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Sixty-four-year-old Rameshwar Prasad Sharma’s eyes well up as he opens his wallet to show the three passport-size photographs kept inside the front flap.
The first is of his infant son, who died of an illness when he was just over a year old. The second image is of his youngest son, the bike-loving Piyush, who was studying chartered accountancy and also preparing to be a company secretary when he died in an accident in 2012.
What Sharma finds most difficult to talk about is the third photo in his wallet — Dushyant, his second son and last surviving child until 2018, when he ended up becoming one of the central characters in a drama that snuffed out his life.
Victim Dushyant Sharma. (Special Arrangement)
On May 3, 2018, Dushyant’s body was found stuffed inside a suitcase in Jaipur. The same day, the Jaipur Police arrested three persons for Dushyant’s murder — Priya Seth, 31, Dikshant Kamra, 25 and Lakshya Walia, 27. On November 24 this year, the three were sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted a day earlier of murdering Dushyant in what has come to be known as the Tinder murder case.
A double life
“Five years have passed, but I still remember everything about that day,” says Sharma, his voice choking as he sits in his chamber at a government office in Jaipur, where he is engaged as a contractual employee after retirement.
He talks of the call he got on May 3, 2018, when an unknown woman had spoken to him from Dushyant’s number. “The woman (Priya) told me that if I didn’t pay Rs 10 lakh in 20 minutes, she would kill Dushyant. I pleaded with her, saying, ‘Beti (daughter), I have already lost two children. Please don’t kill my son.’ She told me ‘Beti kisko keh raha hai (who are you calling daughter?).’ I managed to arrange Rs 3 lakh by breaking a fixed deposit and put the amount in Dushyant’s bank account. But they had already killed him by then,” he says.
Sharma says he is still in the dark about how Dushyant — who he describes as a “doting father” of a toddler and a “loving husband” to his wife — ended up being murdered by Priya, Dikshant and Lakshya.
Dushyant Sharma’s father Rameshwar Prasad Sharma at his office in Jaipur. (Express photo by Deep Mukherjee)
Police Inspector Gur Bhupendra Singh, who investigated the case as SHO of Jhotwara police station in Jaipur, says, “Dushyant lived a double life. While he was married and had a son, he had a Tinder profile under a different name, in which he pretended to be a wealthy businessman from Gurgaon. He had matched with Priya on Tinder. She was then in a live-in relationship with Dikshant, who she met on a dating app. Dikshant was a struggling model who had run up a debt of around Rs 21 lakh. The two planned to kidnap someone and demand a fat ransom. It was around this time Priya matched with Dushyant on Tinder.”
Sitting in his office in Manak Chowk police station, where he is the SHO, Singh says that at the time of the murder, Priya, who was in her mid-20s then, already had three previous FIRs registered against her — one under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, the other for allegedly cutting open an ATM kiosk and the third for allegedly blackmailing a former partner.
Singh says that after matching on Tinder, the 28-year-old Dushyant, who was an engineer and worked with a private company that dealt in building materials, interacted with Priya using his fake identity, before meeting her. On May 2, 2018, the two were to meet once again.
“I don’t even know what Tinder is…I don’t even see the messages on my WhatsApp. Till date, I cannot understand why Dushyant was on Tinder. He was a loving son, husband and father. He got married only in 2015. He was shy, and would mostly spend his time with us. On the evening of May 2, he told me not to park the car as he would need it later. He usually stayed indoors in the evening as he understood our anxiety since we had lost two of our children. As Dushyant left in the car that day, he promised to be back in an hour,” says Sharma.
A cover blown, a murder
Sharma recalls receiving a call from him a couple of hours later on May 2, 2018.
“He said that one of his company’s trucks was being held hostage by some people who were demanding Rs 8-10 lakh for its release. He told me that he would be back after settling the matter,” the father says.
“His phone was switched off after that call. We looked for him all night, even roping some of our relatives to search for him, but in vain. The next morning (May 3, 2018), I got a call from his phone. He sounded very scared. He told me, ‘Papa, these people will kill me. They are asking for Rs 10 lakh.’ It was then that I heard a woman’s voice. After abusing me, she told me to transfer Rs 10 lakh to his account immediately if I wanted Dushyant alive,” adds Sharma.
