Bharat Kalicharan Yadav (1971 – 13 August 2004), also known as Akku Yadav, was an Indian gangster, burglar, kidnapper, serial rapist, murderer, and extortionist. Akku grew up in the Kasturba Nagar slum, which is located in the Indian central city of Nagpur, Maharashtra. He lived and did business in the slum which housed a number of criminals and two rival gangs.
Akku's earliest known crime was a gang rape in 1991. Akku and his gang committed crimes consisting of rape, murder, home invasion, and extortion in Kasturba Nagar for 13 years, until his death. Akku tried to create a small business empire; he extorted money, harming and threatening those who resisted him. During his life as a criminal, Akku murdered at least three individuals. He tortured and kidnapped people, invaded homes, and raped over 40 women and girls. He bribed police, giving them money and buying them drinks to convince them to let him continue committing crimes. As a result, the police not only refused to stop Akku for many years, but supported him. Akku and his associates gang-raped women and girls as young as age 10 as a "warning" to those who resisted him.
After a woman named Usha Narayane resisted Akku and his gang, a mob burned down Akku's house. Akku went to the police seeking protection, and was arrested for his safety. During his bail hearing, on 13 August 2004, he was lynched in the courtroom by several hundred women who stabbed and stoned him. He had chili powder thrown in his face, and his penis was hacked off. The women all claimed responsibility for the murder, and although some were arrested, they were eventually acquitted. Although hundreds of women were involved in the lynching, the State CID had a different version of the events. Senior police sources said the lynching was carried out by four men and that the women who had claimed responsibility were protecting them. None of the women agreed with the police version. Police said that both men and women were present when the lynch mob appeared. On the day of the lynching, BBC News initially reported that about 14 women and several children forced their way into the courtroom and stabbed Akku to death. A film based on the incident, 200: Halla Ho, was released on 20 August 2021 digitally on ZEE5. A limited web series called Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom was released on Netflix depicting the story and interviews of the victims.
Biography Early life Akku Yadav grew up in Kasturba Nagar, a slum of Nagpur, Maharashtra. He had two younger brothers—Santosh and Yuvraj. According to author Mitzi Szereto, Akku's father, a milkman, had formed a criminal gang consisting of his sons, their cousins and family friends. Since childhood, along with several relatives and other neighbourhood boys, Akku extorted local vendors and shopkeepers for money or their products under threat of violence. In his teenage years, Akku was noted as a voyeur who spied on female residents defecating in the bushes.
In her book Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur, author Swati Mehta wrote: "by all accounts, a child of the neighbourhood, Akku had graduated from milkman's son to local menace".
Crimes Akku's first confirmed rape occurred in 1991, when Akku and his gang kidnapped a woman who passed by their hideout inside an abandoned building. After the rape, the woman reported the assault to Jaripatka police station, where she was initially ignored by the officers, who were receiving bribes from Akku from his extortion operation. Ultimately, a complaint was filed and Akku was arrested, but the case was never taken to court. Following his release by posting bail, Akku broke into the woman's home and beat her and her husband. The instance remained the only time where a rape led to a criminal complaint against Akku.
In their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, authors Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn wrote: "Akku Yadav was, in a sense, the other 'success' of Kasturba Nagar. He was a deplorable man who had turned an apprenticeship as a small-time thug into a role as a mobster and king of the slum." Akku ruled a gang of criminals who controlled the Kasturba Nagar slum. They robbed, tortured, and killed people with impunity. Akku committed crimes for several years as he created a small business empire. He and his gang members often harassed and intimidated people to extort money. Extortion was his main source of income, and he would hurt people if they did not give him money or if they angered him in any way. Akku characteristically threatened to rape anyone who resisted him. It is known that many of Akku's rape victims were Dalits, who face a disproportionate level of difficulty in receiving justice for cases of sexual assault.
Pratibha Urkude and her husband Dattu ran a small grocery shop and Akku harassed them for years. He would pick up goods from the shop and refuse to pay or would simply pay much less than was owed. Sometimes he would demand money and become violent if they were unable to pay. Akku often worried he was being plotted against. As a result, he did not permit men or women to gather and talk. He made sure young boys did not play together, and if they did, Akku would break up their games. Suspicious that people were asking questions about him, he would warn people against reporting his crimes to the police, threatening them if they did so. Killing left inconvenient corpses that required him to bribe the police to prevent them from stopping his crimes.
Rape, however, was very stigmatizing and, as a result, the victims could be relied on to remain silent. Akku raped people to silence them far more frequently than murdering them. The women who killed Akku claimed that he had been raping and abusing local women with impunity for over a decade. They alleged that local police had refused to help his victims or pursue charges because Akku was bribing them. Yadav's crimes encompassed rape, murder, robbery, extortion, home invasion, assault, and criminal intimidation. Before his death, Akku had been arrested some 14 times. In late 1999, he was detained for a year under the Maharashtra preventive detention law—The Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Slumlords, Boot-leggers, Drug Offenders and Dangerous Persons Act 1981.
