Indian Army Major Amit Dwivedi, currently posted in 11 Jaklies unit in Dimapur (Nagaland), was all set to leave for deputation to Sudan (on a United Nations mission) in a couple of weeks time. The Major had come with his wife Shailja Dwivedi to Delhi two months back from Nagaland and they were all set to enrol their six-year-old son in a school in Amritsar from where his wife belongs.
But, fate had other plans, and Shailja was brutally murdered by her “obsessed lover” and colleague of her husband Amit, Major Nikhil Handa, on June 23 last. Handa, who is also posted in Dimapur, has since been arrested by Delhi Police (read he was hiding in Meerut) and has been sent to four-day police custody.
An India TV report said that accused Nikhil Handa had made 3,300 calls and messages to his fellow Major’s wife since January this year.
Shailja was Mrs India Earth 2017 finalist and had lived life to the fullest. A homemaker, the Delhi Police said that she was having an “affair” with Major Handa since 2015. Police said that it was a crime of passion – the accused told the cops that he and the victim had an argument in his Honda City car and in a fist of fury, he “slit her throat, threw her out of the car and ran the vehicle over her to make it look like a case of accident”. Police say that Handa, who is also the father of two kids, was continuously “pressurising” the victim to marry him and he had followed her to Delhi from Dimapur about a fortnight back on the pretext of treatment.
Shailja, who got married to Major Amit Dwivedi in 2008, was living in Nagaland with her husband for the last two years. Her body was found lying near the Delhi Cantonment.
Just before the fateful incident, she was dropped in the Army Base Hospital in her husband’s official vehicle for a physiotherapy session but later when the driver came to pick her up he learnt that she had not attended her scheduled physiotherapy session and had “instead rode off with Major Handa in a car”.
Major Dwivedi spotted the accused in the CCTV footage of the hospital and told the police that he suspected his colleague. The victim’s husband had always smelt a rat and according to Shailja’s brother, a criminal lawyer from Amritsar, Major Dwivedi had always barred Handa from “attending parties at home”.
Shailja’s cherubic nature, according to her brother, was mistaken as “liking” by the accused. He first saw Shailja on Facebook and befriended her spouse to meet her. And this became the reason for her gory end – as her last sentence on the social media site read – “Even when your life is full of colour, you still need to be reminded that things come in black and white” – a line which will haunt her family members forever.