According to the police, after he left home late on May 2, 2018, Dushyant met Priya and they went to her rented house in his car. He was unaware then that Dikshant and Lakshya, both from Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar district, were waiting for him at her flat. As soon as Dushyant reached Priya’s house, he was overpowered by Dikshant and Lakshya.
SHO Singh says, “The trio retrieved Dushyant’s identity cards and realised that he was not the wealthy businessman he pretended to be on Tinder. Infuriated, they beat him up.”
Sharma recalls, “On May 3, 2018, Priya called me from Dushyant’s phone and asked me to arrange Rs 10 lakh in 20 minutes. When I told her that I could arrange Rs 3 lakh by breaking a fixed deposit, she threatened to kill my son if I disconnected the call. I arranged Rs 3 lakh but realised that I needed Dushyant’s PAN card to make the deposit. When I informed Priya, she sent a photo of his PAN card on WhatsApp from his number. After the money was deposited in his account, she disconnected the call and switched off the phone.”
After losing contact with Dushyant’s kidnappers, the petrified Sharma family went to the police.
SHO Singh says, “We immediately activated our ground-level intelligence and dug up Dushyant’s call records to locate his phone. It led us to the location of the three accused, who confessed during interrogation to murdering Dushyant. That’s how we found his body, which was stuffed inside a suitcase abandoned on a highway. As per the case records, Dushyant had been strangled, before being stabbed fatally.”
Priya, Dikshant and Lakshya were trying to flee from Jaipur in Dushyant’s car when they were arrested in the evening on May 3, 2018. They had purchased a fake number plate to fool the police, says the SHO.
Priya Seth, Dikshant Kamra and Lakshya Walia were sentenced to life imprisonment on November 24 this year for murdering Dushyant Sharma. (Special Arrangement)
The gory nature of Dushyant’s murder is documented in the court verdict, which mentions bloodstains “on the bed sheet, the wallpaper, Priya’s scarf, Dikshant’s jeans, their shoes and even on the debit card cover”.
“When we entered Priya’s flat, there were bloodstains all over the place,” adds the SHO.
Dushyant’s father says after he deposited Rs 3 lakh in his son’s account, the accused withdrew around Rs 25,000 from the ATM — the maximum daily withdrawal limit. That too served as evidence in the prosecution’s case against the accused.
While convicting the trio on November 23 this year, District and Sessions judge Ajeet Kumar Hinger wrote in his judgment, “Priya Seth’s prior acquaintance with deceased Dushyant Sharma, mutual dialogue between them, the sequence of Dushyant Sharma reaching Priya Seth’s flat in Bajaj Nagar, and Priya Seth murdering him in collusion with Dikshant Kamra, who lived with her, and their mutual friend Lakshya Walia is proven by the circumstantial evidence analysed above.”
‘Couldn’t bear to see my son’s killers’
On November 24, the three accused were sentenced to life imprisonment. SHO Singh says the accused never showed any remorse for killing Dushyant.
He says, “Priya belongs to Pali district and had come to Jaipur to study in college. She is fluent in English and was a good student. Her father was a teacher. Soon after shifting to Jaipur, she got enamoured with high living standards, started spending on expensive items and got drawn to a life of crime.”
The Sharma couple live with the pain of losing their last surviving child.
“At times, I cannot sleep at night. My wife Vijayanti has been shattered since the incident. The only lights in our lives are Dushyant’s wife and our grandson. We have discovered a daughter in her. She supports us with all her heart. Our grandson is in school. I live only to see him grow up. He resembles Dushyant and his brother so much. Vijayanti and I keep seeing glimpses of our sons in him,” says Sharma.
Sharma says that while he attended all the hearings in the case, he couldn’t bear to stand for too long in the courtroom.
“In the court, I would see the three accused sitting on benches. I couldn’t bear the sight of them. The verdict makes me feel like I have finally got justice for Dushyant. Our advocate Sandeep Luhadia didn’t charge us a single penny but worked extremely hard to ensure justice for Dushyant,” says Sharma.
He says his grandson kept asking for his father for a long time.
Sharma says, “Initially, we told him that his father was in Delhi. Later, as he got a bit older, we told him that his father was with God and would not return. I still think about Dushyant all day. I don’t know why they killed him even after I had arranged some of the money…If only they had spared his life.”
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