Divya Pahuja: A gangster, a ‘girlfriend’ and a grisly end

On January 2 this year, Divya was shot dead in a hotel room in Gurgaon, with her family alleging that her murder was linked to Gadoli’s death.

The two murders, nearly eight years apart, shone a spotlight on the seamy world of gangsters and law enforcement, glamour and sordid relationships. For Divya, 27, the eldest of two children growing up in Gurgaon’s Baldev Nagar, it was a world no less alluring than the Instagram reels she immersed herself in.

A teenager and a gangster with a degree

Divya was barely 18 when she was first arrested in the Gadoli case. But by then, the teenager had already been living dangerously. Police claimed that Divya and the gangster were living together at the time of his encounter.

Her father a fruit vendor and mother a homemaker, police sources said “circumstances at home” may have played a major part as a young Divya was soon introduced to the world of gangsters and their rivalries. Her mother Sonia was arrested with Divya in the Gadoli case. Sonia was first released from jail in October 2020, during the pandemic, on health grounds after which she surrendered again in 2022 before she was granted bail in March 2023. She is now out on bail in the case.

It was around 2015 that Divya met Gadoli through her friends. The son of a constable with the Haryana Police, Gadoli, who had a bachelor’s degree from Rohtak University, had a bounty of Rs 1.25 lakh on his head at the time of his death. “Though he was wanted in 41 cases, including 10 cases of murder, across Haryana and Delhi when he died, Gadoli started out with petty assaults. Later, he formed a gang that was involved in the businesses of extortion and illegal liquor,” the police said.

As Gadoli gained a foothold in the world of crime, around this time, police said, he became enemies with politician-gangster Binder Gujjar over dominance in the illegal liquor and extortion business in the city.

According to the Mumbai Police, the Gurgaon police team conspired with Binder’s brother Manoj to track down Gadoli, who was then on the run in a case of murder of Binder’s driver, to Mumbai. And Divya would prove to be a handy double-cross agent.

The Mumbai Police’s chargesheet says that throughout her trip from Jaipur to Mumbai with Gadoli, as Divya kept updating her location on Facebook, she was sharing information on Gadoli’s whereabouts. Divya, the Mumbai Police said, would also pass on vital, coded clues to her mother, who in turn passed on the information to Manoj.

While the Mumbai Police said Manoj had promised Sonia a flat and money in exchange for information on Gadoli, in their bail applications, the mother-daughter denied conspiring with the Gurgaon police to kill Gadoli.

Divya Pahuja’s mother Sonia at their Baldev Nagar residence in Gurgaon. (Express Photo: Aiswarya Raj)

Wearing a grey cap that Divya got for her from a mela two days before her death, Divya’s mother Sonia denies these charges and says her first-born worked at a Noida-based event management firm for Rs 36,000 per month before her death. “Look at our house… It urgently needs to be repaired. If we were extorting people or getting money through other means, our house would not be in this state.”

Sonia’s younger daughter Naina, 25, was still in school in 2016 when Divya was arrested. Following the arrests of her mother and sister, Naina started working with a private company. “I have been working for seven years and Divya also worked to support the family as our father has a heart disease and does not work anymore. We know what hard work is. My sister would never try to extort money from anyone,” says Naina.

Phone, social media and an odd request

Pahuja remained lodged in Mumbai’s Byculla women’s jail from July 2016 to June 2023, when she was granted bail by the Bombay High Court. She had been denied bail five times in the past.

In the interactions that The Indian Express had with Divya, while she was produced in court during the trial and later, after she got out on bail, she came across as a teenager like any other. Denied her phone, Divya would often complain to her sister, who visited her in court and in jail, that she missed being on social media.

