crowd, largely of media persons, waited outside his house in the Balmiki settlement in one corner of the village, Sohanlal had not returned home from work as a sanitary worker in the nearby National Thermal Power Plant at Dadri.
Krishna, his 26-year-old son, along with his younger brother Ravindar, was finding it difficult to handle media queries.
The villagers and neighbours described Sohanlal as a “thorough gentleman”.
Mr. Krishna defended his father. “My father is not a criminal. He didn’t rape anybody. He was framed in that case for which he had to spend seven years in jail in Mumbai,” he said.
Krishna said his father was never convicted of rape. “He was framed in that case of assault and loot, a crime he did not commit,” he said.
Naresh Balmiki, a neighbour, said Sohanlal, a resident of Dadupur in Bulandshahr district, had gone to work in Mumbai in the early 1960s.
“When he returned to Dadupur, he found that his ancestral properties were occupied by his relatives. He then decided to start a new life and came to Parpa, which is his in-laws’ place,” Naresh told The Hindu .
The village pradhan, Jogindar Singh, said nobody in the village knew that there was a case of rape against Sohanlal.