Akku allegedly raped so many people that according to residents of the Kasturba Nagar slum, a rape victim lives in every other house there. Akku allegedly raped over 40 women; his youngest victim being a 10-year-old girl. One person described Akku as "the Gabbar Singh of Kasturba Nagar" saying, "We stayed mostly indoors when Akku was around". Women have said Akku and his gang would invade homes any time of the day. He sometimes wanted a motorcycle or would grab a mobile phone or extort money. Akku and his gang members would beat up anyone who resisted them. He murdered a woman named Asha Bai, a daughter of Anjana Bai Borkar, in front of her 16-year-old granddaughter. Borkar was one of five women arrested for Akku's lynching. Speaking of Akku, the granddaughter said: "We were eating dinner when he came to the front door and pretended to be a friend of my brother. When my mother opened the door, he dragged her out and stabbed her. He then cut off her ears for her earrings and her fingers because he could not get her rings." Akku had reportedly murdered at least three people and dumped their bodies on local railroad tracks.
One woman described how she and her husband were attacked by Akku. He came to their house at 4:00– AM–5:00 AM. Akku knocked aggressively on their door saying he was a police official, and asked them to open it. Once Akku entered, he stabbed the husband in the thigh with a knife, locked him in the bathroom and dragged the wife by her hair away to a place where he raped her. Akku allowed her to return after three or four hours. In January 2004, Akku was banned from entering Nagpur city. An elderly man named Harichand Khorse, who earned a small amount of money playing a musical instrument called a baja, was beaten violently by Akku because he was unable to pay 100 rupees. According to neighbors in Kasturba Nagar, Akku once raped a woman right after her wedding. He also stripped a man naked and burned him with a cigarette, then forced him to dance in front of his 16-year-old daughter. Akku took a woman named Asha Bhagat and tortured her in front of her daughter and several neighbours by cutting off her breasts. Akku then sliced Bhagat into pieces on the street, killing her. A man named Avinash Tiwari, one of the neighbours, was horrified by the murder and planned to report Akku to the police. As a result, Akku butchered him. Akku and his men gang-raped a woman named Kalma ten days after she gave birth. After what happened to her, Kalma committed suicide; she burned to death after dousing herself with kerosene and lighting it. Akku's gang pulled another woman from her house when she was seven months pregnant. They stripped her naked and raped her on the road in public view.
Akku ordered his men to drag girls as young as age 12 to a nearby derelict building to gang rape. Many of Akku's victims reported his crimes. Instead of arresting him, the police told him who had reported the crime; Akku would go after them. The police worked with Akku, protected him and supported him; he gave them bribes and drinks. When a 22-year-old woman reported being raped by Akku, the police accused her of having an affair with him and sent her away. Several women were turned away by police after being told: "You're a loose woman. That's why he raped you." One woman told the police she was gang-raped by Akku and his associates. The police responded by gang-raping the woman themselves. Twenty-five families moved out of Kasturba Nagar. People, however, removed their daughters from schools and kept them locked inside their homes where nobody could see them. Vegetable vendors avoided Kasturba Nagar, so housewives had to go to far-away markets to buy food. As long as Akku only targeted poor people, the police would not interfere.
He and his men attempted to extort Ratna Dungiri, damaged her furniture, and threatened to murder her family. Since Dungiri refused to file a police report, Usha Narayane filed one herself, but Akku surrounded Narayane's house with his men after the police informed him of the complaint. Akku threatened Narayane with a bottle of acid, while she called the police, who never arrived. After Akku and his men attempted to force open the door to Narayane's house, she opened a gas cylinder and threatened to blow up everyone present, after which Akku's gang left.
The neighbours heard about what Narayane had done and were now willing to go after him. Soon there were many angry victims on the streets, and they started to pick up sticks and stones. People threw stones at Akku's associates. His men saw the crowd's mood and fled. The victims marched through the slum and celebrated. On 6 August 2004, they went to Akku's house and burned it down. Akku now feared for his life and went to the police for protection; they arrested him for his own protection on 7 August 2004. Akku's mother vacated his house. On 7 August, Akku was due to appear at the city district court and 500 slum residents gathered. As Akku arrived, one of his men tried to pass him knives wrapped in a blanket; the police failed to notice this. After the women protested, the accomplice was arrested, and Akku was taken back into custody. He threatened to return and teach every woman in the slum a lesson. On 8 August 2004, a group attacked Akku while he was being taken before the court; he survived the attack only to be lynched five days later.
Death