Courts rarely open a docket from legend alone. Yet on the morning of May 25, a bench in the Supreme Court of India stepped up to a murder that has rattled two families. An empty chair at the stilted flag‑laden table, a case file with a peculiar title, and a judge who cannot be seen—these are the elements of a legal drama that might write up a new chapter in Indian justice.
Chief Justice Surya Kant calmly convened the panel, flanked by Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M Pancholi. The trio’s names slice through the office’s chatter as they read lines from a file called “Alleged institutional bias and procedural discrepancies in the unnatural death of a young girl at her matrimonial home.” No word of injustice yet, but every eye is glued to the next paragraph.
Twisha Sharma’s father, brother, and other relatives argue that the husband, Samarth Singh—a lawyer—and his mother, Giribala Singh, a retired judge from Bhopal, conspired to distort the investigation. They claim the legal firepower in the family put the real blame on the wrong side of the court. Samarth was locked up only ten days after Twisha’s body was discovered, the clerk reads. “You can’t die without a story,” his attorney said, deflecting the backlash with a witty line about keeping a low profile.
When a working lawyer and a former judge orbit the same apartment block, the idea of “mischief” looks more like a familiar family evening. Those close to Twisha worry that influence runs deeper than words. The accusations, they say, are not merely about attachments but about a whole pillar of a system that claims blindness. In a courtroom that always has to prove neutrality, the presence of a retired judge as grief’s main witness seems off‑beat.
Samarth’s arrest drew headlines, but what drew scrutiny further was his lawyer, Mrigendra Singh, who denied hiding. He stepped onto the radio waves crashing over NDTV, saying, “We’re not a story about secrets.” That could be good or bad, depending on who believes it. The court’s turn on the case suggests that nobody is tripping over a simple “no.”
By the time the hearing lines up, the Supreme Court will review conflicting accounts of a legal process that may have been swayed by personal connections, and whether a young woman’s death slipped inside a sentence engineered, deliberate or not. The case will be dressed with all the legal frameworks, procedural safeguards, and page turns that might expose the weak spots in an otherwise bullet‑proof system.
On May 25, the bench will weigh the weight of bias against the hush of silence that surrounds Twisha’s untimely fate. Will procedural discrepancies be found, or will the court validate the very system that many fear is broken?
