Uttarakhand: The murder case that refuses to die down

With fresh evidence coming to light in the Ankita Bhandari murder case, the BJP’s hope of brushing it under the carpet has been crushed. The 19-year-old receptionist was killed three years ago because she refused to sleep with a VIP. Her mother Soni Devi had named the VIP — the BJP's Uttarakhand organising secretary Ajay Kumar — and demanded his arrest.

In the last week of December 2025, however, actress Urmila Sanawar — who claims to be the wife of former BJP MLA Suresh Rathore — released an audio clip in which Rathore identifies the VIP present at the Vanantra resort on the night Ankita was killed as ‘Gattu’ — Dushyant Kumar Gautam, the BJP’s national general-secretary for Uttarakhand.

Protests demanding Gautam’s arrest and a CBI probe into the murder erupted across the state. Marchers led by the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch and the Insaniyat Manch converged in large numbers outside chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami’s residence on Sunday, 4 January.

Several Opposition parties rallied together, including the Congress, Uttarakhand Kranti Dal, Uttarakhand Swabhiman Morcha (which led the ‘paper chor, gaddi chhod’ campaign against the Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission paper leak in September 2025), AAP and the Left.

Maintaining that the Opposition was intent on tarnishing the image of its leaders, the BJP held a parallel demonstration on the same day in Dehradun.

On Monday, 5 January, Rajya Sabha MP and BJP leader Naresh Bansal called a presser, probably hoping to reiterate that Pulkit Arya — who managed the resort owned by his father, ex-BJP leader, Vinod Arya — was in jail, along with two of his accomplices. Instead, Bansal ended up being grilled by local journalists who wanted to know why crucial evidence had been destroyed the night of the murder.

Sanawar and Rathore now have five FIRs filed against them: four by the Haridwar justice for police and one by Gautam alias ‘Gattu’. Sanawar refuses to be cowed down and said in a 6 January social media post that she planned to release fresh evidence, which would be even more explosive.

Gautam, meanwhile, has filed a Rs 2 crore defamation suit against the duo and all the political parties who participated in the rally on Sunday.

These efforts to gag protest failed. A statewide strike was called for 11 January. If the government didn’t accept their demands for a CBI probe, they would launch a civil disobedience agitation of the kind not seen since the land legislation movement of 2023, said Garhkumaon Alliance’s Kanishk Badiyari. As it happens, that CBI probe has now materialised.

Doon becoming the goon capital of Uttarakhand

Dehradun, city of ‘grey hair and green hedges’, now epitomises the violence that has come to define Uttarakhand.

Anjel (or Angel) Chakma, a final-year management student at a private university in Dehradun, was assaulted on 9 December 2025 by a bunch of drunken goons while celebrating a birthday dinner with his younger brother Michael and some friends. Michael was hit on the head with a rod, and Anjel was stabbed. After 17 days in hospital, he died the day after Christmas. Their father, a BSF jawan posted in Manipur, alleged Anjel was brutally attacked while trying to defend his brother, who was subjected to racial slurs like ‘Chinky’ and ‘Momo’.

Dehradun police said their investigation found no evidence of racial abuse or racially motivated violence. Senior superintendent of police Ajay Singh downplayed the incident, claiming tempers flared when Anjel objected to the ‘banter’ of a group of youths near a liquor shop. Michael stoutly denied being anywhere near a liquor shop. The police FIR makes no mention of ‘racial bias’.

It’s high time the police acknowledge the increase in hate speech against minorities. The India Hate Lab (IHL) 2024 report provides a detailed account of this surge, documenting 1,165 verified in-person hate speech incidents, a staggering 74.4 per cent rise from the 668 recorded in 2023. These peaked during national elections, with 98.5 per cent of recorded instances of hate speech directed against Muslims.

In the PIL filed by Supreme Court advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi, he quotes Anjel’s haunting words to his attackers, “We are Indians. What certificate should we show to prove that?”

The killing of Anjel Chakma is not an isolated incident. It is part of a long- standing pattern of racial violence against citizens from the northeastern states of India. In 2014, for example, Nido Tania, a 20-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh, was beaten with rods in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar and died in hospital.

Awasthi says India's new criminal laws ignore hate crimes, racial discrimination and violence against Indian citizens, treating them as ‘ordinary’ offences. His petition calls for special police units in every metro to tackle racial crimes, and describes the failure to protect minorities as a ‘continuing constitutional lapse’.

Missing forest pillars fatten foresters’ bank balances

Midway through the last month of the last year, a division bench of the Uttarakhand High Court ordered the CBI to investigate the disappearance of 75 per cent of 12,312 forest boundary pillars in the Mussoorie and Raipur divisions — areas considered highly lucrative for real estate developers.

Notices were also issued to the Central government, the Uttarakhand government, the Survey of India and the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee, which is expected to supervise the investigation.

These pillars determine forest division boundaries. Their disappearance indicates that prime forest land has been handed over to hoteliers and resort owners. This, the court noted, can only have happened with the collusion of Indian Forest Service officials. The CBI has been asked to probe those forest officials whose bank accounts have quadrupled in the past three years.

Acting on the PIL filed by environmental activist Naresh Chaudhary, the high court has directed the Survey of India to conduct a comprehensive, scientific and geo-referenced survey to accurately locate and restore the missing boundary pillars.

The bench, led by Justice Manoj Tiwari, marked his strong displeasure at the sheer scale of the missing markers. It directed all respondents to file their counter-affidavits within six weeks and listed the matter for further hearing on 11 February 2026.

If you can’t find wives in Uttarakhand, shop from Bihar

Rekha Arya, Uttarakhand’s minister for women and child welfare, found herself in an embarrassing position after her husband Girdhari Lal Sahu told the young men of Almora that they should stop worrying about not getting local wives — he would help them ‘buy’ a bride from Bihar for as little as Rs 20,000–25,000.

Addressing a public event in late December 2025, he was caught on camera saying, “Come with me… we’ll get you married.” The ensuing uproar forced him to apologise. He only meant it as a friend, he said, feebly.

While Congress state president Ganesh Godiyal demanded an apology from the BJP, the state unit insisted Sahu has no connection with the party. The state president of Congress Mahila Morcha, Jyoti Rautela, said, “It’s this kind of thinking that promotes social evils like human trafficking, child marriage, and exploitation of women.”

The Bihar State Commission for Women has served a notice to Sahu, with chair-person Apsara saying such comments reveal his “mental bankruptcy.”