The Supreme Court Wednesday refused to entertain the parole plea of Swami Shraddhanand aka Murali Manohar Mishra, who is serving a life sentence for killing his wife Shakereh Khaleeli, reported LiveLaw. A docu-series currently streaming on Prime Video, Dancing On The Grave, is based on the Shakereh murder case. The 82-year-old Mishra had recently sent a legal notice to the makers of the series, saying it adversely affects his legal rights. The murder of the rich heiress Shakereh Khaleeli, by the man she had married after divorcing her first husband, diplomat Akbar Khaleeli, had sent shockwaves in Bengaluru in the 1990s. Her body was found buried in the backyard of her own palatial home in 1994, three years after Mishra drugged and buried her, possibly while she was still alive. Who was Shakereh Khaleeli? Shakereh Khaleele, was born on August 27, 1947 in Chennai to businessman Gulam Hussain Namazie and Gauhar Taj Begum Mirza, the daughter of Sir Mirza Ismail, the Dewan of Mysore, Jaipur and Hyderabad. When she was 18, she married Akbar Mirza Khaleeli, the son of her mother's sister. Akbar Khaleeli was a diplomat, and when Shakereh was not travelling with her husband she stayed in Bengaluru, engaged in real estate. They had four daughters —Zeebundeh, Sabah, Rehane, and Esmath. In 1982, while on a visit to the Nawabs of Rampur, the Khaleelis came across Swami Shraddhanand. Murali Manohar Mishra was a school dropout from Madhya Pradesh who had started working for the Rampur royal family, looking after property issues. He had also styled himself a swami, or godman, claiming he had 'tantrik' powers. When the Khaleelis returned, Mishra came to Bengaluru with them to help sort out some property issues. Akbar Khaleeli soon left for Iran on his posting. Marriage and murder Three years later, Shakereh told her husband she wanted a divorce. In 1986, she married Mishra. In the years that followed, Shakereh was estranged from her family, including her daughters, even as Mishra got more and more control over her money and assets. Shakereh's mother, Gauhar Taj, had to file legal cases to prevent Mishra from getting at the family's inheritance. Then a few years later, Shakereh ran into her second daughter, Sabah, at the Delhi airport. Sabah, who was a model by then, decided to stay in touch with her mother. According to what Mishra and Shakereh's family told the police and the courts, as Shakereh got closer to her family and started planning to spend money on her daughters, fights between her and Mishra became frequent. In 1991, Shakereh stopped talking to Sabah directly. To Sabah's questions, Mishra would reply that her mother was away on different holidays. Sensing something was wrong, in 1992, Sabah approached the police. It was two years later that a Bengaluru police constable finally managed to make headway in the case, by taking a servant of Mishra out for drinks and realising that Shakereh's body was buried in the same Richmond Town home the couple had lived in. The body was then exhumed and Mishra arrested. According to the police, Mishra had drugged Shakereh's tea and then lowered her into a large wooden box, which he had built on the pretext of transporting antique furniture. The box was buried in a pit he had had dug in their house “for a water tank”. When her skeleton was exhumed, one hand appeared to be gripping the bed sheet underneath, raising the possibility that she was alive when she was put in the box. Long legal case Eleven years later, in May 2005, Mishra was convicted for murder by an Additional City Civil Judge. In September of that year, Karnataka High Court confirmed a trial court death sentence for Mishra, which was later commuted to life. In September 2022, Mishra approached the Supreme Court seeking early release, seeking parity with the convicts of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, who had been allowed to walk out.
