The death of 33-year-old Twisha Sharma has left the country stunned with the institutional bias, dowry allegations and mental distress surrounding the case.
She was found dead under bizarre circumstances at her matrimonial home in Bhopal on May 12, 2026. It happened right after six months of her marriage to advocate Samarth Singh, the son of Giribala Singh, a retired district and sessions judge.
The case, which seemed like a tragic domestic incident at first, has turned into a high-profile investigation and is now a suo motu case before the Supreme Court. It is a spectacle of the influence of public officials who exercise authority beyond the legal and moral boundaries. Twisha’s family has alleged that the local police botched early evidence collection and tampered with CCTV footage to protect the accused.
Former Miss Pune and an MBA graduate, Twisha Sharma, married advocate Samarth Singh in Delhi after meeting through a dating app in 2024, and the two soon decided to marry. Indian weddings are known to be lavish, and so it was – the bride’s face lit up throughout with a spectrum of emotions, happiness scattered like dandelions as she danced with joy. A once-happy bride now found hanging in her own home after months of the grand matrimony, the question remains- choice or force?
Twisha Sharma’s mother-in-law, Giribala Singh, had allegedly demanded ₹2 lakh at the time of the marriage of her son, according to the FIR filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Her family told police that they had provided dowry and gifts beyond their financial capacity at the time of the wedding. Little did they know that no amount of cash and expensive gifts in the world would be enough to save their own daughter.
The FIR said that soon after the wedding, Twisha was subjected to mental torture by her husband and mother-in-law regarding dowry, who allegedly said that the amount spent by her parents on the wedding did not match their expectations.
The FIR also said that after the marriage, her husband and mother-in-law did not give her money for personal needs. Hence, her parents were forced to look after their daughter constantly, despite already being drained by the preceding dowry, to transfer funds to her online.
The marriage was a sham from the start, something built by monetary means to satisfy others’ greed could never substitute pure and selfless love. The dowry shackled Twisha’s family in a loop of hope, only for it to rupture into millions of fragments under the burden of their ever-increasing demands.
Dowry is not a form of reassurance to ensure a daughter’s well-being. It is a presumed tradition rooted in avarice and coercion. In India, dowry is heavily penalised by the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, as well as through stringent protections in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). But what good will the law do for a crime normalised by the common people? Especially when predators wear the skin of lawmakers, and the law-abiders blindly follow them like sheep, while their daughters become a customary sacrifice.
The most frightening question that the case of Twisha Sharma raises is whether the system of dowry is no longer restricted to arranged marriages. Reportedly, Twisha Sharma and advocate Samarth Singh met through a dating app and willingly decided to marry. The sacred concept of love has been crushed by wealth. Dowry has always appeared to be confined to arranged marriages, but the stereotypes have revealed a much harsher reality.
A shocking discovery has been made that Giribala Singh reportedly behaved in a suspicious manner, trying to retrace Twisha’s routine to cowardly cover up the family’s malevolence. Twisha Sharma visited the salon hours before she was found hanging at her in-laws’ house in Bhopal. The next morning, Sharma’s mother-in-law, Giribala Singh, called the salon and made repeated inquiries about her visit. She inquired when her daughter-in-law had visited the salon, the precise time when she left, and how she made the payment, recalled the salon’s owner. The salon owner said she repeatedly asked her whether there was any proof or record showing Sharma had visited the salon, be it of a payment.
A second call from her came in the afternoon, asking for footage of Sharma’s visit in an anxious manner. Singh told her that Sharma had died by suicide. Shortly after, a group of around five to six people arrived at the salon, wearing black-and-white clothes like those of a lawyer. A woman in the group identified herself as an advocate and asked for footage of Sharma’s visit, claiming that the police needed it. The footage was extracted by the group, but their real identities remain unclear.
For a marriage whose foundation was love, the aftermath did not reveal even a shred of sorrow. Not a single tear was shed out of love; only allegations went back and forth, tarnishing the victim’s reputation. A love marriage is supposed to bloom into lifelong happiness, but when a daughter’s worth is reduced to her family’s ability to provide wealth, her roots are ripped, and she’s found hanging under such mysterious circumstances.
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