Where is Lawyer Vilas Bhande Now? Akku Yadav Update The Talks Today
Andrew Adams
Updated on March 14, 2026
The three-part docuseries “Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom” on Netflix looks at the lynching of alleged serial killer and criminal Bharat Kalicharan AKA Akku Yadav in a courtroom in Nagpur, India.
People who lived in Kasturba Nagar in Nagpur and were afraid of Akku and had to deal with his crimes for over a decade are interviewed on the show. Vilas Bhande was one of the people interviewed, and he was also accused of taking part in the lynching. So, if you want to know what happened to him since then, here’s what we know.
What does Vilas Bhande do?
Vilas Bhande grew up in Kasturba Nagar. Before Akku Yadav turned to crime, he was friends with Vilas Bhande. Vilas said on the show that when they were teenagers, they were up to no good. To pass the time, they would steal, gamble, and play games. Akku even taught him how to swim because they were such good friends. But in 1991, something happened that changed the way they were going.
Vilas says that he, Akku, and a few other people went to a building that was still being built to steal something. They saw two people over there. Vilas said on the show that all he wanted to do was steal money, but Akku raped the girl, and the police soon arrested him. He made friends with a few other criminals in jail, and they started coming to Kasturba Nagar after he got out.
Over time, Akku’s terror continued to have a big effect on the people who lived there. He was accused of raping more than 40 women and girls, including some who were raped in groups during the day. Aside from that, it was said that Akku had killed three people. One of them was a friend, and the other was a woman he saw as a threat, according to the show. Akku kept making threats, stealing from people, and raping women until August 1, 2004.
After Akku threatened Vilas’ sister-in-law Usha Narayane, the rest of the people in the area came together against him. On August 7, 2004, Akku turned himself in to the police. Before that, Vilas asked the police for help with the search, but he said they didn’t take him seriously. The same was true for the media. Then, Vilas said that the person who arrested Akku was a friend of Akku’s. Soon, they found out that he had a bail hearing on August 13, and everyone was worried that he would get out and keep breaking the law.
Vilas talked about how the community came together in the days before the lynching and thought about what to do about Akku’s upcoming release on the show. At the time, they all thought that if he got out of jail, he would kill them. So, on August 13, 2004, a group of women went to court, where they beat Akku in the face with chili powder and then stabbed him to death.
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How is Vilas Bhande doing now?
Vilas said on the show that he didn’t see anything that afternoon in court, but he knew who was involved. At first, the police arrested five women, but as they looked into the case, they found more suspects, bringing the total to 21. Vilas said that the lynching happened because the police ignored their pleas for help over and over again. He thought that if the authorities had taken them seriously, it wouldn’t have gotten to this point.
Vilas was one of 21 people who were accused of the murder, but in November 2014, everyone was found not guilty. He said at the time, “The terrible thing would not have happened if the government and police had paid attention sooner. Many times before, the mob had risen up and tried to tell the police about the dangerous criminal’s activities. Vilas lives with his wife and two kids in Kasturba Nagar right now. He is a lawyer there, and things seem to be going much better for him now.
Early years
Akku Yadav grew up in the slum of Kasturba Nagar, which is near the city of Nagpur, in the state of Maharashtra. Santosh and Yuvraj were his brothers. Yadav lived and did business in the slum, which police say was home to some criminals and two rival gangs that worked the area. In her book Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur, author Swati Mehta wrote, “By all accounts, Akku had gone from being the son of a milkman to being a local menace. He was a child of the neighborhood.”
Crimes
In their book Half the Sky: How Women Around the World Can Turn Oppression into Opportunity, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn wrote: “Akku Yadav was, in a way, Kasturba Nagar’s other “success.” He was a terrible person who went from being a small-time thug to being a mobster and the king of the slum.” Yadav was in charge of a group of thieves who ran the Kasturba Nagar slum. They stole, beat, and killed people without getting caught. Yadav broke the law for a number of years while he built a small business empire. He and his gang members would often bother and scare people into giving them money. His main way to make money was to force people to give him money, and he would hurt them if they didn’t or if they did something to make him angry. Yadav always said that he would rape anyone who stood up to him. It is known that many of Yadav’s rape victims were Dalits, who have a hard time getting justice for sexual assaults compared to other groups.
