MURDEROUS LOVE

A long-running, high-stakes investigation into a crime of passion in the peace-loving city of Chandigarh has a new twist

- SNEHA BHURA

IT IS ONE of the more common tropes from true-crime TV shows. Not a mysterious serial killer or a tortured detective on his breakthrough case, but one of those plot-points that keep recurring in Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Miss Marple potboilers: the picturesque tranquility in a pensioner’s paradise is shattered by a heinous crime most uncharacteristic of the place, leading to incessant whispering, storefront chatter and the devious excitement of a whodunit.

Something similar happened in the usually calm and serene city of Chandigarh on September 20, 2015. Around 9:30pm, in a public park in Sector 27, a handsome man of 34 was shot dead allegedly by a former girlfriend. There were at least four bullet wounds on the body; the killer had used a shotgun. The park was 7km from the girl’s house and 11km from the man’s. With the victim and the suspect hailing from influential legal families that knew each other closely for more than 30 years, this case of a jilted love story gets even more interesting when you throw in power and pressure into the matrix.

The slain Sukhmanpreet Singh Sidhu, more popularly known as Sippy Sidhu in Chandigarh, was a lawyer and a national-level rifle shooter. He was also the grandson of Justice S.S. Sidhu, a former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and the son of I.P.S. Sidhu, former additional advocate general of Punjab. Kalyani Singh, the accused in the murder, is an assistant professor of home science in a college in Chandigarh and the daughter of Himachal Pradesh acting Chief Justice Sabina Singh. At the time of the incident, Kalyani’s mother was a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. On June 15, Kalyani was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation when her alleged involvement in the crime suddenly came forth.