Seema Mohan Gavit and her sister Renuka Kiran Shinde were convicted in 2001 of a six-year series of child kidnappings and murders in western Maharashtra. With their mother, Anjanabai, they lived by theft in crowded places in Pune, Kolhapur, Nashik and Mumbai. The courts found that the three women, with Renuka's husband, conspired to kidnap children under five years of age and to keep them as cover, so that a woman caught stealing could escape suspicion with a child in her arms. Children who were no longer useful were killed.
The prosecution charged them with kidnapping 13 children between June 1990 and October 1996, attempting to kidnap another, and murdering nine. The trial court in Kolhapur found six murders proved and sentenced both sisters to death. The Bombay High Court upheld five murders and the death sentences in 2004, and the Supreme Court of India confirmed them in 2006. The sisters were then expected to become the first women executed in India since independence. Their mercy petitions, however, took almost eight years to pass through the offices of the Maharashtra government, the Governor, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs and the President, and in 2022 the Bombay High Court commuted their sentences because of that delay. In April 2023 the Supreme Court ruled that they must remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives, and directed every state in India to decide mercy petitions without delay.
The courts describe Renuka and Seema as sisters; press reports call them half-sisters or step-sisters. Court records give Renuka the aliases Rinku and Ratan, and Seema the alias Devki. The Bombay High Court's 2022 judgment recorded Renuka's age as about 45 and Seema's as about 39.
Their mother, Anjanabai Gavit, was the third woman accused. The Supreme Court's 2006 judgment says the appellants and their mother made a living from thefts, and that the police had caught the women on several occasions and later released them. According to the judgment, they stole gold chains and other valuables from people in the crowds at festivals. Agence France-Presse reported in 2014 that the sisters had been drawn into petty crime as teenagers by their mother.
Renuka's husband, K.S., was the fourth member of the group named by the prosecution. According to his evidence as summarized by the Supreme Court, he had studied to the seventh standard, left school in 1982 and trained as a tailor. He met Renuka in 1983, when she already had a son from an earlier marriage, and married her in December 1989 at a temple near Shirdi. The family rented a house in Pune. The constable who let them that house in 1990 later gave evidence at the trial.
The prosecution case, accepted by the trial court and upheld on appeal, was that the two sisters, their mother and Renuka's husband agreed to kidnap small children below five years of age, to keep them with them while they stole, and to get rid of them when they were no longer useful. The Supreme Court summarized the purpose in plain terms: the group thought a child with them was the only way to avoid arrest if they were caught stealing. The judgment records that the women would have a child with them whenever they committed a theft.
The court found that 13 children had been kidnapped between June 1990 and October 1996. The children were taken from bus stands, railway stations, temples and markets in Kolhapur, Thane, Kalyan, Mumbai and Nashik. Some were later abandoned or left at temples; at least one was taken to an orphanage. The High Court's 2022 judgment lists the kidnapped children named in the charges as Santosh, Guddu, Raja, Shradha, Gauri and Pankaj, among others.
The courts gave the children only their first names, and their ages as estimated in the evidence.
Santosh was about a year and a half old when he was kidnapped in Kolhapur in July 1990. The constable who rented the family their house in Pune saw the boy there; Anjanabai told him the child was a relative's son. The Supreme Court said the evidence of this witness alone was enough to prove the case concerning Santosh. His murder was the first of the five upheld on appeal.
Anjali, also called Pinki, was about two years old (the approver put her age at three) when she disappeared in Nashik on October 18, 1994. Her mother told the court that the child was not seen after the family came back from a temple, and that they searched for her without success. Her father testified that she had been missing since that day and that he lodged a first information report on November 1, 1996. Her murder was upheld.
Shraddha, also known as Rani and Bhagyashree, was about a year and nine months old when she was kidnapped in Kolhapur. Gauri, also called Bhavna, was about a year and a half old when she was taken in Nashik. Pankaj, about four, was kidnapped in Mumbai on July 27, 1996, and killed in September 1996, weeks before the series ended. The murders of all three were upheld.
