On the intervening night of September 29 and 30, 2020, the Uttar Pradesh Police and administration cremated the body of a 19-year-old Dalit woman, an alleged sexual assault victim, in Hathras. The family claims, her cremation was done without their consent.
Some five kilometres away, India Today journalist Tanushree Pandey had finished filing her broadcast for the night and checked into a small hotel. But something did not feel right. She turned to her cameraperson, Waqar Ahmad, and told him they needed to go back.
What she witnessed in the hours that followed changed her perspective permanently.
Outside the ambulance carrying her daughter’s body, the victim’s mother stood pleading for one last look at her child. She was denied.
Five years later, that night—and the 16 days leading up to it—forms the subject of Hathras 16 Days, an investigative docu-series directed by Patrick Graham, produced as a Docubay Original, and streaming exclusively on ZEE5. The series reconstructs the case through first-hand testimonies, archival footage, on-ground reporting, and interviews with journalists, activists, law enforcement officials, and policymakers.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Pandey reflected on what her reporting uncovered, what the system did and did not do, and why she believes the case remains as urgent today as it was in 2020.
A Case That Was Already Being Buried
The assault took place on September 14, 2020, in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. According to her dying declaration, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was sexually assaulted while working in the fields and suffered severe spinal injuries that would ultimately claim her life. Critically injured, she was taken to a nearby police station, where she remained on the floor for hours before being shifted for medical treatment.
No police officer came to record her statement or immediately take her to the hospital. An FIR under the relevant sections of sexual assault was not registered in the crucial first hours after the attack. Key forensic evidence, including her blood-soaked clothes, remained uncollected at her home for days.
She was first admitted to a hospital in Aligarh before being shifted to Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi as her condition deteriorated. She died on September 29.
Forensic samples were collected and the medical examination for sexual assault was conducted more than eight days after the crime. The gynaecologist who examined the victim and later spoke to the documentary team said that by then, sperm samples could no longer be recovered. But, she stressed, the absence of forensic evidence did not rule out sexual assault. In fact, she told the filmmakers that she believed the victim had been sexually assaulted, but because of the delay in collecting evidence, it could not be scientifically established through forensic testing, depriving investigators of crucial forensic evidence and, in the doctor’s view, denying the victim justice.
Authorities, however, moved quickly to publicly declare that no rape had taken place. The very evidence they themselves had allowed to deteriorate became the basis of their defence.
One of the arguments advanced by investigators was that the victim had changed her statement multiple times. Pandey rejects that assertion.
“The victim was very clearly saying it from day one that she was forced upon (zabardasti), from the very first hours after the crime. If you had listened to her and conducted the medical examination on time, the truth perhaps would have come out.”
According to Pandey, the police themselves admitted that they never went to speak to the girl while she lay critically injured.
“There is no other explanation,” she said. “There is only one explanation why they didn’t do it. She belonged to a Dalit family. They knew they could get away with it.”
The Night No Journalist Had Anticipated
When the case first broke, Pandey was in Mumbai covering the COVID-19 pandemic. She was then reassigned to the Sushant Singh Rajput case, one of the biggest con stories ever sold to the Indian public, as she calls it, so she eventually stepped away and came back to Delhi.
Pandey first reached Safdarjung Hospital after receiving a call from the victim’s brother. Journalists, including Nidhi Suresh, Barkha Dutt were also there. After the young woman succumbed to her injuries, Pandey travelled to Hathras, expecting to cover her final rites and speak to the family.
On the night of September 29, after finishing a live broadcast with senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, she returned to her hotel. The village had been unusually calm. Nobody present that night—not Pandey, not journalists Bismee and Manisha from ThePrint, nor the local reporters—anticipated what was about to happen.
They had noticed police barricades going up and preparations being made near the cremation ground. The assumption was that the final rites would take place the next morning. After all, in most parts of India, families do not cremate their loved ones in the middle of the night.
But Pandey decided to return anyway.
Her cameraperson, Waqar Ahmad, was hesitant. As a Muslim man, he was uneasy about being out late in Uttar Pradesh under those circumstances. Pandey reassured him, and they drove back together.
“We don’t normally go back like this. I don’t know what I felt, but something didn’t feel right,” she recalled.
What greeted them was a family being denied the most basic act of grief.
The victim’s mother lay down in front of the ambulance, begging for one final glimpse of her daughter’s face. She was not allowed.
“A mother is begging that her daughter is dead, that she will never be able to see her again, and asking just to see her face one last time. She wasn’t asking for wealth or property. What was the big deal? You did not even allow that. You forcibly burnt her daughter. What more can I say?”
