A day after the Meghalaya High Court confirmed the bail of main accused Sonam Raghuvanshi in the murder of her husband, Raja Raghuvanshi, during their honeymoon last year, a cousin of the deceased stated on Tuesday that his family will move the Supreme Court for cancellation of bail.
The Meghalaya High Court on Monday dismissed a plea of the state government to rescind the bail granted to Sonam by a lower court on April 27.
“We will move the Supreme Court for cancellation of Sonam’s bail and will start the process of filing the petition soon,” Raja’s elder brother Vipin Raghuvanshi told PTI following the HC judgment in Indore.
“My family is going to take the legal fight for justice into its own hands and hire a private lawyer,” he stated, expressing frustration with how the prosecution has handled the matter.
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“I still cannot understand how Meghalaya Police could commit a legal lapse in not informing Sonam on the grounds of arrest when arresting her,” he added.
The Meghalaya High Court, in its ruling passed on Monday, had identified numerous mistakes by police in telling Sonam the grounds of her arrest.
“If this is the manner in which the intimation of the grounds of arrest is made, the same reflects a total non-application of judicious mind on the part of the arresting agency, which strikes at the root of the process of arrest of an accused person, leading this Court to come to the conclusion that the arrestee does have a strong case to contend that no such effective grounds have ever been intimated to her at the initial stage of her arrest,” the HC had ruled.
Therefore, it added, the stipulations of Article 22(1) read with Section 47(1) of Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) have been breached.
The Indian Constitution in Article 22(1) provides that the arrested person has a right to be informed of the grounds of his arrest and consult a lawyer of his choice. Section 47(1) of the BNSS says that the police shall at the time of arrest inform the accused of the charges against him and the grounds for his arrest.
Officials said Sonam was detained from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh on June 9, 2025 for allegedly plotting to kill her husband Raja Raghuvanshi. She was released on bail after spending almost 10 months in judicial detention in the Shillong District Jail
Raja Raghuvanshi belongs to a family of transporters. He tied the knot with Sonam on May 11 last year in Indore and the newly-wed couple departed for Meghalaya on May 20 on their honeymoon. But on their honeymoon on May 23, Sonam went missing. The body of Raja Raghuvanshi was recovered from a steep gorge near a waterfall in the Sohra region (Cherrapunji) in East Khasi Hills district on June 2.
Her suspected lover Raj Kushwaha and three of his associates were also detained for their role in the murder.
