An attempt has begun to tarnish the Hathras victim’s reputation, with senior police and administration officials meeting small groups of reporters since Tuesday evening to suggest the girl was in a relationship with one of the accused and her murder was a “love affair gone wrong”.

Speaking off the record, these officials are claiming that call details of the gang-rape-and-murder victim’s brother — whose phone they say the girl regularly used — show 104 conversations with accused Sandeep Singh between October 2019 and March 2020.

“Sandeep Singh had 104 phone conversations in six months with the girl, who was using her brother’s mobile phone. Sandeep made 42 calls and received 62 calls from her brother’s number,” an official was quoted as telling one group of reporters on Wednesday.

“Why would two people living in the same village talk to each other on the phone for long durations?” the officer added, after showing the reporters the soft copy of the call details.

The claim is consistent with the administration’s efforts throughout to question the rape charges and protect the four Rajput accused.

None of the officials cited any reason for claiming that most of these 104 conversations involved the victim and not her brother. Her brother has accepted that the girl often used his phone but has declined to respond to the claim that most of the 104 calls involved her.

The family has accused all the four suspects of harassing the Dalit victim, an allegation the girl had corroborated from her hospital bed.

At the meetings with the reporters, mostly from news outlets seen as government-friendly, the officials have been urging them to visit the village again and question the girl’s family about the alleged affair.

According to the girl’s father, the special investigation team (SIT) too has been repeatedly asking the family about their social relations with the accused — whether they interacted regularly — despite repeated clarification that Rajputs and Dalits do not mix socially.

“We know we will be unable to convince the anti-women RSS followers that phone conversations don’t necessarily signify an affair,” state Congress chief Ajay Kumar Lallu told reporters.

“People talk to each other on the phone even if they live in the neighbourhood. Also, people know each other in the villages and keep meeting even if they are enemies.”

The 19-year-old was allegedly gang-raped and had her tongue cut off and spine broken on September 14 in a millet field, where she had gone to cut grass for cattle. Her death in a Delhi hospital on September 29 has sparked nationwide protests.

What the officials are insinuating now had been openly alleged on Sunday by Ranjit Bahadur Srivastava, a senior BJP politician and chairperson of the Nawabganj Nagar Palika Parishad.

“Why do these girls go to collect grass in sugarcane, arhar and millet fields or in jungles? Why don’t they go to paddy or wheat fields?” a man resembling Srivastava is heard purportedly saying in a video, whose authenticity the politician has confirmed.

Sugarcane, arhar, millet and maize plants are taller than wheat or paddy plants.

“They (the girls) are made to die in sugarcane, arhar or maize fields. Whatever happened to this girl (Hathras victim) was purely because of a love affair gone awry,” Srivastava said.

Rajput panchayats have been claiming not just an affair but that the accused are innocent and have been framed. One such panchayat was attended by a former MLA from the BJP, Rajveer Singh Pahalwan, who openly supported the accused.

For eight days after the crime, the police had refused to add gang-rape charges to the original attempt-to-murder charge. Even now, official after official has been questioning the possibility of rape while the government has been sitting on the forensic report, submitted on Saturday.

“Police officers claim there was no gang rape. This is just the beginning. The government’s next step will be to prove that the Rajput youths didn’t kill my daughter,” the victim’s father said on Wednesday.

“They will then try to prove that it was an honour killing (by the girl’s family). And when the media forget us, their final step will be to allow the Rajputs to lynch us.”

He went on: “The SIT met us a dozen times over the past six days and focused more on our relations with the accused than the gang rape and murder of my daughter. They asked me and my wife more questions about our role in the incident than about the case.”

He said the mother was repeatedly asked why she had “run away” after stumbling on the crime scene although she had clarified she never ran away and that it was her screams that prompted the attackers to flee.

“They don’t believe my daughter’s statement from her hospital bed that Ravi Singh, one of the four accused, had tried to sexually assault her earlier too. But we remained silent at the time because we work in the fields of Rajputs,” the father said.

Half-a-dozen families from the Valmiki caste — to which the girl’s family belongs — live in the village of over 120 households. Apart from four or five OBC families, the rest are upper caste, mostly Rajputs.

On Wednesday, the girl’s father again questioned chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s Hindu credentials over his police’s act of hijacking the girl’s body and allegedly burning it after locking the family inside their home.

“Adityanath claims he is a Hindu sadhu. Doesn’t he know that an unmarried person in our society is buried and not cremated? Did he know before ordering his police to cremate my daughter at 2.30am that in sanatan dharma the last rites are prohibited at night?” he said.

The state government has told the Supreme Court that the last rites were conducted in the presence of the family, and that the cremation was speeded up because there was a possibility of violence.

SIT tenure

The state government has extended the SIT’s tenure by 10 days despite Adityanath on Saturday recommending a probe by the CBI.

The SIT had recommended a lie-detection test on the victim’s family, among others. The family wants a judicial probe.