4 days on, Kuljit’s kin struggle to get her body

Mahesh Sharma
Mandi Ahmedgarh, Sept 20

Four days after the body of their married daughter was exhumed from a graveyard at Chhapar village, the parents of the deceased Kuljit Kaur are yet to start performing her last rites as a post-mortem examination of the badly decomposed body is yet to be conducted.

The body that was initially shifted to the Civil Hospital at Sadhar is now lying at the mortuary of the Civil Hospital, Ludhiana. The aggrieved family has now been assured that a post-mortem examination will be conducted tomorrow.

The father of the deceased, Ranjit Singh of Meerpur Hans village, near Jagraon, regretted that his family had to pass through an ordeal, first to know what had happened to their daughter and now to perform her last rites. “We have been made to run from one place to another even to get the body for cremation though everybody knows that postmortem is simply a formality now,” said Ranjit Singh, maintaining that they were first told that they would be handed over the body at the Civil Hospital, Sadhar, and now they have been waiting for the body at the Civil Hospital, Ludhiana.

The family is more upset to learn the modus operandi of the alleged killer, who in their daughter’s case is her husband Gurcharan Singh, an Army man. “We could never believe that nature will play such a cruel joke on us. While a woman is considered to be safest in the hands of her husband, in our case she was killed by her husband only and that, too, with martial art he had been trained in to fight terrorists and soldiers of the enemy nation,” said Ranjit Singh. Gurcharan Singh, an Army commando posted in Ladakh, had attacked Kuljit on the neck to kill her. Her head was later severed with a spade brought from the nearby farm.

Kuljit of Chhapar village, who had been living alone at Akalgarh Basti Sadhar alone for three months, had gone missing on August 9. The Sadhar police had arrested Gurcharan Singh and his accomplice Lovepreet Singh, who had confessed to have killed Kuljit. Her body was exhumed from a graveyard at Chhapar village on Tuesday.