Around 6 p.m. on May 28, a team of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) left the residence of retired Bhopal district judge Giribala Singh with her. They had arrested her following more than six hours of investigation and questioning in connection with her daughter-in-law Twisha Sharma’s dowry harassment and death case. Dozens of reporters and camerapeople, who had turned the locality into a media centre since that morning, swarmed around the CBI’s cars. The crew moved with the cars, from the house where Twisha, the 33-year-old former model, had been found dead on the night of May 12, to the police station. Giribala Singh’s son and Twisha’s husband, Samarth Singh was already in the CBI custody.
Samarth Singh, husband of Twisha Sharma, is being taken to a court in Bhopal on May 29 in connection with the death and dowry harassment case.
| Photo Credit:
A.M. FARUQUI
The arrest came a day after the Madhya Pradesh High Court quashed the anticipatory bail granted to Giribala Singh by a local Bhopal court on May 15, just hours after the local police registered an FIR in the case amid allegations from Twisha’s family of bias and lack of cooperation. Even though further investigation and trial will continue in the case, the two events mark the conclusion of 16 exhausting and painful days for Twisha’s family. During this period, Twisha’s body was kept in a mortuary for 12 days for a second autopsy to be performed, before the cremation. Through the two weeks, social media was rife with emotional breakdowns, online campaigns, and debates around the position of women in an Indian family. Twisha’s body was cremated at Bhopal’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat on May 24, just hours after a second autopsy was conducted at AIIMS Bhopal by a four-member expert panel of the AIIMS New Delhi on her family’s demand and on the orders of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. Her family bid her a tearful farewell and as her brother Harshit Sharma, a Major with the Indian Army, lit the funeral pyre, Twisha’s mother Rekha Sharma collapsed on the floor. Even as relatives held her, she remained inconsolable. At a brief prayer gathering, Twisha’s father, Navnidhi Sharma, remembered his daughter saying that she would take care of her parents “as a mother” would. “We don’t know how we will live without her. As kids grow up, they take care of their parents. They become like parents and parents become like children. She used to take care of like a mother does her children,” he said, while expressing confidence that she will get justice.
