Daily News & Analysis
 
Mumbai, Sep 2: A newly-married woman killed herself after offering a prayer to Goddess Laxmi to appease her greedy in-laws.

Though this reads like a Bollywood script, it is far removed from it. Rekha Singare, 21, a resident of Nehru Nagar, committed suicide by jumping out of a moving train at Lower Parel on Wednesday.

She took this extreme step because she was being harassed by her husband, Laxman, 25, and mother-in-law, Chandrakala, 45, for a dowry of Rs25,000, said police. Rekha, who hails from a poor family, knew that her father, Ashok Sable, a Sion resident, would not be able to pay the dowry. The Nehru Nagar police on Friday arrested Laxman and Chandrakala and charged them under sections 306 (abetment of suicide) and 498 (dowry death) of the Indian Penal Code. Senior inspector Uday Suryavanshi said, “Acting on her father’s complaint, we have arrested them in this case.”

In the police statement, Sable said that the Singares had been harassing Rekha for the past five months. “They tortured her to such an extent that she decided to end her life as she was well versed with my finances,” he said.

A police official said that on Wednesday night, Laxman and his mother approached the police to register a missing person’s complaint as Rekha had been untraceable since Wednesday morning.

Incidentally that same night, the Nehru Nagar police received a call from the Government Railway Police (GRP) at Mumbai Central that an unidentified woman had been killed in an accident.

The GRP had found Rekha’s diary with phone numbers and a pouch with prasad from the Mahalaxmi temple.

Investigation revealed that the woman was  none other than Rekha. Both Laxman and Chandrakala were produced before the Kurla Metropolitan Magistrate Court and remanded to police custody until September 8.