Aarushi murder whodunnit grips India's middle-class

By Alistair Scrutton

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A young girl's throat is slit in her bedroom. A servant is also found dead nearby. The dentist father is arrested, injected with a "truth serum", held for 50 days and then released. The murder weapon has still to be found.

India is gripped by a murder whodunnit that has highlighted its bumbling police, aggressive media and a deep-seated unease among the Asian giant's newly rich about household servants amid increasing numbers of crimes in its cities.

When Rajesh Talwar walked free at the weekend after about 50 days in jail, it was the latest twist in a case that has dominated headlines for weeks, often overshadowing news of rising inflation and an embattled government that faces a vote of no-confidence.

Talwar's 14-year-old daughter Aarushi was found dead in her bedroom in May in Noida, a town of new shopping malls and IT offices just outside Delhi and a place synonymous with the Asian giant's new, confident middle-class lifestyle.

India is awash with horrific crime stories, often related to caste, among its billion-plus people. These stories, most from remote villages, make small paragraphs in newspapers.

But the Noida murder mystery resonated among many of the new, middle class, reflecting their fears as the country quickly urbanises and wealth disparities rise.

Police immediately named the murder suspect as a missing servant, hitting at the heart of households where middle- and upper-class families regularly employ poorly paid, often ill-treated, servants to cook, clean and walk the dog.

"Noida is basically Delhi, it is about the people who we call middle-class in India," said Dipankar Gupta, a sociology professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.