BIRTH OF MYSTERY: The case awaits resolution since 1999

On September 9, Ravi Kant Sharma will turn 50. A day that should have been a milestone will be spent behind bars-if Delhi Police get to him by then-or on the run. Either way it will be an unlikely celebration for the disgraced Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, one who has spent 26 years in service, lobbying his way from one prized posting to another.

Today, the man who a junior officer in Haryana describes as a combination of "low profile and high ambition" is a fugitive, with a prize of Rs 50,000 for information leading to his arrest. He has lost his job as Haryana's IG (Prisons). His patrons-from former prime minister I.K. Gujral to former Haryana Police chief S.P.S. Rathore, himself accused in a molestation case-can do little to save him. Only wife Madhu and daughters Komal and Pragati put up a valiant, almost daily primetime show before TV cameras, defending him, buying time, preventing the immediate, postponing the inevitable.

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It has been three and a half years but nemesis has caught up with Sharma. The ghost of Shivani Bhatnagar, a woman they say he wooed and indulged, used and was used by, has come to haunt him. No Greek tragedy could have been more dramatic, no crime chase more ironic. Sharma, once a feared lawman, is now the subject of salacious gossip and snide ridicule, the newest national embodiment of scandal.

Sharma has been accused by the police of masterminding the January 23, 1999 murder of Shivani, then a correspondent with The Indian Express in Delhi. Madhu, in turn, has charged-with an ambiguous subsequent half-retraction-that Union Communications Minister Pramod Mahajan, the rising star of the BJP, had an affair with Shivani and then organised her murder. Seen as a clever, streetsmart politician, Mahajan has certainly encountered a public relations problem, even if he says, "Rumour-mongering was always against me. Now I'm relieved it's out."

I ACCUSE: Madhu shifted the spotlight to Mahajan during her outburst on TV

THE MADHU SHOW Madhu Sharma's media outbursts have been timed to gain optimum advantage for her husband. AUGUST 4: Tells Delhi police R.K. Sharma will soon join the investigations. Next day, he applies for anticipatory bail, unsuccessfully. AUGUST 8: Accuses Union Home Ministry of framing her husband to protect "a BJP leader". AUGUST 11: Wants to meet prime minister to discuss "high-level conspiracy". Next day, Sharma is due to rejoin duty. Doesn't. AUGUST 15: Accuses Mahajan of murder. On August 14 and 16, police remand of two co-accused ends. AUGUST 21: Demands DNA test on Mahajan to test Shivani's son's paternity. Legally, only Shivani's husband can make such a demand.

For the moment, Mahajan's famed managerial skills, which make him a sort of first among equals in the BJP's second rung, have helped him. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's daughter Namita tied a rakhi on him on August 22, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani rushed to his defence, calling Madhu's charge "malicious". Samajwadi leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh backed him too. As the man himself put it, "My political, governmental and social activities haven't been affected."

But why has a murder that took place almost four years ago reached a denouement only now? Why is this heady cocktail of power and politics, passion and press possessing all of India? After all, the Sharma angle is not new. A day or two after Shivani was strangled and stabbed in their Delhi apartment (see graphic), Rakesh Bhatnagar, her husband and a journalist at The Times of India, was reported to have told friends he suspected one R.K. Sharma.

The Haryana cadre officer-apparently so much a part of Shivani's life that "ravikant" was the password to her e-mail account in The Indian Express computer system-was called in for questioning in 1999. He got the better of his interrogators easily.

Delhi's then DCP (Crime) Karnal Singh, now posted in Goa, recalls Sharma's cocky attitude. "He never really cooperated with us," says Delhi Police Commissioner R.S. Gupta. Dropping names, he even skipped the lie-detector test, getting doctors to certify he had a nasal condition.

