Twisha Sharma’s death became another public trial of a modern Indian woman |
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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit
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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story
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Twisha Sharma’s death became another public trial of a modern Indian woman
From Twisha Sharma to Sunanda Pushkar and Jiah Khan, India has long perfected a cruel ritual—turning dead women into the accused while the real questions fade into the background.
A dead woman is on trial again in India.
The accused this time is a 33-year-old actor-model. Twisha Sharma, the former Miss Pune with an MBA, had appeared in campaigns for Dove and L’Oréal. She was found hanging on the terrace of her matrimonial home in Bhopal on 12 May. It had only been five months into her marriage with Samarth Singh, an advocate, and son of a retired district judge, Giribala Singh.
Sharma is in no position to defend herself. She cannot explain herself, enter a plea, or undergo an interrogation. But this has hardly slowed her prosecution. In the days following what the Supreme Court has since called an “unnatural death”, the case against Sharma was laid out in painstaking detail by her mother-in-law.
Over the last week, Giribala Singh, who is out on anticipatory bail, has vended interviews to every possible media channel. According to her, Sharma was schizophrenic, had a “dual personality” and there was “a fourth person in her mind”. She has insinuated that her daughter-in-law abused drugs, including marijuana, even while pregnant.
In one interview, with a well-timed sniffle, she accused Sharma of terminating the pregnancy and “denying” the family the joy of a grandchild. But she has also described a daughter-in-law so distressed by that same pregnancy that, according to her, the child was “killing [Sharma] from inside” – offering this, too, as evidence of a disordered mind. It is evidence, for sure, just not of the kind Singh likely imagines.
Even as her own son was absconding — the Madhya Pradesh police had to announce a reward of Rs 10,000 for information on his whereabouts — Giribala Singh’s sustained campaign of allegations against her daughter-in-law continued. Sharma had apparently spent Rs 7-8 lakh in five months and carried “mysterious keys” to an unidentified car and a house in Noida. Sharma’s parents, she claimed, had pushed her into the glamour industry as a........