On February 7, 2016, Sandeep Gadoli, a Gurgaon-based gangster, was shot dead in an alleged encounter with a team of the Haryana Police at a hotel near the international airport in Mumbai. (File Photo)

In 2017, Pahuja was admitted to the state-run JJ Hospital as her health deteriorated and she rapidly lost weight. Later, speaking to The Indian Express, she had said about her hospital stay, “I couldn’t bear to be in hospital where everyone else was using their phones and I didn’t have mine. I felt as if everyone else was getting on with their lives while I remained stuck inside jail. I requested the hospital authorities to send me back to jail. At least in jail, everyone was the same, nobody had a phone.” It was an odd request since prisoners liked the time they got away from jail.

Speaking to The Indian Express about her time in jail, Divya had said that for the initial few months of her confinement, she did not eat jail food in the hope that she would be out soon.

“I was told that once the chargesheet is filed, I might get bail. I did not eat because I did not want to get used to life in jail… I thought it is anyway temporary. All those months, I only ate some snacks available in the canteen,” she said.

It was when her first bail was rejected, five months after her arrest, that Divya began settling into her life in jail. She took to writing letters to her father who couldn’t visit her in jail due to his physical disability. It was mostly her younger sister Naina who would visit her in jail and through whom she took social media updates on what her friends and others her age were doing, eating, etc.

In January 2023, Divya moved a two-page handwritten application before the Mumbai sessions court seeking a plea bargain. She reportedly claimed that she passed on information about Gadoli to the Gurgaon police “to save her family, as he had threatened to kidnap her father and sister”. On her next court visit a few days later, she withdrew the application claiming “duress” and that incarceration had “affected” her mental health.

Throughout her time as an undertrial, Divya had maintained her innocence, including breaking down in court saying that “she was stuck between the police and a gangster”.

After being granted bail in June 2023, Divya, who was a first-year BCom student at the time of her arrest, told The Indian Express that she intended to study law.

Asha, 32, a homemaker and Divya’s neighbour in Gurgaon’s Baldev Nagar, says, “When Divya returned in July (on bail from Mumbai), she was quite reserved. She opened up as time passed.”

Divya also created a new Instagram account, which she kept private, after her release on bail, the family said. They added that she mostly kept to herself and did not even meet old friends since her return from Mumbai.

Divya was barely 18 when she was first arrested in the Gadoli case. But by then, the teenager had already been living dangerously. Police claimed that Divya and the gangster were living together at the time of his encounter. (File Photo)

Blackmail and a murder

On January 2, five months after she came out on bail, Divya was shot dead at a hotel in Gurgaon by the owner of the hotel, Abhijeet Singh, 56.

Divya’s family said she was introduced to Abhijeet, who hailed from Haryana’s Hisar and is a 1989 NIT Kurukshetra graduate, by Gadoli’s old rival Binder. Her family claimed Binder had told her that Abhijeet, a former engineer who owns a house in Delhi’s South Extension, would leave his wife for her.

Abhijeet told police Divya was allegedly blackmailing him by threatening to post his “objectionable” photos and videos on the Internet. Police have arrested six people so far: Besides Abhijeet Singh, hotel staff Omprakash and Hemraj, who allegedly helped Abhijeet move the body; Megha, who allegedly helped Abhijeet dispose of the weapon and Divya’s belongings; Punjab and Haryana High Court lawyer Balraj Gill, who helped dispose of the body; and Parvesh, who supplied arms to Abhijeet.

Though the police have recovered the alleged gun, a senior officer said Divya’s phone is yet to be located. Gill’s co-accused Ravi Banga, who allegedly abandoned the car at a Patiala bus stand on January 3 after dumping her body in a canal at Pasiana in Punjab’s Moonak at dawn, is yet to be arrested. Her body was found on January 13 from Bhakra canal in Haryana’s Tohana, about 150 km from the original site.

Divya’s lawyer Sana Raees Khan claimed that she expressed frequent apprehensions about her safety. Even after she got out on bail, the shadow of the case never left Divya completely – she still had a trial to go through and faced serious charges, including murder. “Maybe Divya would have been alive if she was still in jail,” said Khan.