Meerut murder: Muskan, Sahil experiencing drug withdrawal symptoms, say jail officials
Meerut (UP) (PTI): In judicial custody for allegedly murdering Saurabh Rajput, his wife and her lover are having a hard time adjusting to life in jail, with prison officials claiming that the duo were experiencing drug withdrawal symptoms.
Muskan Rastogi and her lover Sahil Shukla have been lodged in Chaudhary Charan Singh district jail here since last Wednesday after a court here sent the duo to judicial custody for 14 days.
Jail sources said the duo have been showing signs of extreme distress. "Muskan and Sahil are not able to sleep properly. They are also refusing to eat and drink," a source said.
While some speculate that this might be due to remorse, jail officials attribute it to drug withdrawal.
Senior Jail Superintendent Viresh Raj Sharma said, "Both Sahil and Muskan have been taking drugs for a long time. Due to this, they are having problems of restlessness and are not even able to sleep at night."
Doctors have prescribed medication to manage their symptoms, and a dedicated team is monitoring their condition, he said. Police investigations have revealed that the two accused consumed drugs and alcohol regularly.
Notably, the two accused did not have any visitor since their incarceration, a source said.
Rajput was drugged and then stabbed to death allegedly by Muskan and Sahil on March 4, his body dismembered and sealed inside a drum with cement. The duo then went on a vacation to Himachal Pradesh, all the while misleading Rajput's family by sending them messages from his phone.
The matter was reported to police on March 18, following which they were arrested.
Muskan and Rajput got married in 2016 against his family's wishes, following a relationship and they had a six-year-old daughter. Muskan and Sahil had known each other since school and reconnected via a WhatsApp group in 2019, police said.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
