Her absolute lack of visible emotion, unflappable and chillingly cold demeanour, and brazen misogyny is not the only reason Giribala Singh is in the national spotlight. I did a double-take, recoiling more than once as I interviewed Singh after her daughter-in-law, former model and actor Twisha Sharma was found dead (allegedly) by hanging in her in-laws’ house in Bhopal. I shuddered to think that Singh had been a district judge.
Think of all the female petitioners who would have brought their own chronicles of harassment, abuse, and domestic violence to her court. Would she have treated them with the contempt and character assassination she has reserved for her son’s wife?
So, why was I interviewing an accused in a dowry, assault, abuse and abetment to suicide case? Because Singh’s press conference, where she made sweeping allegations against a young woman who was no longer alive to defend herself, was absolutely atrocious. Sadly, she received very little push-back against her innuendo and smears.
And so I chose a few central questions to confront her.
As an officer of the law who must have sat on thousands of petitions for bail, how could she defend the fact that her son, Samarth Singh — who’s also a lawyer — went absconding? (Samarth surrendered to the Jabalpur police on Friday evening.) I had earlier asked her if she had asked him to surrender and co-operate with the police? Or, had she hidden him in the hope that some court would grant him anticipatory bail? When I asked her if she knew the whereabouts of her son, she declined to answer. Strangely, she cited the Umar Khalid case to me as an example of the Supreme Court’s observations on how bail is the norm, not the exception. But Khalid has been in jail for more than five years without a trial or bail and is, perhaps, the least accurate illustration to make a case for bail as a right. In any case, should she not be additionally booked for obstruction of justice for knowingly encouraging her son to run from the law instead of honouring it?
I then asked Singh about her claim that Sharma used drugs and was schizophrenic. There is no independent corroboration of this, but assuming it to be true, how is it lawful to reveal the private medical records of a patient at a press conference? A mental health diagnosis is a confidential matter, between a psychiatrist and his/her patient. A doctor can lose his licence if he reveals these details unless there is a compelling legal or public service driven reason. Why did Singh have access to Sharma’s private medical records? She had no answer except to say her son had access to the details and so did she.
I then pointed out that when she spoke of drugs used by Sharma, she had conflated prescription medicines with drugs and used the two interchangeably at her press conference. She had no response to that. On an audio recording, made by Twisha’s family before she was found dead, Singh can be heard admitting that her son battled drug addiction in his college years. She also says that Sharma may have terminated her pregnancy because she was fearful of the impact of her husband’s drug-abuse on the foetus.
So, while she was smearing her daughter-in-law, it was her son who had an actual addiction problem at some point, going by the tape released by Sharma’s family.
Talking about Sharma’s terminated pregnancy, I was stunned when Singh told me that Sharma was guilty of extreme “cruelty” because she had an abortion. As a judge she should have surely known the law. I had to remind her that abortion in India was entirely legal up to 20 weeks for all women and up to 24 weeks for special categories. Sharma had been married for a little over five months and was two months pregnant when she opted for abortion. To hear this stone-faced mother-in-law, who must have had the chance to adjudicate abortion cases, was just galling.
The most egregious of her comments was the way she questioned Sharma’s character. On the same audio tape recorded by Sharma’s family on April 22, Harshit, Twisha’s soldier-brother can be heard arguing with Giribala Singh on why his sister is being treated this way. Singh doubles down, making all sorts of claims about prostitution — and how some sell their brains and others sell their bodies. She then goes on to make comments about promiscuity and Twisha’s alleged sexual history. Nowhere in the conversation are there any comments about her son’s sexual history. As a judge whose duty it was to protect the rights of all citizens, she fell back on the oldest trope in the book — tell a woman she’s been sleeping around when you want to bully her, control her and slander her.
There are many other unanswered questions in this case. Did Singh work the hotline to other judges on the morning her daughter-in-law was found dead, as widely reported in the media in Madhya Pradesh?
The belt allegedly used by Sharma to hang herself — her family alleges that she was murdered — was not brought forward by the investigating officer for the autopsy. So the ligature material could not be matched with the marks on her neck.
Sharma’s father told me he regrets not bringing her home sooner. And therein lies a tale — how we as people remain focused on saving marriages, instead of saving our daughters. The family will be haunted by that for years to come.
But the country is aghast at the persona of Singh who appears to have masterfully weaponised her stature and knowledge as an officer of law to obfuscate the truth, protect her son and smear her daughter-in-law.
I do not know a single woman who is not repulsed by her conduct. Now that the case is set to go to the CBI, may the truth prevail.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
