New Delhi: “Sara used to live a life of fear and terror,” recalls Seema Singh, lying on her daughter’s bed in their house in Lucknow. The 27-year-old was allegedly murdered in 2015 by her husband, former Independent MLA Amanmani Tripathi, the son of former Uttar Pradesh minister Amarmani Tripathi and his wife Madhumani, who were prematurely released from jail last week in the Madhumita Shukla murder case.
This is the room where Sara once texted about her life being “ruined”—before the ill-fated trip to Leh from which she never returned. The room remains untouched, a somber reminder of her daughter’s ordeal, while Seema continues her legal battle for justice.
Sara, a law graduate and the third child among two brothers and two sisters, had secretly married Amanmani under Arya Samaj rites in July 2013. But she spent most of her two-year married life at her mother’s Lucknow home because the Tripathis never accepted the marriage. Seema claims that Amanmani, who met Sara at a party, often beat her daughter up, leaving behind painful bruises.
“But then he’d give her false hopes and dreams, and she used to become happy briefly,” Seema says, recalling her daughter being trapped in a cycle of abuse.
On 9 July 2015, Sara, travelling to Leh, died when their car met with an “accident” that Amanmani survived without any scratch to show. Suspicious, Seema filed an FIR, leading to a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chargesheet that refuted the accident theory, calling it ‘staged’.
At the time of Sara’s death, Amanmani was associated with the ruling Samajwadi Party. Despite facing accusations in his wife’s murder case, he contested and won the 2017 assembly election as an Independent from Nautanwa, after being denied a ticket by the SP. Amanmani’s parents, who were lodged in the Gorakhpur jail at the time, would be convicted of hatching the conspiracy and murder of Shukla, with whom the senior Tripathi was allegedly in a relationship. The 27-year-old poet was six months pregnant when she was shot dead at her apartment, with DNA report confirming the pregnancy.
The trial began in April 2017 at a special CBI court in Ghaziabad, before which Amanmani spent all of three and a half months in jail — from November 2016 to March 2017. More than eight years since Sara’s death, the case remains pending due to changing judges and public prosecutors. All this time, Seema, a lawyer herself, has been resolute in seeking “justice” for her daughter.
“I am ready to fight at any cost. Her memories and voice resonate in my ears. I lay on her bed, hoping she would come back…These thoughts don’t let me sleep, but the pain and anger force me to get into action,” she says.
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An unqualified doctor and a sweeper
Amanmani has maintained before courts that the ‘accident’ at Paigu Chauraha on National Highway 2 in Firozabad district’s Sirsaganj area happened because he had to apply sudden brakes and steer the car away from the road when he saw a school girl on a bicycle approaching from the other side. He claims the car skidded and rolled over several times before falling into a ditch.
Sara was taken to a hospital in Firozabad where the postmortem was conducted by a doctor named Pankaj Rakesh. The postmortem was neither photographed nor videographed, and the viscera was not preserved. The postmortem report mentioned shock, haemorrhage, and lung injury as the causes of death, supporting the accident theory. The CBI has claimed that Rakesh was not a qualified autopsy doctor, and that he conducted the postmortem with the help of a sweeper, Gyan Chand.
Nine days after the incident, the Firozabad police registered an FIR under IPC Sections 498A (cruelty), 302 (murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) based on Seema’s complaint. A week later, on 24 July 2015, the state government transferred the case to the CBI, which registered a case on 19 October. The CBI filed a chargesheet in February 2017.
The CBI investigation relied on reports from the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. The agency cited clear evidence to show that Sara’s death was not an accident, but a pre-planned murder. Similarly, the IIT-Delhi report said that the exterior damage on the vehicle does not indicate multiple roll-over in a crash. Based on the AIIMS report that analysed the photographs of Sara’s dead body, the CBI asserted that the victim was first strangulated and then the crime scene was created to make it look like an accident. The CRRI report also dismissed the accident theory as claimed by Amanmani after analysing the condition of the car and the ‘accident’ site.
Amanmani Tripathi was finally arrested on 25 November 2016 and lodged in Ghaziabad’s Dasna Jail. His bail application, twice rejected by the lower court which cited lack of any injury to the accused, was accepted in March 2017 by the Allahabad High Court.
