Madhumita Shukla

On May 9, 2003, Madhumita Shukla ‘Madhu’, a budding poet of considerable fire but questionable merit, was murdered in her Lucknow home by two assailants. The only other person present at her home that afternoon was Desraj, a 13-year-old domestic help. Two gun shots were fired at Shukla, but the noise got drowned out by the sound of the running water pump, and no one in the middle class neighbourhood bothered.

At the time of the murder, Shukla was six months pregnant. She was carrying the child of the minister of state for stamps and registration (in the then Mayawati government), Amarmani Tripathi, a man she had met some three and a half years ago when she was 18. Tripathi was 45, married, and a father.

                                                           

Amita Verma, senior Lucknow-based journalist, who penned the 160 page book Poetry Passion Politics…The story of Madhumita (Parity Paperbacks, April 2004) says that a very important element in the case being brought to prosecution was the relentless media attention. And in some ways Tripathi had asked for it.

It was pressure from the media in fact which had the police extract the foetus from Shukla’s body a couple of hours before it was to be cremated. The DNA test of the unborn male child was the most important evidence that linked Shukla and Tripathi. When Verma began writing, she wanted to present Tripathi’s side of the story as well. But as she writes in the forward to the book: “I was keen to get him to give his side of the story. But he stubbornly refused. Attempts to contact his family members in Gorakhpur were also met with rude rebuttals.”

Shukla and Tripathi were in an unequal relationship, which began to sour when the pregnant poet refused to abort her baby. Her diaries and letters, which became crucial pieces of evidence, hinted at two earlier abortions which had been forced upon her by Tripathi. The much married Tripathi had cosied up to Shukla using that favourite sob story of married but unfaithful men…that of being in an unhappy marriage, dominated by a crazy wife, Madhumani.

Madhumani, who is now in a mental asylum in Dehradun, had on her part tried to warn and threaten Shukla when the relationship became known. It was Madhumani who first plotted to kill Shukla, alarmed as she was at the prospect of her husband’s love child coming into the world and staking claim on his property.

For the task, she enlisted the help of one Rohit Chaturvedi (cousin of Amarmani Tripathi), who later roped in Santosh Rai (a former student leader of Gorakhpur) for the task. It was Rai who went to Shukla’s home that May afternoon with Prakash Chandra Pandey (a small time criminal) to eliminate Shukla. In October 2007, the Tripathis, Chaturvedi and Rai were sentenced to life imprisonment by a Dehradun court.