And Justice for Twisha Sharma
Why should a young, cheerful, “full of fun”, ambitious, out-going, educated and accomplished young woman, choose to hang herself to death, so soon after her ‘dream marriage’?
Why should this jovial person suddenly turn isolated, solitary and quiet, detached and alienated from her friends, yet again choosing the silence of suppression, as has been the condemned inheritance in a woman’s life in large parts of India since ages?
You could see that she had once been a spontaneous and strong woman, with an effervescent smile, who laughed easily, rediscovering life in her own terms as a youthful female symbol of modernity. So why did she stop laughing, or why even a fleeting smile refused to cross her face, after she got married with such great expectations?
Why?
Why did she choose a hellish life of ritualistic, caged condemnation, when she had all the skills to fly on the wings of fulfilment, dream and success?
And why should she have chosen to marry and make a life-partner out of a man whom she met on a ‘dating app’ – and apparently barely knew – or, did she?
Did she at all have a clue that he may perhaps turn diabolical and sinister? Perhaps, quite contrary of the ‘online image’ he might have created for himself. (A typical masculine trend in contemporary online ‘interactions’ – a dangerous phenomenon often missed by the innocent and unsuspecting).
The dark side of this ‘bad faith story’ is that it seems so tragically inevitable, not-at-all-surprising, a predictable pattern repeated the umpteenth time, in the caged confines of a husband’s home, apparently with a dominant mother-in-law at the helm, and where the new bride seems to have become eternally trapped.
The darkest side of this cruel story is that this spontaneous and fun-loving woman has become a ‘victim’ of a perverse phenomenon which used to rage across India, especially North India, decades back, with woman after woman, newly married brides with expectations and optimism in their eyes, young girls, educated girls from liberal families, falling one after another into that deadly abyss called ‘Dowry’. In some cases even while the hangover of a honeymoon had not ended, and while the cathartic memories of an extravagant wedding seemed to be still in the air.
As it seems – in the case of Twisha Sharma.
Those terrible days, in small towns or big cities, dowry deaths became a curse and a scourge for young women with fake dreams of a so-called ‘happy married life’. Across India. Often, the psychological and physical trauma was intense and relentless. Often, the end was so brutal that the human capacity for barbarism, within the ‘holy family’, seemed unprecedented.
Indeed, in many cases, ‘Dowry Death’ became second nature to ‘Happily Married’.
But we thought it was over, isn’t it? Over and gone! A dark chapter in our murky history of nasty male narratives and brutish domination of women, often rendered invisible to the blind eyes of a society celebrating entrenched, orthodox male values as a divine Manusmriti doctrine, so convenient to keep women and girls in chain?
Including, educated, enlightened, progressive women.
Twisha Sharma (33) was Miss Pune; she got the beauty pageant crown in this city near the Western Ghats where a cool wind flows, in 2012. She did ads for Dove and L’Oreal. She looked cool, like a next-door, confident girl, comfortable with her life and destiny. (Dove anyway has a reputation of dismantling archaic notions of ‘beauty standards’ while asserting female self-identity and freedom.)
She acted in two films, one regional and the other a Hindi film, a cybercrime thriller, Zara Sambhal Kay. The Telugu movie was Mugguru Monagallu, a comedy thriller. Her team members liked her company, said she was fun, and that she was a passionate person, never a work-shirker. No films followed these debut ventures,
With a promising career in modelling unfolding, she entered a tougher professional journey; she did an MBA and chose a corporate communications job.
In other words, in terms of ambition for a young woman in neo-liberal capitalism, she had just about started flying. And everything seemed to be going her way.
And that is when, perhaps, she entered this dating app. Why, only she knows, perhaps. She met her Bhopal-based ‘future husband’ via a dating app, as media reports inform, in 2024, and married him in December 2025.
Months later, she was found dead in her home on May 12, 2026. Her dead body was found hanging on the terrace. An FIR was registered against her husband, Samarth Singh, a lawyer, and mother-in-law Giribala Singh, a retired district judge in Bhopal. She was arrested by the CBI for dowry harassment and evidence tampering, on May 28, 2026, after the Madhya Pradesh High Court rejected the anticipatory bail granted to her. Her son is in police custody.
The charges against Giribala Singh include Section 80(2) for dowry death, and Section 85 for cruelty to a woman by her husband or her relatives. Sections 3 and 4 of the Dowry Prohibition Act has been invoked against her.
The Twisha Sharma death and dowry case has become high profile, pointing to several mysterious elements before and after her body was discovered. There are too many questions, according to media reports.
What was she doing before and after her death? Did she have financial shares and did her husband wanted those to be transferred in his name? As alleged by her family, was she repeatedly harassed soon after her marriage for ‘more gifts and dowry demands etc? Was evidence destroyed? Was their a deliberate ploy to manipulate digital evidence and conceal facts?
Was she forced to do an abortion? Were serious aspersions cast on her character? Why did she, a vibrant person, suddenly turn detached, a recluse? Did she tell her parents that she was going through hell? Why did it become necessary to do a double post-mortem of her body, with experts from AIIMS, Delhi, conducting a second post-mortem in Bhopal? Was Samarth Singh allegedly absconding for days?
According to reports the MP High Court has stated some injuries found on her body were “not caused due to taking out the body from the ligature or carrying out to the hospital” and that one head injury “was ante-mortem”, suffered before death.
“As per the post-mortem report, the death was due to ante-mortem hanging by ligature, but from the post-mortem, it is also clear that six other injuries were found in the body of the deceased, in which four injuries were on the left arm, one on the ring finger and one on the head, and that was ante-mortem. From the query report, it is also clear that these injuries were not caused by taking out the body from the ligature or carrying out to the hospital,” the court said
Twisha’s family, taking into account the observations made by the High Court, thereby asserted that this clearly points that their daughter “was killed”.
Siddharth Luthra, lawyer for Twisha’s father, stated that Giribala Singh used her “skills”, picked up as a judge, to “tamper” the evidence and the crime scene.
She did training in Special Courses on Cyber Crimes, Cyber Forensic & Digital Signature Technology and Crime Scene Management and used her skills to tamper the crime scene… Luthra said.
“Initially, we did not think the issues were major. We thought it was simply an attitude problem that would get better with time. My daughter, too, didn’t make an issue out of it, she was made to believe it was all her fault,” Twisha’s father told NDTV (May 23, 2026). “These chats circulating in the media are barely 10 per cent of the harassment my daughter had to endure,” the father said. Before she was found dead, Twisha Sharma had told her family, according to her father, “Phas gayi hu (I am stuck).”
I am stuck, she had said. A sociological reality repeated again and again, which the family and ‘she’ choose to tolerate, hoping against hope that things will become better. That never ever happens.
By then, it is too late.
In the end, one hopes, that Twisha Sharma gets justice. And her mother and father get a closure – which, indeed, never ever happens.
Her childhood, her beautiful smile, and cheerful self, will stay with them forever. A young life full of dreams — nipped in the bud.
