Uttarakhand: Ankita Bhandari case reopens questions power tried to close

More than two years after the murder of 19-year-old Ankita Bhandari shook Uttarakhand, the case has resurfaced — not because of new forensic breakthroughs, but because of viral allegations, political defensiveness and an uneasy sense that uncomfortable questions were never fully laid to rest.

The immediate trigger this time is a set of videos and an alleged audio recording circulated by Urmila Sanawar — describing herself as the wife of expelled former BJP MLA Suresh Rathore — who claims that a person referred to as ‘Gattu’ was a “VIP” linked to Ankita’s killing. The Uttarakhand Police on Saturday said it had registered two FIRs to probe the origin and content of the material, even as the political fallout gathered pace.

Additional director-general of police (law and order) V. Murugesan sought to draw a firm institutional line under the case, stressing that the original investigation had been conducted by a Special Investigation Team headed by a woman IPS officer, upheld by both the high court and the Supreme Court, and had culminated in life sentences for all three accused.

That framing, however, sits uneasily with the memory of how the crime unfolded — and how quickly evidence vanished.

Ankita, a receptionist at a resort owned by Pulkit Arya, the son of locally influential but now expelled BJP leader Vinod Arya, was murdered in September 2022 after allegedly resisting pressure to provide “special services” to guests. Within days of her disappearance, parts of the resort linked to her last movements were demolished using heavy machinery — a move that provoked public outrage and raised immediate concerns about destruction of evidence.

The demolition, ordered by the district administration amid protests, was defended as a law-and-order necessity. Critics saw it as a premature act that irreversibly compromised a crime scene in a case already freighted with political sensitivity. The optics were stark: a young woman from a modest background was dead, while the site central to reconstructing her final hours was flattened before forensic processes could fully play out.

Mass protests followed across Uttarakhand, forcing the state government onto the defensive and compelling swift arrests. The SIT moved quickly, charges were framed, and on 30 May, the additional district and sessions judge in Kotdwar convicted Pulkit and his associates Saurabh Bhaskar and Ankit Gupta, outcomes repeatedly cited by authorities to argue that justice was ultimately delivered.

Yet the speed of closure has never entirely dispelled public unease about what may have been lost in the first frantic days after the crime.

It is into this unresolved moral space that the latest controversy has erupted — and the response from BJP national general-secretary Dushyant Kumar Gautam — also a former Rajya Sabha MP — has been revealing.

Gautam, the party’s Uttarakhand in-charge, has denied any link to the allegations with notable urgency: warning of defamation suits, writing to home secretary Shailesh Bagoli, demanding takedowns of digital content, and questioning the very authenticity of the audio-visual material. He has also offered a dramatic pledge to retire from public life if a single proven wrongdoing is placed before him — a statement calibrated less for evidentiary standards than for public spectacle.

The speed with which Gautam has shifted the focus from the substance of the allegations to their circulation suggests a familiar instinct in Indian politics: treat virality itself as the crime, and scrutiny as sabotage.

Rathore has added another layer of murkiness by claiming he paid Rs 50 lakh to Sanawar to stop alleged blackmail, even selling his factory to do so — an extraordinary admission that raises its own questions about influence, silence and informal settlements in political ecosystems.

The BJP, meanwhile, has sought to undermine Sanawar’s credibility, at one point dismissing her video as AI-generated and at another portraying her as a woman of “questionable social activities”. The Congress has responded by demanding a CBI probe under judicial supervision, ensuring that the case remains politically combustible even as institutions insist it is legally settled.

The Uttarakhand Police’s insistence that the case has already passed every judicial test is legally sound. Yet legality alone has never been the only metric by which this case has been judged.

What continues to haunt the public imagination is not just who was convicted, but how quickly power moved to contain damage: a demolished resort, a furious street, a government scrambling to restore order, and a justice process that arrived, but left behind an aftertaste of haste.

The current storm — viral claims, political threats, competing narratives — may ultimately collapse under evidentiary scrutiny. But its persistence points to a deeper failure: the inability of institutions and political actors alike to convince a sceptical public that everything that mattered was truly examined before the bulldozers arrived.

In that sense, the Ankita Bhandari case is less about resurrecting old conspiracies than about confronting an enduring discomfort — that even when verdicts are delivered, trust, once levelled, is much harder to rebuild.

With agency inputs