A boy called Raja, also named Swapnil, was kidnapped in Kolhapur in March 1995. The trial court convicted the sisters of his murder, but the High Court held that the evidence in his case was not satisfactory. In the case of Guddu, kidnapped in Mumbai in 1993, the sisters were convicted of kidnapping and acquitted of murder because the prosecution could not prove it. Another child taken in Mumbai in 1993, and a baby kidnapped in Thane, were among the children for whose kidnapping the sisters were convicted. The High Court also found that one attempted kidnapping, of a girl in Nashik, had been wrongly recorded against them.
The Supreme Court described the effect on the towns where the group had operated. People in the locality, it said, "were completely horrified and they could not send their children even to schools."
The sisters were arrested in 1996, IANS reported; the exact date and the circumstances of the arrests have not been reported. Their mother was charged with them.
On October 17, 1997, Renuka's husband agreed to become an approver, a co-accused who gives evidence for the prosecution in return for a pardon under Section 306 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. He was first examined before a magistrate on September 17, 1998. His evidence became the backbone of the prosecution case, and the courts tested it against the testimony of the children's parents, a lodge owner in Nashik, a neighbor, the constable who had let the family their house in Pune, and medical and recovery witnesses.
Anjanabai died in custody before the trial ended. The Supreme Court's 2006 judgment gives the year of her death as 1997; IANS and the Deccan Herald reported it as 1998.
The case was tried by the Additional Sessions Judge at Kolhapur as Sessions Cases Nos. 55 and 56 of 1997. The charges covered criminal conspiracy to kidnap children and use them for thefts, the kidnapping of 13 children, an attempted kidnapping, and the murder of nine children.
On June 28, 2001, the court convicted both sisters and sentenced them to death. It found six murders proved: those of Santosh, Anjali, Raja, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj. The death sentences were imposed for murder under Section 302 read with Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code, which covers criminal conspiracy. For kidnapping, the sisters were convicted under Section 364 read with Section 120B, and under Section 323, the offense of voluntarily causing hurt, with terms of imprisonment for those counts.
The death sentences went to the Bombay High Court for confirmation, as Indian law requires, together with the sisters' own appeal (Confirmation Case No. 2 of 2001 and Criminal Appeal No. 718 of 2001). On September 8, 2004, a division bench upheld the convictions and confirmed both death sentences.
The High Court reduced the murders proved to five. It held that the evidence in the case of Raja was not satisfactory, and that the attempted kidnapping in Nashik had been wrongly recorded against the sisters. It also found that the approver had suppressed some material facts in his evidence, but upheld the convictions on the evidence that corroborated him.
The sisters appealed to the Supreme Court of India (Criminal Appeal No. 722 of 2005). Their counsel, Aparna Bhat, argued that the approver's evidence was tainted and should not have been acted on without satisfactory corroboration. A bench of Justices K. G. Balakrishnan and G. P. Mathur heard the appeal, and Justice Balakrishnan wrote the judgment, delivered on August 31, 2006.
The court accepted that an approver's evidence must always be viewed with suspicion where there is reason to think he has concealed facts. It agreed with the High Court that Renuka's husband had suppressed material facts: he had presented himself as a passive observer, though he had been present at many of the crimes, and the court found it hard to believe that the women had committed all of them without him. It noted that the law provided a route to prosecute an approver who concealed facts or gave false evidence, under Section 308 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, but that the public prosecutor had not used it. The corroborating evidence, the court held, was enough to sustain the convictions.
On sentence, the judges found no mitigating circumstances in the sisters' favor except that they were women. They pointed to the deliberate and systematic way the children had been kidnapped and killed, the length of time the crimes had gone on, and the danger the group had posed to the community. "We do not think that these appellants are likely to be reformed," the court wrote. "We confirm the conviction and also the death penalty imposed on them." The stay of execution was vacated.
The Bombay High Court's ruling of 2022 later traced, from the government's own files, what happened to the case after the Supreme Court's judgment.
Between September 1 and 8, 2006, appeals for mercy on the sisters' behalf, from people in Canada, Japan, the United States and India, reached the President of India. The President's Secretariat sent them to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs on September 8, and the ministry forwarded them to the Home Department of Maharashtra on September 15, 2006. The state asked its Inspector General of Prisons for an opinion; the Inspector General asked the two prisons where the sisters were held, Yerwada Central Prison in Pune and Nagpur Central Prison, for documents. Yerwada answered only after three reminders, in November 2007.