There were other leads too, marital discord for one. It was widely believed by her friends that Shivani had a relationship with Sharma. She often spoke about it. In the summer of 1998, she went to London on a three-month Chevening journalism scholarship. She took time off to fly back to India at her own expense. When a colleague asked her how she could afford it, she reportedly said, "I have a close friend in Air-India who fixes tickets for me."

RED HERRING PRAMOD MAHAJAN Madhu Sharma's grave but unsubstantiated charges have grabbed the headlines but have left the flamboyant cabinet minister unfazed. After his categorical denial of the charges, the party's support for him and a clean chit from the police, it is business as usual for Mahajan. He hasn't deviated one bit from his hectic ministerial and political schedule. Nor for that matter has he eased on his social life. On the face of it, the negative publicity has not affected his political standing. However, it has certainly dented his public image and to some extent compromised his earlier position as the frontrunner for the BJP leadership.

Given the implied infidelity, suspect No. 1 in January 1999 was the husband. Not surprisingly, Bhatnagar says he was questioned some 70 times by the police that year: "I didn't even have time to mourn my wife's death. Nor could I spend time with my child."

Somewhere deep in his heart, Bhatnagar believes Sharma used his clout to bury the case. It came up for review when Gupta took charge of the capital's police force this July. By then the police had begun to keep watch on Sri Bhagwan and Satya Prakash (see box). Sri Bhagwan, who later told the police he was Madhu's "foster brother", had been under scrutiny ever since the police, studying Sharma's phone records, had noticed the extraordinary number of exchanges between them over the past three years. It was a fact the Ajai Raj Sharma regime had overlooked. Deciding Shri Bhagwan was "close" to Sharma and likely to know his secrets, Gupta put him under the scanner.

THE EXECUTORS: The police say Sri Bhagwan (top) was the conduit to Sharma and drove the getaway car, while property dealer Satya Prakash (below, right) recruited the killers

NIGGLING QUERIES « The killers enter Shivani's flat unarmed, hoping to find murder weapons. One of them discovers a piece of yellow wire, another a kitchen knife. Curious isn't it? « The killers meet at one point, drive down together, they commit the crime together and drive away together. Yet they are never introduced to each other. Why? « For three and a half years the case is near buried, though R.K. Sharma has been questioned in early 1999. Did someone soft-pedal the probe? Why the hurry now?

Sharma's alibi was that on the day of the murder he was in Pune. There he had borrowed a cell phone from S. Kuckreja, a Delhi-based businessman with interests in Pune. That afternoon, a little after the time doctors say Shivani was murdered, Kuckreja's cell phone received a call from a Delhi cell phone. It belonged to Sri Bhagwan and its location was traced to the Patparganj zone, in the vicinity of Navkunj Apartments where the Bhatnagars stayed.

Sri Bhagwan's lines were tapped, his conversations listened in on. Three years had passed. Tongues loosened with time. U.K. Katna, joint commissioner (crime), Delhi, says, "We found that the links of the prime suspect and other accused were common." Police sources say they picked up definitive clues while monitoring Sri Bhagwan's conversations with Satya Prakash, son of a policeman who once worked under Sharma. The first was arrested on July 30, the second on August 17. In between, on August 1, the police brought in Pradeep Sharma, said to have stabbed Shivani (see box).

By now, the Delhi policemen had enough to want another meeting with Sharma. On August 2, at 5 a.m., a Delhi Crime Branch team reached Panchkula, near Chandigarh. In keeping with protocol, the visitors sought the assistance of local policemen, who inexplicably delayed the operation by two hours.

The joint Haryana-Delhi team descended on Sharma's residence at 7 a.m. Ten minutes earlier, the man had escaped in his Ford Ikon. "We don't know who tipped off Sharma," admits Gupta, "but for sure he was." The police are searching for him all over Haryana. Even Chief Minister O.P. Chautala has called upon him to surrender. Sharma is variously described as hiding at a farmhouse in Gurgaon or in one of the many jail complexes he lorded over as IG (Prisons).

