Rajasthan family gets life term for murdering son's girlfriend over marriage issues

Rajasthan family gets life term for murdering son's girlfriend over marriage issues

A Rajasthan court sentenced a woman, her two sons and daughter to life imprisonment for conspiring to kill the 25-year-old girlfriend of one of the sons after she insisted on marriage despite their caste differences.

A relationship that ran into caste opposition, followed by a demand for marriage, ended in murder and life imprisonment for four members of a family in Rajasthan. A special SC/ST court in Tonk convicted a woman, her two sons and daughter of conspiring to kill a 25-year-old woman, who was in a relationship with one of the accused, Pradhan.

The deceased, Suman, and Pradhan, both residents of Jaipur with roots in Rajasthan’s Tonk district, were in a relationship. But things changed when Suman began pressing Pradhan to marry her.

Pradhan started avoiding the issue as the two belonged to different castes.

It was then, according to the prosecution, that Pradhan plotted Suman’s murder with his mother, brother and sister in 2022. He called her back to their village on the pretext of a Shraddh ceremony and made her consume a poisonous chemical.

Pradhan informed Suman’s brother about her condition, three days after the incident, and asked him to come to Ajmer, where Suman had already died. Believing that she had died of a snakebite, her family performed her last rites in September 2022.

The story, however, began to unravel after Suman’s postmortem report showed that she had died after consuming a poisonous chemical, not from a snakebite.

Suspicion on Pradhan grew after it was found that he had withdrawn around Rs 80,000 from Suman’s account using her ATM card.

The case was registered in May 2023 after Suman’s brother filed a complaint. During the investigation, police uncovered the conspiracy to kill her after she insisted that Pradhan marry her.

Meanwhile, Sanjana and her son Sawai Ram were also recently accused of murdering Sanjana’s husband, Jagdish. They were in judicial custody in Jaipur and were brought to Tonk on production warrants in connection with the Suman murder case.

The court has now sentenced Sanjana, her sons Pradhan and Sawai Ram, and daughter Sushila to life imprisonment. It also imposed a total fine of Rs 1.35 lakh on the four.

Special Judge Aarti Maheshwari based the verdict on the statements of 27 witnesses and 37 documents.

While pronouncing the verdict, Judge Maheshwari also included a 10-line poem written by her in the judgment, reflecting on the murder, betrayal of trust and caste differences in the relationship.

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