By Sushil Kutty
Indore’s Raja Raghuvanshi didn’t want to honeymoon in Meghalaya. But Indore’s Sonam Raghuvanshi was adamant and Meghalaya they went. And Meghalaya is wishing this wasn’t how it should have been! Why bring murder to Meghalaya, there was already talk of Meghalaya as a crime-high state?
Now, the wife is in custody. An alleged lover of a previous life, too. The husband’s decomposed body was spotted by a drone in a deep gorge in Meghalaya with the wife missing. Only to surface at a dhaba in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. At 2 am in the wee hours of Sunday. She made a phone call from the mobile of the dhaba owner who called the police even as the woman spoke with her mother in Indore, hundreds of kilometres from where the husband’s decomposed body was spotted by the drone sent up to get a bird’s eye of the forested and mountainous area where the husband and wife went missing.
Hubby didn’t know he had been set up for murder by his bride of just a couple of weeks.
Such are the travesties of marriage. You never know who the person you are marrying and this happens to both men and women who tie the knot not knowing fully the antecedents of betrothed. In this case there was not even an inkling. The laughing and smiling photographs and videos of Raja Raghuvanshi and Sonam Raghuvanshi didn’t point to anything but love, love and more love.
And then they went for their honeymoon! Now, marriages have their pitfalls…. But this one had given a bad name to not just to honeymoons but also to, hold your breath, to honeymoon destinations. Honeymoon destinations can be any place the newly wed choose to be for the first week or two of their marriage.
Honeymoons are happy affairs. A time to discover, and invent, too. Like in this case, where if the Meghalaya Police is to be believed, Sonam Raghuvanshi invented a bunch of lies which she kept away from the knowledge of Raja Raghuvanshi, the most deadly of which was to lull him into expecting that she was having a rip-roaring time in being with him, with him alone.
The last bit of video, CCTV footage, shows Raja and Sonam arriving on a scooty to what looked like the front door of a building, later revealed as a ‘Homestay’, and a happy looking (or acting) Sonam whittling her clothing to manageable numbers, shucking warm clothes and donning different ones, literally dancing on her feet, happy as hell while Raja was inside with the homestay receptionist.
Then they are leaving. The scooty taking a U-turn and heading away, to lose them in grainy footage. Whoever knew what was to follow. Later, somebody released “audio” in which Sonam is heard talking to her “mother” in a lightly complaining tone. The two are climbing up a hill and Sonam says she is finding it difficult to climb but that Raja Raghuvanshi wouldn’t take a “No”.
The honeymoon was going up before it came crashing down, which is what happens to most marriages. But, shucks, this was a honeymoon. Now, there is no honey and there is no moon for Raja Raghuvanshi, definitely, whose decomposed body was found by an all-seeing drone.
There was no sign of Sonam Raghuvanshi. The couple’s rented scooty was found 20 km from where Raja’s body was found. A white t-shirt marked the spot, apparently Sonam’s, left to mislead the police. A machete was also at hand, a brand new machete, which the police say must have been bought for the express purpose of killing Raja Raghuvanshi.
Did Sonam know she would be a widow or did she plan and plot to be a widow? The police are investigating the “crime”, the police of Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In the United States, this would be a federal crime and the FBI would automatically get to investigate the “crime”.
But in India that is not how crimes crossing state lines are investigated. Don’t be surprised if the police of Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh start working at cross purposes. More than likely there would be jurisdictional squabbles. Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are ruled by the BJP and Meghalaya isn’t. So wait for politics to make an unsavoury entry.
The Meghalaya Police is on a ‘high’ after Sonam Raghuvanshi was “arrested” from a dhaba in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. The Meghalaya Police straight away claimed credit for solving the crime in seven straight days. The state’s DGP came on record. And why not? The Meghalaya Police was under tremendous strain following this whodunit. The state’s reputation was at stake. Meghalaya was seen as crime-high even as it was considered tourism high, with Shillong rated within the top 10 tourist destinations of the world. It also was a tried and tested honeymoon destination before Sonam Raghuvanshi spoiled the image. For the first time in decades, Meghalaya was being spoken of as something of a dangerous place to be for outsiders. That the native folks of Meghalaya were blood-thirsty “cannibals”, the Khasi and the Garo and God knows who else, wolves in sheep’s clothing.
This isn’t fair, but word goes around and honeymooners might give Meghalaya a wide berth! Couples had gone missing but this was being given a bad colour. Bad, ugly notations bookmarked. Behind the ‘megha’ the dark clouds didn’t translate to Cloud Nine!
Meghalaya’s domestic tourism was being badly hit. Outsiders familiar with Meghalaya and the Meghalaya people scratched their heads! Word would get around to international tourists, too. And then, what?
Crime is a tourist repellant and Meghalaya doesn’t sit pretty in crimes rates. The NCRB data doesn’t give Meghalaya any benefit of doubt. Sonam Raghuvanshi could have gone for a honeymoon to any number of places but she picked on Meghalaya! (IPA Service)
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