Even the three months in jail did not halt Amanmani’s life. In an order passed on 10 February 2017, the high court allowed him to file his nomination for the UP assembly election. Amanmani travelled to the centre to submit his nomination papers in police custody.
In its order granting bail to Amanmani, the high court favoured a “liberal attitude”, pointing out that “there is no apprehension of the applicant tampering or hampering with the investigation”. The high court also said that the CBI case was based only on documentary evidence, without any eye-witness account.
Both Seema Singh and the CBI challenged the bail before the Supreme Court, which upheld the high court order in April 2018, observing that the court had “taken into consideration relevant factors while granting the bail”.
Also read: Who was the SHO key in convicting Amarmani Tripathi? He protected the secret diary, witness
287 hearings, five judges
In a supplementary chargesheet filed in December 2021, the CBI named Dr Rakesh, claiming he had not disclosed Sara’s injuries to shield Amanmani. Rakesh approached the Allahabad High Court last year, seeking the dismissal of the case against him. However, the high court declined his request. A similar application was rejected by the trial court in February 2021. The supplementary chargesheet had also named the naib tehsildar, Krishna Murari Dixit, who prepared the inquest report after Sara’s death. Dixit passed away in 2021.
Meanwhile, before the CBI court, 62 prosecution witnesses have been examined. However, as per Seema’s lawyer, Navneet Tyagi, a police witness has already been declared hostile, as he failed to support the prosecution’s version.
In the order granting bail to Amanmani in March 2017, the high court had directed the trial court to decide the case expeditiously, “if possible within a period of one year strictly, on a day-to-day basis”.
Since April 2017, when the case first came up before the trial court, it has been listed before the court 287 times. It is currently at the evidence stage. Tyagi told ThePrint that in the past seven years, the public prosecutor has been transferred at least four times. “It is adversely affecting the case…The line of defence often changes with the PP…The CBI could have appointed one PP for the entirety of the case.”
He claimed that Seema had requested the CBI to appoint a single prosecutor for the entire duration of the case, but she did not receive a favourable response. The original investigating officer was also transferred, he said, adding that the judges have also been transferred at least thrice in the case, with the court also having remained vacant for some time.
While granting bail, the Allahabad High Court had ordered Amanmani to appear on dates fixed by the trial court. However, as per Tyagi, the trial court granted Amanmani multiple exemptions over the past few years. There have also been several adjournments. For instance, the court’s 18 August order noted that both Amanmani and Rakesh had sought exemption from appearing before the court, and no prosecution witness had appeared on that day.
‘I call him hatyara’
Seema has spent the past nine years running from pillar to post, appealing to anyone willing to hear, demanding “justice” for her daughter. She says she was “born brave”. In 2016, she started a change.org petition for ‘Justice in Sara Singh murder case’, and has dedicated Twitter and Facebook accounts to the cause, frequently uploading videos demanding answers.
In 2017, she urged her acquaintances to circulate two videos in which she made appeals against voting for Amanmani. Last year, she sent letters and visited offices of several political parties, requesting them not to give a ticket to Amanmani. She has joined hands with Nidhi Shukla, the younger sister of Madhumita, whose killing is back in focus with convicts Amarmani and Madhumani being prematurely released by the Yogi Adityanath government without serving their life sentence.
Despite Seema’s efforts, Amanmani managed to get a ticket from the BSP to contest the 2022 assembly election from Nautanwa in Maharajganj, the seat that the 31-year-old had won as an Independent in 2017. He lost the election, and was expelled from the BSP earlier this year on charges of indiscipline and anti-party activities. In July 2020, Amanmani also tied the knot with one Oshin Pandey from Madhya Pradesh at a small ceremony in a hotel in Gorakhpur.
Meanwhile, Seema has claimed receiving threats. “Once in Ghaziabad, some men came on a bike and pushed me…I get calls from unknown numbers…He thought if he bullies me, intimidates me, I’ll get scared. But I’m fighting.”
Seema told ThePrint that she always refers to Amanmani as “hatyara” (murderer), so that the message reaches the maximum number of people. And she is determined to see the case through.
(Edited by Prashant)