Yadav was mean to Pratibha Urkude and her husband Dattu for many years. They ran a small grocery store. He would take things from the store without paying or only pay a small amount of what he owed. He would sometimes ask for money and get violent if they couldn’t pay. Yadav often worried that someone was making plans to hurt him. So, he wouldn’t let men or women get together and talk. He made sure that kids their age didn’t play together, and if they did, Yadav would stop them. Suspecting that people were asking about him, he would tell them not to tell police about his crimes and threaten them if they did. Because the bodies were in the way, he had to pay off the police to keep them from stopping him.
But rape was very shameful, so the people who were raped could be counted on to keep quiet. Yadav raped people to make them quiet much more often than he killed them. The women who killed Yadav said he had been robbing and abusing local women for more than a decade without getting caught. They said that Yadav was paying off local police so that they wouldn’t help his victims or press charges. Mehta says that Akku Yadav’s first crime, in 1991, was a gang rape. He also did things like rape, murder, theft, extortion, home invasion, assault, and intimidating criminals. Yadav had been arrested about 14 times before he died. He was locked up for a year at the end of 1999 because of a law in Maharashtra called the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Slumlords, Boot-leggers, Drug Offenders, and Dangerous Persons Act of 1981.
People in the Kasturba Nagar slum say that Yadav raped so many people that a rape victim lives in every other house there. Yadav is said to have raped more than 40 women, the youngest of whom was only 10 years old. One person called Yadav “the Gabbar Singh of Kasturba Nagar” and said, “When Akku was around, we mostly stayed inside.” Women have said that Yadav and his group would break into homes at any time. He sometimes wanted a motorcycle, stole a cell phone, or tried to force people to give him money. Yadav and the other people in his gang would beat up anyone who stood in their way. Anjana Bai Borkar’s daughter Asha Bai was killed in front of her 16-year-old granddaughter. Borkar was one of the five women who were arrested for the lynching of Yadav. When the granddaughter talked about Yadav, she said: “We were eating dinner when he came to the door and said he was my brother’s friend. He pulled her out of the house and stabbed her when she opened the door. He then cut off her fingers to get her rings and her ears to get her earrings.” At least three people were said to have been killed by Yadav and their bodies dumped on nearby railroad tracks.
One woman talked about how Yadav attacked her and her husband. He went to their house between 4 and 5 in the morning. Yadav knocked on their door loudly and said he was a police officer. He asked them to open the door. Once Yadav got inside, he stabbed the husband in the thigh with a knife, locked him in the bathroom, and pulled the wife away by her hair to a place where he raped her. After three or four hours, Yadav let her come back. In January 2004, Yadav was not allowed to go into the city of Nagpur. Yadav beat up an old man named Harichand Khorse because he couldn’t pay 100 rupees. Harichand Khorse made a small amount of money by playing a musical instrument called a baja. Neighbors in Kasturba Nagar say that Yadav once raped a woman right after she got married. He also took a man’s clothes off, burned him with a cigarette, and made him dance for the man’s 16-year-old daughter. Yadav took a woman named Asho Bhagat and cut off both of her breasts in front of her daughter and a few neighbors. Yadav then killed Bhagat by cutting her up on the street. A neighbor named Avinash Tiwari was horrified by the murder and planned to tell the police about Yadav. Because of this, Yadav killed him. Ten days after Kalma gave birth, Yadav and his men raped her in a group. After what happened to her, Kalma killed herself by dousing herself in kerosene and setting herself on fire. Yadav’s group pulled a woman who was seven months pregnant out of her home. They took off her clothes and raped her in public on the road.
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