Lohagad Fort sits above the Indrayani valley in Maval taluka, roughly 50 kilometres from Pune, Maharashtra. A popular weekend trekking destination, the fort draws visitors through most of the year, and in the weeks before and after the monsoon, the approach path fills with groups from across the Mumbai-Pune corridor.

On the morning of June 18, Ketan Agarwal, 26, the director of a Pimpri-Chinchwad real estate firm and the son of Vishal Agarwal, a businessman in construction, was among those who climbed its stone steps. He had come to celebrate the birthday of his fiancée Siya Goyal, 20. He did not return.

At 10.30 that morning, Siya informed authorities that Ketan had slipped while taking photographs near the Vinchu Kata ridge, an extension of the fort that looks like a scorpion’s tail, and fallen into the valley below. His body was recovered after a three-hour rescue operation. The incident was registered as an accidental death. But Ketan’s father told police that his son was a frequent trekker who knew the terrain well, and that things did not add up.

“Ketan always played it safe. He never took risks, so it is unlikely that he stepped so close to the edge as to fall over,” said Vishal.

That account set in motion an investigation that would over the following days lead Pune Rural Police to allege that Ketan’s death was not an accident but a premeditated murder. Police say it was planned across multiple visits to the fort, and murder had been attempted once before. Siya and her boyfriend Chetan Babulal Chaudhary, 22, have been arrested since.

Ketan’s father told the police that the engagement with Siya had taken place in February this year. The families had made arrangements at a considerable scale and cost for the November wedding planned in Jaipur, which was to cost about ₹17 crore, with two private aircraft arranged to ferry guests.

What the Agarwal family did not know, according to police, was that Siya had been in a relationship with Chetan Chaudhary, a businessman, for close to a year before the engagement. The two had worked together, said Pune Rural Superintendent of Police Sandeep Singh Gill at a press conference on June 23.

Between January 1 and June 18 alone, investigators found evidence of approximately 2,000 phone calls between them, amounting to more than 238 hours of conversation. Siya had, police allege, no intention of going through with the wedding, but did not communicate this to the Agarwal family.

A defence lawyer speaks

Chaudhary’s advocate Ram Shahane has contested the basis of his client’s arrest and has raised challenges to the FIR on several grounds. Shahane argued that the FIR, as registered, does not disclose a specific overt act on the part of Chaudhary that would constitute direct participation in the alleged offence.

Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, a charge of murder under Section 101 requires the prosecution to establish that the accused caused the death, intended to cause death, or caused bodily injury sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death. Shahane’s position is that the FIR does not set out the factual foundation for any of those ingredients against his client specifically, as distinct from the co-accused.

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He also argued that the presence of a romantic relationship between Chaudhary and Siya, the principal basis on which his client has been named, does not satisfy the requirements of Section 61 of the the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which governs the grounds on which a person may be arrested. Arrest requires either a reasonable complaint, credible information, or reasonable suspicion founded on definite facts, Shahane noted, and mere association with a co-accused does not automatically fulfil that threshold.

On the question of criminal conspiracy under Section 61 of the BNS, which the prosecution is expected to invoke given the alleged prior planning and coordination, Shahane maintained that no concrete act in furtherance of a conspiracy had been attributed to his client beyond his alleged presence at the fort.

“If we look at the FIR, the allegations against him are not concrete. His role is not described. It is only said that he is her boyfriend. He has been implicated in this case,” Shahane said. The advocate indicated that the defence would challenge the remand and the charges at the appropriate stage.

Police have maintained that the call records, tower location data and CCTV footage together constitute sufficient material to sustain the arrest and the charges. The investigation remains ongoing, and a chargesheet is yet to be filed.

The questions the case leaves behind

The case has drawn attention across Maharashtra, partly because of the scale of the alleged planning, and partly because of what it has exposed about the circumstances that preceded it.

Swati Dyahadroy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Savitribai Phule Pune University, noted that cases in which women are the primary accused tend to attract disproportionate public and media attention, in part because they disturb prevailing assumptions about gender and moral conduct. “In Indian society, we connect women with ethics and submissiveness. When a woman is at the centre of a crime, it disrupts that image,” she said.

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She also pointed to a detail that has received little scrutiny in media coverage: Siya was 20 years old at the time of the engagement and had not yet graduated from college. “Why was she being married at 20? What was the family pressure? These are questions society should be asking itself,” Dyahadroy said.

Dyahadroy situated the case within what she described as a pattern of a compulsory endogamous marriage system in which young people, particularly young women, have limited room to exit arranged matches set in motion by families. “Siya may get proven guilty for what she is accused of doing. But the question of why she felt she could not simply say no, and say it and be heard — that question deserves an answer too,” she said.

chinmay.r@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew