New Delhi: Station House Officer Ajay Kumar Chaturvedi fled to an undisclosed location for two days, sat under a tree, and jotted down details of Madhumita Shukla’s diary. It linked the fiery poet to Amarmani Tripathi, a powerful four-time MLA who was a minister in the Mayawati government in 2002. The diary was the key to establishing the motive for Shukla’s murder, and what cops initially thought was a “blind murder case”. It was where she had diligently recorded details of her love affair with Tripathi and her two abortions.
When Chaturvedi walked into Shukla’s house in Lucknow’s Paper Mill Colony, where she was murdered, and found the diary at the crime scene, his heart sank. He instinctively realised that the powerful men who ran Uttar Pradesh would prefer that the diary simply disappear. The pressure to get rid of the diary and other documents he found at Shukla’s house was building up. Top officers asked Chaturvedi to focus on finding the shooters instead of establishing the motive.
“The pressure started building from day one,” says Chaturvedi.
The murder upended his life almost overnight. On the morning of 9 May 2003, he was an SHO of a police station in Lucknow looking to climb the police ranks. In less than a week, he found his career teetering as he worried about his life, all the while ensuring that evidence in the most high-profile case involving an Uttar Pradesh minister remained secure.
Chaturvedi was determined to build a strong case. Witnesses would not disappear on his watch. He sprinted the lone witness, Deshraj, Madhumita’s domestic worker who could identify the shooters to his government’s residence. And then he fled to a remote location to make a copy of the diary.
Senior UP Police officers kept asking Chaturvedi to find the killers and not focus on the diary. “One senior officer took the diary and documents away from me and only returned it when I warned him that I would mention his name in the general diary entry for case records,” he says, dredging up details of the 20-year-old case.
The diary was an important piece of the puzzle and helped the prosecution secure a life conviction for Tripathi and his wife Madhumani in 2007.
“There was no other way to do this. The first couple of days are the most important in any investigation and more so in a murder case like this,” he says.
But after serving 16 years of their life sentence, the husband and wife will go back home — the Uttar Pradesh government ordered their release on 24 August.
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Key evidence
Shukla never mentioned Tripathi by name in the diary. He was referred to as “AT” and “Mantri” and other acronyms in multiple places, but, by then, word had started to spread.
“All senior officers, except a few, asked us to leave the diary and the motive behind the murder. But how could the investigation go on if we ignored the motive? She was murdered before she could give birth to the child she was carrying,” says 67-year-old Chaturvedi who lives a retired life in Lucknow.
Within seven days of what was proving to be a sensational murder, Chaturvedi was shunted out of Mahanagar Police Station where he was attached as an officer of inspector rank to a non-descript police chowki.
“I was asked to join a chowki in Bareilly. How would I accept it after serving as an SHO for eight-nine years? I was threatened with suspension,” he says. It didn’t stop him from making a copy of the diary. But as the pressure built, he took one month’s medical leave after just seven days on the case.
During the time he was on the case, Chaturvedi conducted a thorough and transparent investigation, weathered intimidation tactics, secured the lone witness, submitted the diary as evidence, and made a copy of it as well. There were times when Chaturvedi—47 at the time—felt that he was being punished for doing his job.
“It felt like the crime was not committed by Amarmani but by me. I could never get the courage to become an SHO again. My life changed in seven days,” Chaturvedi says.
On the eighth day after the murder—17 May 2003—the case was transferred to the crime branch. A month later it was transferred to the CBI.
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Political muscle
On the evening of 9 May, the phone at Mahanagar Police Station rang. It was from the control room, and officers were told that there was a robbery and murder. A lady had been shot in her flat at Paper Mill Colony.
The entire flat was cordoned off by the police. When Chaturvedi walked into the bedroom, he saw her body on the tail end of the bed on the floor. The bullet wounds seemed fresh, and blood was still oozing out of her chest.
“Desraj was the only person who had seen the killers enter the house. Madhumita had asked him to make tea for them. Then they shot her and fled. It was extremely important to save him for the case,” says Chaturvedi.
At the time, no one realised that Madhumita was pregnant. It was only after the post-mortem report, when the body in the ambulance was already on its way for the last rites in her native village in Lakhimpur Kheri, that the UP Police received information that she was indeed pregnant.
“I made a call to my senior officers informing them about the development. A call was then made immediately to stop the ambulance that had reached Sitapur. We had to preserve the foetal tissue for DNA,” Chaturvedi says.
Apart from the diary, Chaturvedi had also recovered a taweez or talisman that had Madhumani’s name written on it from Shukla’s house.
While Chaturvedi and some of the senior officers — Anil Agarwal (then-SSP Lucknow), Rajesh Pandey (then-SP Crime Lucknow) — were trying to piece together the murder, Tripathi began flexing his political muscle.
In his political career of 40 years, the ex-MLA has been associated with the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A Brahmin Bahubali leader, he was one of the most infamous and feared men in the Purvanchal region of UP. In 2002, he won the assembly election on a BSP ticket and took office as a minister in the Mayawati government in alliance with the BJP.
Chaturvedi described the case proceedings as a pressure cooker environment, with political intimidation from all sides.
The case was transferred to the state’s crime branch unit on 17 May and a month later to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The political pressure led to the suspension of two senior rank officers of the CB-CID and the transfer of five junior officers.
The DNA report confirming that the child’s father was Amarmani was submitted to the CBI in September 2003.
Chaturvedi, who was dealing with the sudden stagnation of his career, would follow the case through the papers. Amarmani, Madhumani, Tripathi’s cousin Rohit Chaturvedi, and two contract killers Santosh Rai and Prakash Chandra Pandey, were arrested by the CBI and chargesheeted in December 2003.
In 2007, a CBI court in Dehradun convicted the four accused with life sentences. In 2012, Pandey was also handed a life term by the Uttarakhand High Court while upholding the sentencing of the other four.
Tripathi and his wife gamed the system and spent the better part of the sentence at a private ward in Gorakhpur BRD Medical College, from where he allegedly ran his empire. But Chaturvedi’s career was in the doldrums. After Madhumita’s murder, the inspector, who had served as SHO for police stations in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), Lucknow, and Kanpur was refused postings by senior officers.
His career till retirement was marked by a series of transfers—first to the Crime Records Bureau, then to the Special Task Force, Anti-Terrorism Squad, and later to the National Investigation Agency. He retired 13 years later in 2016—as an inspector.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)