Renuka wrote her own petition to the President from Nagpur on January 14, 2008. It went back and forth between the prison, the Inspector General and the Home Department, which in April 2008 asked for English translations of all the papers. The Union ministry sent the state reminders in February and May 2008, and in October 2009 a joint secretary wrote personally to Maharashtra's Additional Chief Secretary. Seema petitioned the Governor of Maharashtra through an advocate on September 26, 2008, and Renuka's petition was forwarded to the Governor's office in June 2009. Renuka petitioned the President again on November 27, 2010, and through 2011 the file moved between the prison, the Inspector General and the Home Department over queries and requests for clearer English copies.
The High Court's judgment records the Governor's rejection of Seema's petition once as March 26, 2012, and elsewhere as August 17, 2013. On June 21, 2012, a fire broke out at Mantralaya, the state government's headquarters in Mumbai, and the state later said files on the petitions had been destroyed. In late 2012 the prison had to ask the Kolhapur sessions court for fresh copies of the judgments. The state sent the papers to the Union ministry in March 2013, and after the Governor's decision of August 17, 2013 the ministry sent the file to the President in October 2013.
The President's Secretariat returned the file twice: in February 2014, so that it could be reexamined in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, which held that unexplained delay in deciding mercy petitions could justify commutation; and in June 2014, for review by the new Home Minister. President Pranab Mukherjee rejected both sisters' petitions on July 7, 2014. The ministry told the state on July 16, and the sisters were informed on July 30, 2014.
Gulf News reported at the time that the rejection had cleared the way for them to become the first women executed in post-independence India. The sisters were held in Yerwada Central Prison.
The executions were set for August 19, 2014. That day the sisters filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court, and the public prosecutor told the court, on the jail superintendent's instructions by telephone, that the sentences would not be carried out. The next day the state undertook not to execute them while the petition was pending. Their lawyer, Sudeep Jaiswal, who had represented them since 2010, told Agence France-Presse that there had been "an inordinate delay in carrying out the death sentence."
The petition was listed several times in 2014 and 2015. On January 21, 2016, it was adjourned at the state's request, with no one appearing for the sisters, and then it was not brought back before the court by either side for more than five years. The High Court later recorded that the sisters' local advocate had died and that they had little contact with lawyers, given what the court described as their ignorance and illiteracy. In October 2021 a circulation note moved on the sisters' behalf put the case back on the list. A bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal heard it on December 18, 2021, a non-working day, and reserved judgment on December 22.
The arguments were narrow. The sisters' counsel, Aniket Vagal, blamed the delay on the executive at every level: the Governor, the state government, the Union Home Ministry and the President. The Union government's counsel, Sandesh Patil, denied any delay on its part. The state argued that the delay had come from following the required procedure at each level, and told the court that it was still insisting on the death penalty. It also filed an affidavit describing incidents involving the sisters in custody; the judges found that conduct neither significant nor serious. The sisters' counsel argued that they had been kept in solitary confinement; the state said they were held not in solitary confinement but in the prison's death-row yard.
On January 18, 2022, the court commuted both death sentences to life imprisonment. Justice Jamdar's judgment did not soften its view of the crimes. The evidence, the judges wrote, showed that "only an extremely depraved mind could have perpetuated such brutal killings," and that the accused had been completely indifferent to the suffering of the children and their parents. But they held that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution extends to the stage of execution, and that a delay of this length could not be excused by the gravity of the crime alone.
The court measured the delay from September 15, 2006, when the Union ministry first sent the petitions to Maharashtra, to July 30, 2014, when the sisters were told of the President's decision: seven years, ten months and fifteen days. It found the delay "entirely attributable to the officers of the Respondent - Governments." "Though the procedure for deciding the mercy petitions mandates speed and expediency," the judges wrote, "the State machinery showed indifference and laxity at each stage of processing the files." IANS reported that the bench called gaps of fifteen days to a year in moving files "abhorrent" at a time of electronic communication.
The court refused the sisters' request to be released on the ground that they had served 25 years. A sentence of life imprisonment, it said, lasts for the remainder of the convict's life unless the competent authority remits it. The warrants for their execution were cancelled.
