A day after a 31-year-old teacher at a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Delhi died allegedly by suicide at her home in Ghaziabad’s Vasundhara, police arrested her husband and her father-in-law on Monday. The arrest followed the registration of a dowry case on a complaint by the woman’s family.
Minutes before her death, Anvita Sharma had sent a message to her brother Amit on Sunday. “She sent the (suicide) note and a message to me at around 1.30 pm on Sunday, and then I alerted her husband,” said Amit. “I love you bhai. Please forgive me and take care of everyone” — her last message read.
Her brother said months after Anvita married Gaurav Kaushik in 2019, she started facing problems in her marriage, and there were frequent fights. “We had asked Anvita to consider divorce but Kaushik convinced her to come back,” he claimed.
According to police, the incident took place at 1.30 pm on Sunday when the woman’s husband, a practising doctor, and their four-year-old son were not home.
Abhishek Shrivastava, ACP, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad, said police recovered a one-and-a-half-page suicide note from the spot. “The woman was declared dead at the hospital following which police were alerted. We also found a suicide note,” the ACP said.
The note, according to police, read: “Sorry, I cannot tolerate it anymore, so I am leaving this world. My husband wanted a beautiful girl who could do all household chores, and also earn money. I did everything I could but this man always found fault.”
“In every argument, he would taunt me and my family… that he makes more money than all of us… He did not let me study further after marriage and had access to all my accounts. He married my job not me…,” it further read.
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Speaking to The Indian Express, Anvita’s father Anil Sharma said he spent around Rs 26 lakh on the wedding. “We could sense the family (Kaushik’s) was greedy. When they first came to meet my daughter, they raised a demand for a vehicle. I was hesitant but later thought of gifting it to my daughter. But that was also in Kaushik’s name,” he said.
“Anvita had been working at a KV in Delhi’s Dallupura since October 2019 as a Fine Arts teacher,” he added.
ACP Shrivastava said, “We lodged an FIR after a complaint was filed against her husband, his father Surendra Sharma and mother Manju under BNS sections 85 (husband or relative of husband of woman subjecting her to cruelty), 80 (2) (punishment for dowry death), 115 (2) (voluntarily causing hurt), 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) and sections of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961.”
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