Familiar with the law and police procedure, Sharma apparently wants to give himself up after those arrested have completed their maximum 14 days in police remand and have been handed over to judicial custody. The last to be arrested, Satya Prakash, has been sent to police remand till August 28. Sharma, lawyers say, doesn't want to be confronted by his "co-conspirators" while they are being held by the police. He also wants the police to reveal all they know. That will make his defence easier. Having been refused anticipatory bail by lower courts in Delhi and Haryana, Sharma has now moved the Delhi High Court. It will hear the case on August 26.

All this doesn't help Mahajan, who has been charged by Madhu of having an affair with Shivani. As a diversionary tactic it has been brilliant. Mahajan can only protest, "I have really nothing to say against the allegations. A lady who says I spoke to Shivani for 45 minutes on the day of the murder must have some shred of evidence. Does she?"

The police dismiss Madhu's outburst. "We will not look into the relationship of a large number of people with Shivani," says Gupta, "unless one of them fits in with the conspiracy angle." Law is about proof, politics about perception. On the latter count Mahajan may be vulnerable. In 2001, nothing linked US Congressman Gary Condit to intern Chandra Levy's disappearance-but that didn't prevent negative fallout.

Part of the problem is that, in the rumour mills that abound at the intersection of Delhi's media and power circles, gossip about the Shivani-Mahajan equation is as old as the lady's death. Friends recall she often boasted of her Mahajan connection. While in Britain in 1998, she told co-fellows that Sharma and Mahajan rang her frequently. Sharma's calls have been corroborated by phone records, Mahajan's are still a question mark. Was Shivani only boasting to create a mystique about her "contacts"?

This is not unlikely. To a small-town girl like Shivani, the press card was a passport to a world she could not naturally inhabit but one she longed for. The media used to be a dowdy old institution; today, it is all about glamour and access.

She was not alone in her possible misuse of a journalistic platform. Some practitioners have used the profession to become touts and fixers in official circles. Shivani is said to have done no more than harangue former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh into getting her brother admitted to Lucknow University. More than cutting "deals", she wanted to get "noticed", to rub shoulders with the movers and shakers. Her colleagues saw her as something of a social climber.

This was probably why Sharma appealed to her, though he was 15 years older. She first met him in the summer of 1997, when he was in the PMO and she was chasing a story on a medical college supposedly promoted by the family of BSP politician Mayawati. They were introduced by a wheeler-dealer companion of a woman Congress MP residing in south Delhi's R.K. Puram.

Sharma impressed Shivani with his smattering of French and knowledge of wines and European food. They met frequently at least two central Delhi restaurants, Chor Bizarre on Asaf Ali Road and Basil and Thyme in the fashionable Santushti complex. Bhatnagar admits to having dropped his wife at both locations, sometimes wondering which "sources" she was meeting. Later, she visited Sharma at Hotel Ashok, where he stayed when he came down from Mumbai. The police "have reason to believe the relationship was very intimate". Records of a Patparganj taxi service reveal Shivani hired a vehicle to take her to the hotel on dates that match Sharma's stay there.

One day late in 1998, colleagues say, Shivani walked into the Express office all charged up. She had asked Sharma to marry her, she said, after they both divorced their current spouses. He had refused and she vowed to "ruin him" with the help of amorous letters he had apparently written to her and revelatory notes she would pen to his wife. She was also vocally upset with Mahajan, who she claimed was not helping her in her battle against Sharma. Her co-workers asked her to move on, hoping she would listen. A few weeks later she was dead.

What happens next? The investigators have their task cut out. In three months from July 30-the day the first arrest was made-they need to file a chargesheet in which they have to explain the telephone linkages, the pattern of the calls, the recoveries made, and the conspiracy itself.

Sharma, when the law catches up with him, is likely to deny everything, to make even more reckless charges, to further politicise the issue. The fun has just begun.

-with Vishwas Kumar