Highway to hell – The Hindu

Trigger warning: The following article has references to rape and murder. Please avoid reading if you feel triggered.

On a foggy November evening, Preet, 37, was flirtatiously speaking to a potential client, when she was intercepted by a police officer. The trans woman, who had been giggling and playfully patting the shoulder of a man, suddenly broke into a sweat. Near a tea stall along the Ludhiana-Rupnagar route on National Highway 344A, the policeman produced a sketch and asked her a barrage of questions. “Have you seen an effeminate man (ladkiyon wali chaal chalan), one with a saffron dupatta covering his face? Is he one of you? Do you know him or where he is?”

Relieved that the officer was not there to question her about sex work, she said she did recall seeing a man whose face resembled the sketch, but didn’t know where he was. “I remember him sometimes flaunting nail paint. He would come to a tea stall near Model Town frequently, and interact with the tea seller,” says Preet.

Weeks later, she saw the face of the same man flash on televisions in every dhaba (roadside eatery) and theka (alcohol shop), and in every local newspaper. Some Hindi newspapers called him the “gay killer”; others went on to explain how a “gay man” had targeted 11 men, looted and killed them, she recalls.

On December 23, the Punjab police arrested Ram Saroop, 47, also known as Sodhi, for allegedly killing Maninder in Kirtarpur Sahib area, Rupnagar. Later, the police learnt during interrogation, that the case for which he was arrested was his 10th murder. Sodhi allegedly confessed that he had killed 11 men in Punjab’s Fatehgarh, Hoshiarpur, and Rupnagar districts. All had refused to pay him for sex work, after they had promised him a sum of money. Among those killed are an ex-army man, a mechanic, and a tea seller.

“One body was recovered with the word dhokebaaz (deceiver) written on his back with a pen. Most of the victims were found in a naked or semi- naked condition, with their pants below their waist,” says Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Rupnagar, Gulneet Khurana. He adds that there was also a queerphobic slur scrawled on the man’s back. All the victims had allegedly been strangled to death using dupattas, scarves, and shawls.

Out of 11 cases, the police across districts had only lodged an FIR for three cases, while inquest proceedings (enquiry into the cause of death) were started for some and daily diary report entries (which the police keeps for administrative purposes) for the rest.

Character sketch

On a rainy August day, Maninder, allegedly the tenth man killed, who worked in the maintenance department in Moura toll plaza, along the Chandigarh-Manali highway, asked his colleague to get two bundles of arabi ke patte (colocasia greens) for him. He was to cook the delicacy for his older brother and two sisters.

“Maninder usually returned home by 7:30 in the evening, but on August 18 (2024), when he did not come by 8:30, we started worrying,” says a sobbing Manjeet, Maninder’s elder brother. As more time passed and the intensity of the rain increased, he grew even more worried. “Living next to the highway, we wake up to so many accidents during the monsoon and winter,” he says.

Around 9 p.m. Manjeet recalls starting his bike with shaky hands, minutes after he learnt from the toll plaza that Maninder had finished his shift and left just after 7:30 p.m. “I drove straight to the theka nearest to his workplace, along the same highway. I was worried that he was drinking,” he adds. There, he got to know that Maninder had bought a bottle of country liquor and left the theka with another man on pillion.

A transperson waiting near a highway in Model Town in Hoshiarpur.
| Photo Credit:
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

Manjeet jumped back on his bike and drove in the direction the theka owner had pointed him in. A few kilometres ahead, he saw his brother’s bike parked next to a boulder. In the headlight, he saw a man trying to drag a body.

“I quickly tried to get off my bike, but by then he dropped the body and fled on my brother’s bike,” he recounts. The man — allegedly Sodhi — lost his balance and the bike fell into the canal. “I had to go back and see whose body that was,” Manjeet says. On reaching the spot, he was horrified to find his brother’s body in a clearing surrounded by shrubs.

The police’s sketch was a result of the description Manjeet gave. The police also recovered a pair of size 11 slippers, a yellow dupatta, an alcohol bottle, and finger prints from the bike, says a senior officer from Kiratpur Sahib police station, Rupnagar. He further adds that Maninder’s medical reports had revealed that he had sexually engaged with someone before his death.

“After speaking to workers at the theka where Manjeet and Sodhi had met, we got to know that he was an ‘effeminate’ man who had covered his head with a saffron dupatta, like women do,” says the officer.

The police activated their sources and learnt that a man frequented truck stands and often covered his head with a dupatta. “We worked out that the man could be a sex worker, maybe from the transgender community,” says the officer. With this profile, the police shared the sketch and started their lookout for the killer.

The Judas kiss

The profile the police drew up was shared with truck drivers’ unions, theka and dhaba owners, people from the transgender community, and sex workers, says SSP Khurana.

Following this, a man who owned a dhaba along the Chandigarh-Manali highway, informed the police that he knew the man from the sketch, and that Sodhi had a “close friend” who frequented his eatery. Soon, the police reached out to Sodhi’s “close friend”, who agreed to help them trace him, on the condition of being kept away from legal action of any kind.

