Murder whodunnit grips India's middle-class

By Alistair Scrutton

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A young girl's throat is slit in her bedroom. A servant is also found dead nearby. The dentist father is arrested, injected with a "truth serum", held for 50 days and then released. The murder weapon has still to be found.

India is gripped by a murder whodunnit that has highlighted its bumbling police, aggressive media and a deep-seated unease among the Asian giant's newly rich about household servants amid increasing numbers of crimes in its cities.

When Rajesh Talwar walked free at the weekend after about 50 days in jail, it was the latest twist in a case that has dominated headlines for weeks, often overshadowing news of rising inflation and an embattled government that faces a vote of no-confidence.

Talwar's 14-year-old daughter Aarushi was found dead in her bedroom in May in Noida, a town of new shopping malls and IT offices just outside Delhi and a place synonymous with the Asian giant's new, confident middle-class lifestyle.

India is awash with horrific crime stories, often related to caste, among its billion-plus people. These stories, most from remote villages, make small paragraphs in newspapers.

But the Noida murder mystery resonated among many of the new, middle class, reflecting their fears as the country quickly urbanizes and wealth disparities rise.

Police immediately named the murder suspect as a missing servant, hitting at the heart of households where middle- and upper-class families regularly employ poorly paid, often ill-treated, servants to cook, clean and walk the dog.

"Noida is basically Delhi, it is about the people who we call middle-class in India," said Dipankar Gupta, a sociology professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"It's a nightmare of the middle-classes," Gupta said, referring to fears of servants attacking their increasingly wealthy middle-class employers.

MEDIA FRENZY

But then came another twist. The day after the girl's murder, a family friend opened a locked terrace door and found the missing servant, his throat slit as well. Police had missed finding the body in their initial investigation.

There started a frenzied media coverage with more twists and turns worthy of a soap opera leading to the arrest of the father for murder by the state police of Uttar Pradesh, widely seen as one of India's most corrupt states.

Noida police said the father murdered his daughter after finding her in a "compromising" position with the murdered servant.

Such was the chaos of the probe -- the police even misquoted the name of the murdered daughter at a press conference -- that the CBI, India's equivalent of the FBI of the United States, were brought in.

It was the CBI who said they had no evidence that the father, who all along protested his innocence, was involved. A court freed him over the weekend. The suspect is now an assistant of the father and two neighborhood domestic helpers, the CBI says.