Another Death inside Marriage
The India Commentary view
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By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2026-05-25 11:21:52
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The India Commentary view
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India has a peculiar relationship with its dead daughters-in-law. It mourns them briefly, marches loudly, and then moves on - to the next outrage, the next hashtag, the next woman who turned up hanging in a house that should have been her home. Twisha Sharma, 33, actor, former Miss Pune, wife of five months, is the latest name in this unending ledger. She will not be the last.
What distinguishes her case, and what has propelled it to the Supreme Court, is not the fact of her death, but the texture of what allegedly surrounded it. The questions a retired district-judge mother-in-law allegedly asked about her daughter-in-law's sexual past. The husband who allegedly questioned paternity of their unborn child and disappeared for ten days after his wife was found dead. The post-mortem that recorded her height ten centimetres shorter than she actually was, misplaced the ligature material, contradicted itself on her age, and omitted the neck X-ray. And most troublingly: the phone call, placed at 11:35 on the morning after Twisha's death, in which her mother-in-law allegedly rang the beauty parlour Twisha had visited hours before she died and sought access to CCTV footage. A retired judge seeking potential evidence within hours of her daughter-in-law's death raises disturbing questions. Grief alone does not readily explain such conduct.
The Supreme Court was right to take suo motu cognisance. Chief Justice Surya Kant was right to note the 'unfortunate' optics of a retired judicial officer at the centre of allegations of evidence-tampering. The Solicitor General was right - and unusually blunt - when he told the bench that 'it is better to have a divorced daughter than a dead one.' The CBI was right to take over. All of this is correct procedure. None of it addresses the actual problem.
The actual problem is that the Dowry Prohibition Act turns 65 this year. It has been the law of this land since 1961. The IPC has had a specific dowry death provision since 1986. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita carries it forward. Sixty-five years of legislation, and in 2024, according to the NCRB, 5,737 women were killed in dowry-related circumstances. That is fifteen women a day. Every day. In a country that has, for decades, congratulated itself on its rapidly modernising, increasingly educated middle class.
The Twisha Sharma case does not come from a village. It comes from Bhopal's Katara Hills. The accused are not illiterate or unlettered. They are a lawyer and a retired judge. They met their daughter-in-law on a dating app. They attended what was, by all appearances, a modern wedding. And yet the operating logic inside that matrimonial home - the surveillance of a woman's past, the questioning of her fidelity, the demand that she shed her aspirations and become domesticated - was indistinguishable from the logic that has been killing women in this country for centuries. Modernity, it turns out, is not a prophylactic against patriarchy. It is merely a new delivery mechanism for it.
There are things the system must now do. The CBI investigation must be swift, thorough and insulated from any institutional pressure. The second post-mortem findings must be placed transparently before the court. The anticipatory bail of Giribala Singh must be reconsidered in light of the evidence. Samarth Singh must face trial without the procedural delays that routinely blunt the edge of India's criminal justice system. The Bar Council's suspension of his licence is a start; it cannot be the finish.
But there are also things the system cannot do. It cannot undo the culture that taught a family of legal professionals that it was acceptable - their right - to interrogate a young woman about her sexual history after marriage. It cannot address the social calculus that made Twisha's ambitions a source of marital friction rather than pride. It cannot fix the low conviction rates that continue to plague dowry-related prosecutions, a reality that risks reinforcing the perception that the odds remain tilted in favour of perpetrators. It cannot mandate that police, prosecutors and magistrates treat these cases with the seriousness they deserve rather than the impatience they typically receive. Those are not failures of any single investigation. They are failures of will - political, institutional, social.
For now, Twisha Sharma's family is fighting for a trial. They are fighting for accountability in a system where the accused are alleged to possess an unusual familiarity with that very system. They are fighting, as families across this country have fought before them, to ensure that a woman's death means something. They are also fighting for something larger: the proposition that a woman's life inside marriage should not be rendered secondary to family reputation, social expectation or institutional influence. Fifteen women a day are still losing that fight. Most of them never make the news.