There are two cremation grounds in that area—one, a concrete facility used by upper-caste families, and another, little more than an open patch in the middle of the fields, designated for Dalits. Even as the police justified the midnight cremation by citing “law and order,” they took the body specifically to the Dalit cremation ground.
“Even in such a situation, the police remembered that the body had to be taken to the Dalit cremation ground. If this is not casteism, then what is?” Pandey said.
For her, the law-and-order argument has never held up.
“If I die tomorrow, will you cremate my body without allowing my mother to perform my last rites? No. You will ensure law and order. So how could you do this to them? Because you knew they belonged to an underprivileged community, one with virtually no representation in power or in the government. Who was going to come and fight for them?”
It's been 3 years today. The right to live and to be cremated respectfully were snatched.
— Tanushree Pandey (@TanushreePande) September 30, 2023
Lest we forget. #Hathras. https://t.co/2VFsuYZt1G
What the Village Revealed
The caste reality Pandey encountered in the village was not subtle.
Alongside journalists Bismee and Manisha from ThePrint, whose stories and photographs from those nights went viral, she witnessed discrimination in its most ordinary and deeply embedded forms. Dalits were not treated as equals. In local shops, money was often placed at a distance rather than handed directly from one hand to another.
The documentary team encountered similar practices while filming there as recently as last year.
“If you are a so-called minority in the village, if you are a Dalit, they will not even take a note from your hand. If you are buying something, you keep the money at a distance and they will pick it up from there. This is still happening.”
According to Pandey, little has changed in the five years since the crime.
“Caste is still a very big reality on the ground.”
Pandey is careful not to make claims beyond what she personally witnessed. She does not attribute a caste motive to the assault itself, saying that is for investigative agencies and the courts to determine.
But about everything that followed, she is unequivocal.
“What happened after—the investigation, the handling of the case, the forced cremation—that happened because that girl was a Dalit. This would never have happened to a family from a dominant caste.”
The contrast with her own social position is something she returns to repeatedly.
“My name is Tanushree Pandey. I am fully aware of my privilege. If something happens to me, the police will at least register an FIR. I know that there will be some degree of attention and scrutiny. But that assurance does not exist for most Dalit victims in this country. This is a country where Dalit grooms are still attacked for riding a horse at their wedding, where children refuse to eat food cooked by Dalit women, and where Dalit children are beaten for drinking water from upper-caste wells or temple premises. This is still their reality.”
That basic assurance, she says, did not exist for the Hathras victim and her family.
And, for many Dalit families across rural India, it still does not.
A System Still Not Telling the Truth
When the documentary team returned years later to interview the then ADG, Law and Order, Uttar Pradesh, Pandey says she was struck by how little had changed.
“The ADG, Law and Order, is giving us fake news in a documentary. How bizarre is that? He said the family had consented to the cremation. I was there. I saw what you did. How can you still lie?” Pandey said.
For Pandey, the problem extends far beyond Hathras. She argues that the criminal justice system has failed to keep pace with the ways in which perpetrators now understand and manipulate forensic evidence. Washing a survivor’s body, immersing it in water, or burning it after an assault can destroy the very evidence needed to secure a conviction. But, she says, the greater failure lies with institutions that do not act even when a survivor is still alive.
If the police do not record a statement, ensure an immediate medical examination, or preserve forensic evidence in those critical first hours, the system itself ends up weakening the case before it ever reaches a courtroom.
“The criminals know that if they put her in water after raping her, or wash her body, or burn her, the forensic evidence won’t be found. They are also evolving. So if a girl is alive and even then the police do not speak to her or collect the forensic evidence that could get her justice, then how is a girl supposed to get justice in this country?”
Pandey believes India needs a far stricter and more uniform protocol for handling sexual assault cases. She argues that the police need to be more sensitive and less politically motivated. The burden, she says, cannot rest on a traumatised or dying survivor to narrate every detail perfectly. Instead, the responsibility must also shift to institutions—to the police, hospitals, and investigative agencies—to preserve evidence, follow procedure, and ensure that justice does not depend on chance.
Revisiting Hathras for the documentary also revealed something that had been less visible during the original reporting. The distrust and fear created by generations of caste discrimination continue to shape everyday life. Pandey says she met Dalit families who were themselves hesitant about inter-caste marriages—not out of prejudice, but because they feared what upper-caste families might do to their daughters.
