His name was Arnav. At home, they call him "Gogo" — that affectionate name that grandmothers give to young children when they are still a mass of warmth and innocence. He was four years old. His whole world — as it should be the world of a child his age — did not go beyond games, sweets, and small laughs.
But on March 12, 2026, when Arnav’s relatives arrived at an apartment in the Lajpat Nagar neighbourhood of the Çauk district of Lucknow, they did not find a child playing. They found a small body covered in bruises, burns, and traces of what no human mind could imagine a human being doing to a four-year-old child.
Arnav’s mother died in 2022. After her death, the child went to live with relatives on his mother’s side in Onau, away from his father, Bashishma Kharbandah, a lawyer who knows how to speak before the judiciary and defend rights. But in August 2025, the father filed a custody application in court and obtained it. Arnav returned to his father’s house. He returned to his second wife, Ragini.
At first, his relatives didn’t even notice. When they visited in the hot summer, Arnav would wear long sleeves and a hat in what looked like a winter outfit. When they asked him why, he would flash a smile and say, “You’re not allowed to see me alone or talk to me without a minder. I have to be safe.”
Long sleeves covered the father’s crime.
During the autopsy, the doctors – who see so many dead bodies they take them as a matter of course – were aghast. They found eighteen to twenty-one wounds on the young boy’s body – beatings from a stick, rope, knife and belt, cigarette burns, the imprints of electric shocks, and a death blow from a wall where his head had collided. When they checked the flat, the investigators found the torture weapons scattered all around the house as if they were household tools.
The 35-year-old Bishma Kharbandah and his wife Ragini, age 30, were taken into custody after an official complaint was lodged by the child's grandmother Sudha Kashyap, alleging that the parents killed their child due to greed over his property.
As the police were taking them to the house for further inquiry, a group of people approached them and started hitting the father, slapping him right there before everyone, as the police had difficulty dealing with such a rebellious mob. It is quite embarrassing for the man who is good at defending people in the court of law to stand up against his own neighbours without having any response to one simple question: why?
This incident has brought into the limelight the problem in the Indian child protection system, as the cases of abuse against children under POCSO have doubled over the last few years.
Arnav wore winter clothes during the height of summer. The amount he held in his tiny frame was proof enough to have his father convicted over and over again. But nobody seemed to notice him. Maybe some people did, but chose not to ask about it.
Grandma Sudha Kashyap, the woman who took care of the baby boy for three years after her daughter passed away, the grandmother who loved her grandson the way all grandmothers love – this woman was the one who let them inside. She refused consolation from the fact that the baby boy was "dead from vomiting, diarrhoea, and falling in the bathroom". Instead, she went straight to the police with the whole truth.
Little Gogo isn't alive anymore. However, today, Gogo has become a name that Indians can mention repeatedly. And then they ask out loud, how many more boys are wearing their winter clothes in summer, and nobody notices?
References:
- https://www.indiatvnews.com
- https://thelogicalindian.com
- https://www.newsbytesapp.com
- https://m.dailyhunt.in
- https://www.aajtak.in
- https://www.tv9hindi.com