Maharashtra appealed. On December 13, 2022, a Supreme Court bench of Justices M. R. Shah and C. T. Ravikumar condoned the state's delay in filing and issued notice. Senior Advocate Siddharth Dharmadhikari argued for the state and Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati for the Union government, which urged that, given the gravity of the offenses, the sentence should be life for the whole of natural life without remission. Advocate Ankita Chaudhary appeared as amicus curiae for the sisters.
The court gave its decision on April 13, 2023. It did not disturb the commutation. The gravity of the offense was relevant, the order said, but "inordinate delay in disposal of the mercy petitions can also be said to be a relevant consideration." It held, however, that the High Court ought to have commuted the sentence to life imprisonment for natural life without any remission, and modified the order so that the sisters would serve "life imprisonment for natural life and without any remission."
The court then addressed every state. If mercy petitions in death-penalty cases were left undecided, it warned, "the object and purpose of the death sentence would be frustrated." It directed that all efforts be made by state governments and other authorities to decide such petitions at the earliest, and ordered its registry to send the order to the Chief Secretaries of all states and union territories. Press Trust of India reported the bench's concern that death-row convicts were taking advantage of such delays.
The number of children killed is given differently at each stage. The sisters were charged with nine murders; the trial court found six proved, and the High Court and Supreme Court upheld five. The Supreme Court's April 2023 order refers to nine people killed, and Press Trust of India's report of that order says the sisters were sentenced for killing nine children, while other reports give five. Only the five murders upheld on appeal are convictions.
Reports also differ on when the series began. The courts found the kidnappings began in June 1990; a Gulf News report on the 2014 mercy decision dated the offenses from March 1991. The year of Anjanabai's death is given as 1997 by the Supreme Court and 1998 by IANS and the Deccan Herald. Some press reports describe Renuka's husband as acquitted; the court records show that he was granted a pardon as an approver. The Bombay High Court's own judgment gives two dates for the Governor's rejection of Seema's petition, March 26, 2012, and August 17, 2013.
The approver himself was never prosecuted for what the courts found he had concealed. The Supreme Court noted the procedure that would have allowed it and observed that the prosecutor had not invoked it.
1983: Renuka meets K.S., later her husband and the approver in the case.
December 1989: Renuka and K.S. marry.
1990: the family rents a house in Pune from a police constable who later testifies.
June 1990: the period of kidnappings found by the courts begins.
July 1990: Santosh, about a year and a half, is kidnapped in Kolhapur.
1991 to 1993: children are kidnapped in Thane, Kalyan and Mumbai.
October 18, 1994: Anjali, about two, disappears in Nashik.
March 1995: Raja is kidnapped in Kolhapur.
July 27, 1996: Pankaj, about four, is kidnapped in Mumbai; he is killed in September.
October 1996: the period of kidnappings found by the courts ends.
November 1, 1996: Anjali's father lodges a first information report.
1996: the sisters are arrested.
1997 or 1998: Anjanabai dies in custody.
October 17, 1997: K.S. becomes an approver.
September 17, 1998: he is first examined before a magistrate.
June 28, 2001: the Additional Sessions Judge, Kolhapur, convicts both sisters (six murders found proved) and sentences them to death.
September 8, 2004: the Bombay High Court upholds five murders and confirms the death sentences.
August 31, 2006: the Supreme Court dismisses their appeal.
September 2006: mercy appeals reach the President and are sent to Maharashtra.
January 14, 2008: Renuka petitions the President.
September 26, 2008: Seema petitions the Governor.
November 27, 2010: Renuka petitions the President again.
June 21, 2012: fire at Mantralaya.
August 17, 2013: the Governor's rejection of Seema's petition (one date in the record; another is March 26, 2012).
July 7, 2014: President Pranab Mukherjee rejects both petitions.
July 30, 2014: the sisters are informed.
August 19, 2014: the day set for execution; the sisters file a writ petition and the execution is stayed.
January 21, 2016: last hearing before the petition lapses from the list.
October 2021: the petition is revived.
December 18, 2021: the High Court hears the case; judgment reserved December 22.
January 18, 2022: the Bombay High Court commutes both death sentences to life imprisonment.
December 13, 2022: the Supreme Court issues notice on Maharashtra's appeal.
April 13, 2023: the Supreme Court orders life imprisonment for natural life without remission and directs all states to decide mercy petitions promptly.