New Delhi: Hours before she allegedly killed herself last week, 25-year-old Karishma Bhatti called her older sister Dipti Bhatia in tears. She wanted to leave her husband of two years, 26-year-old Vikas. Speaking to ThePrint about the events of 29 March, Dipti said her sister suffered through frequent domestic abuse.
“She couldn’t take it anymore,” said Dipti, 37, as she tried to comfort Karishma’s crying seven-month-old daughter at her house in north Delhi’s Jagatpur. “She had said something bad was going to happen and wanted to get out of that place but didn’t get the chance.”
Perturbed by the conversation, Dipti had convinced her father Maharaj Singh to accompany her to the couple’s home in village Khera Choganpur at Greater Noida’s Ecotech III. When they got there, they found Karishma hanging and her husband and his relatives all missing.
It’s been a week since this incident. An FIR in the case — which ThePrint has accessed — books Vikas, his father Sompal Singh Bhatti, his mother Rakesh, sister Rinki, and brothers Anil and Sunil, under IPC sections 498A (cruelty), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 304B (dowry death) and provisions of the Dowry prohibition Act, 1961.
Vikas and his father have been arrested based on a police complaint from Karishma’s family, while Anil and Sunil are absconding.
In their complaint, Karishma’s family has accused Vikas of killing her for a dowry of Rs 21 lakh and a Toyota Fortuner SUV, claiming that he frequently teamed up with his father and brothers to assault her. It’s this complaint that forms the basis of the FIR.
“She would never kill herself. She knew she couldn’t leave her daughter alone with them,” Dipti said, fighting back tears.
Police, meanwhile, see it as a case of dowry death. “They may claim that they didn’t do anything but only investigation will prove what really happened,” Virendra Singh, a sub-inspector at the Ecotech III police station — under whose jurisdiction the Bhatti family lived — said.
Karishma’s family told ThePrint that a post-mortem had been performed the night of her death, but couldn’t provide more details. Sub-inspector Singh too refused to give more details on the case.
However, back in the couple’s two-storeyed house, Vikas’s extended family claims Karishma “was depressed”.
“Our son treated her well but she was never happy,” 60-year-old Rajjo, Vikas’s aunt, said as she sat outside the house with two other women, Danesh(45) and Keshvati (40), basking in the warm April sun.
‘Beat her up, treated her poorly’
Karishma and Vikas tied the knot in December 2022, a match arranged through a family friend, said Karishma’s brother, Deepak Kumar, to ThePrint. However, the family soon discovered they had been misled. Contrary to what the family friend had said, Vikas was not a lawyer but worked in his family’s construction business.
“The day after their wedding, Vikas demanded a Fortuner SUV and Rs 21 lakh. We couldn’t give it to them so they beat up Karishma and treated her poorly. When things got really out of hand, our father gave him Rs 10 lakh more,” Kumar told ThePrint, adding that the family would keep her in confinement, even confiscate her phone.
The mistreatment allegedly continued even after Karishma had her baby last year. “They wanted a boy. They were unhappy when they came to know it was a girl,” Dipti said, adding that even after Karishma got back home from the hospital, the family would make her clean the house and not give her food.
‘Trust women, protect women’
The giving and taking of dowry is a punishable offence in India under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Dowry deaths are dealt with under Section 304B of the Indian Penal Code, which prescribes a punishment not less than seven years, “but which may extend to imprisonment for life”.
Despite these laws, dowry remains a major social problem. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data released in December 2023, 13,479 cases under the Dowry Prohibition Act and 6,450 dowry deaths were recorded in 2022.
Ranjana Kumari, a women’s rights activist and author of the 1989 book ‘Brides Are Not for Burning’, blames the existing consumerist culture and a failure to implement dowry laws for the problem.
“You hardly see people getting arrested due to which people are getting emboldened. Moreover, families are not careful. They think that they are buying happiness for their daughter, but in a way, they are pushing her to get killed,” she said.
The other problem, according to her, is that of perception. “The whole society believes that women lie about abuse. Let’s start trusting our girls when they say that they are harassed, exploited, and beaten. Protect her,” the author said.
Dipti agrees. Women, she said, are often taught to make peace with their situation and not retaliate. “That’s what she (Karishma) did till it took her life,” she said.
‘If our son had killed her, would we have called police?’
According to Rajjo, on 29 March, Karishma went into her room after Vikas went to work. It wasn’t until that evening that a young cousin who went to call her for evening tea, alerted everyone that she had hung herself, she said.
“We immediately called the police. If our son had killed her, would we call the police?” she asked.
Meanwhile, in Delhi’s Jagatpur, baby Naysa cries for her mother, unable to find comfort in her aunt. Both families now want to claim her, Dipti told ThePrint.
“But we are scared that tomorrow when she gets to know how her mother was killed, she won’t be able to live, knowing that her father killed her mother. With Karishma gone, she’s what’s left of her,” she said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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