HAPPENING NOW — #Hathras rape victim’s body has reached her native village, Boolgarhi in Hathras, where the horrific incident took place. SP, DM, Joint Magistrate all here accompanying the family. My camera person Wakar and I will get you all the updates all through the night pic.twitter.com/VxEWDVVpsU
— Tanushree Pandey (@TanushreePande) September 29, 2020
The Family, Five Years On
The trauma, Pandey says, did not end with the cremation.
The victim’s nieces—the young daughters of her brother—are still facing the consequences of what happened. According to Pandey, a local government school principal asked the family to sign a document taking responsibility for the girls’ safety because children from the accused families also studied there.
“Kids are kids. Why are you making them enemies? Why are you continuing that hate, and why are you forcing little girls to live through a trauma they do not even understand?” Pandey said.
She continues to visit the family whenever she can. Journalist Nidhi Suresh has also remained in touch over the years, often bringing books for the children.
The case, Pandey says, also exposed the complicated motivations that sometimes drive television news. After months of saturation coverage of the Sushant Singh Rajput case, while the country grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, many news channels were facing criticism and a loss of public trust. Hathras, she believes, became an opportunity for redemption.
“They desperately needed a story like this so that they could redeem themselves, so that the entire country’s emotions could move there.”
She does not necessarily defend that instinct, but neither does she dismiss the outcome.
“Whatever reason you have, whatever your personal agenda or interest, you are standing with the victims. That’s enough.”
What the Reporting Did to Her
Pandey did not enter journalism through a conventional route. Without a formal degree in the subject, she secured an internship at CNN-IBN and quickly found herself drawn to investigative and conflict reporting. Early in her career, she reported extensively from Naxal-affected regions of Chhattisgarh, covering communities living in the middle of an armed conflict that few television cameras reached.
One of her earliest documentary projects, made when she was just 19, focused on Adivasi survivors of sexual violence in Chhattisgarh. The film was later raised in the Indian Parliament. Over the next twelve years, she built a career around investigative reporting, political and human-interest reporting, and conflict journalism, earning global recognition for her work before eventually leaving NDTV after the Adani Group’s takeover and moving into freelance journalism.
She made her first long-form documentary with BBC World, but when the production house approached her for Hathras 16 Days, she had relatively little experience with long-form documentary filmmaking.
Pandey says she agreed to be part of the project only after receiving written assurances of complete editorial independence and a guarantee that nothing would be suppressed.
“If you tell me at any point that we cannot show the reality as it is, I will back out,” she recalled telling the producers.
One lesson she has carried throughout her career came from her senior, Rajdeep Sardesai: report the story, do not become the story.
That principle guided her even on the night of the cremation. As she recorded the police on her phone, she consciously kept herself out of the frame.
“It is not necessary for my face to appear. The question is necessary, the voice is necessary. And the faces of the culprits are necessary.”
At the same time, she points out that journalists do not always get to choose whether they become part of the story. In cases where powerful institutions feel threatened, reporters can themselves become targets—through surveillance, leaked phone records, criminal complaints, or attempts to discredit their work.
But Hathras changed something in her that years of reporting had not.
She says she never believed in fate before.
“Any reporter could have been there that day. Anyone from my channel could have been there. After that day, I started to believe that there is something called fate. That girl and I are somehow connected. If I didn’t tell her story, I would be ashamed. I also would have failed her. I should have quit journalism in that case, because somewhere you believe that the girl still hopes she will get justice.”
The experience also changed the way she approaches every assignment.
“Whenever I am going on the ground, ten scenarios already run through my mind. They run automatically. That nervous system has developed.”
And perhaps above all, she says, it sharpened her understanding of privilege.
“We sit here and cry over useless things. Go to that village and see. Girls are still not allowed to leave their homes. If you are waking up every day with freedom and opportunity, that itself is a privilege, and you should respect it. You should help those who do not have it. And you should be absolutely loyal and honest to your journalism because it is not just a profession—it impacts the lives of people in this country. Telling other people’s stories is a huge responsibility, and journalists should use that responsibility wisely.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
The Hathras case was not just about one crime. It was about who this country’s institutions choose to protect and who they choose to ignore. Caste discrimination is not a relic. It is present, documented, and ongoing, and every citizen has a responsibility to demand accountability not just when a case trends, but consistently and loudly.
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#Hathras victim burnt against her family’s will. Police locked family members & locals inside the house & forcibly burnt the body. Family couldn’t even see their daughter for one last time.
— Tanushree Pandey (@TanushreePande) September 29, 2020
If torture done to the girl was horrific. This is beyond humanity. We’re finished pic.twitter.com/WkBiyHWLbF