“The man told us that he was Sodhi’s lover and that he visited him frequently. We then laid a trap and waited for Sodhi to contact him,” says the officer. A few days before December 23, Sodhi called and asked to meet him in Sarai Bharatgarh, the officer says.

The police waited in civil clothes for him to reach the spot. His head wrapped in a dupatta, he walked towards his lover, when the police surrounded and nabbed him, the officer recalls. “He started shouting for help and threatened to call the police, if we attempted to rape him. It was only when we told him that we were police officers did he stop screaming for us not to rape him,” the officer says.

A killer’s list

Up until his arrest, the police were unaware that Sodhi had committed 10 other murders. After his arrest, the police asked routine questions around motive. Sodhi told them that Maninder, who had earlier agreed to pay him ₹300 for sexual services, refused to pay him, minutes after the act. “He told us this angered him a lot,” the police say. Maninder also used queerphobic slurs, which further angered him.

“During the interrogation, he took the notebook where we were writing down the details, and wrote about all those he had killed, and where, and started explaining why he had done so,” the officer says.

The first incident was on January 24, 2024, when he was picked up in a car by a retired army man, Harpreet Singh, 55, from Rupnagar, who had promised to pay ₹300 for his sexual services. Sodhi told the police that once the services were rendered, the man refused to pay and began abusing him. Then he allegedly stopped the car, picked up a stick and started beating Sodhi, who in turn grabbed the stick and beat him to death.

On Sodhi’s kill-list was another 55-year-old man, Gurnam Lal, who sold tea along the Hoshiarpur highway in Model Town. The case under Model Town police station, Hoshiarpur, which was Sodhi’s seventh kill, had an FIR registered, but did not have sections of murder listed.

The police had found Lal’s body on his cot inside the tea-stall-cum-home, where he had lived for three years. “There were no signs of an attack,” says the officer in-charge, who filed the FIR under section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (culpable homicide not amounting to murder).

At Lal’s house, Jasminder Kaur, his wife who now runs the shack, says Sodhi had been visiting the shop for the past three years, though not regularly. Since her husband’s death, he had stopped coming. “We never correlated his death with a customer not visiting the shop. Sodhi was like a vagabond; he would pick up whatever work he got and would come and go,” says Kaur.

Jasminder Kaur, whose husband was killed by Sodhi, at her temporary roadside shop in Model Town.
| Photo Credit:
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

She adds that the family, until the end of December, did not think that Lal was murdered, since he was found lying on his cot. “We thought he had passed away in his sleep,” she says.

Many of people who Sodhi allegedly killed were migrants and not much is known of them. Negi was the second murder. His decomposed body was found in a room behind a dhaba in Fatehgarh. Sodhi’s third kill was a man who allegedly took him on a scooter to a secluded place in Fatehgarh, whose body was found on the roadside.

The fourth was Vicky, whose body was found in a wheatfield in Fatehgarh. The fifth was a mechanic who commuted from Punjab to Himachal Pradesh on work, via the Chandigarh-Manali highway, whose body was found along the highway in Begumpur. The sixth was Lucky. There was a Jammu and Kashmir truck driver killed in Chabewal, and two others who unidentified.

The making of a killer

The Punjab police’s investigation has revealed that Sodhi never carried a weapon and would take money from his victims’ wallets, sometimes only as much as they had agreed upon.

“He would also take their phones and sell them to truck drivers or alcohol shop owners in exchange for some money to sustain himself,” police say.

A trans woman who practises sex work on Punjab’s highways says that incidents of abuse are common. After a long sigh she says that not receiving payment after sexual services is a problem that every sex worker faces. “Sometimes, they don’t pay and also beat us up. But sometimes they pay and then bring their friends back, to loot and rape us,” she says, adding that the list of abuse faced by sex workers, especially those from the trans community is unending.

At Sodhi’s home, his wife, 37, who does not wish to be named says, “Almost six months before he abandoned me and his three children, he had been sad and very quiet.” While Sodhi’s wife says he abandoned his home a little after the second wave of COVID-19, she had earlier told the police that he was disowned (bedakhal) by the family two years ago.

A view of Sodhi’s house at Chaura village in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur.
| Photo Credit:
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

Married in 2009, Sodhi lived with his wife and three children for very short periods. “He used to work in Dubai and stay there for two years at a stretch. He would come back for a few months, until he got another job as a technician,” she says. Even during COVID, Sodhi would go to Jammu & Kashmir as a worker trimming animal fur, and would then again come back for a few months.

Fearing ostracization in the village, she breaks down saying that she conceived each child after he came back from his outstation work. While her husband faces trials, she sobs thinking about the trials her three children will now face in school and later in life.

“I have been working as a cleaner in a school and making ends meet with my ₹7,000 salary. Despite the difficulties I have run this house and have protected my children. How will I protect them now? How will I get my daughters married now that the world knows about their father and the life he was living?”