Ahmedabad: For nearly four agonizing weeks, the family of 23-year-old Chirag Vala searched across the city, clinging to hope. What they didn’t know was that the Dalit youth from Vejalpur had been found dead — just a day after he went missing — and quietly cremated by the police as an “unclaimed” body. The police apathy and failure of inter-departmental coordination meant his family never got a chance to say goodbye.A sanitation worker by morning and an autorickshaw driver for an app-based service by day, Chirag lived in the Boot Bhavani slums of Vejalpur. He left home early on June 23, without his phone or Aadhaar card — a detail that deepens his family’s suspicion that he may have been forcibly taken. When he did not return that night, his family approached the Vejalpur police station. Instead of lodging a formal missing complaint, officers reportedly told the family to wait and cited rath yatra bandobast as the reason for their inaction, alleged family members.When the family returned the next day, police reportedly just made a ‘janva jog (station diary note)”, and no FIR was filed. Desperate, the family handed over 28 photos of Chirag to assist the police. What Vejalpur police did not know was that on June 24, Bopal police recovered an unidentified male body from the Telav canal, just 12 kilometres from where Chirag went missing. Bopal police took the decomposed body to a community health centre, then shifted it to Civil Hospital, Asarwa, said police officers.“Yet, no one from Bopal police made the effort to match the unidentified body with any missing person records from nearby police stations, a critical oversight,” alleged the victim’s mother Vali Vala. Meanwhile, Chirag’s family continued appealing to senior officers and scanning CCTV footage.“After seven days, on July 1, we cremated the body as unclaimed,” said a Bopal police officer.The truth surfaced only after Chirag’s wife, Manisha Vala, filed a habeas corpus petition in Gujarat high court on July 19. That evening, a Bopal police official called the family, asking them to visit the police station. There, male relatives were shown a photograph of Chirag’s lifeless body. “When the family members identified him, we were told that his body had already been cremated,” said Vali.“My son was murdered. We were not even allowed to see his face one last time. This happened because Vejalpur and Bopal police failed to speak to each other,” said the grieving mother.Activist Rakesh Maheria, who supported the family’s search, criticised the police: “Both police stations failed miserably. This is not mere negligence, it is inhuman.” Had there been timely sharing of information, the body could have been identified earlier, allowing the family to perform the last rites, he added.Confirming the chain of events, Bopal police inspector B T Gohil said that the body was cremated after seven days as no one had claimed it. When asked whether any state-wide alert or coordination with other stations was done, he said: “That’s probably done after a month.”
