In her characteristic upright and honourable style, Mehar Bhargav was outraged by the acquittal of Jessica Lall’s murderers. A successful and bright lawyer herself, Mehar, who gave up the practice to settle for a more leisurely and languid life as wife, mother and friend, would burst into rage about the police’s slipshod investigation and the prosecution’s disgrace. ‘‘The rich and powerful will always get away,” she would rage, whether at her favourite card game or at one of her lavish dinner parties.

Within a week, Mehar, citizen and league of the charmed and privileged, wife of an influential Congress politician Luv Bhargav, was shot in the neck on February 28 for telling off an insulting and foul-mouthed youth who was harassing her daughter-in-law, in the heart of Hazratganj, Lucknow.

(Investigations have made little headway. The police identified Sachin Pahari as the man who shot her and Amit, Pramod Kumar and Jai Singh as his accomplices. Police have managed to arrest two persons — Jai Prakash, who is reported to be Pahari’s cook, and Pramod Singh, who confirmed to the police that Pahari was the one who shot Mehar.)

As the nation was gripped with the trial of Lall and the young Priyadarshini Mattoo, whose appeal against the acquittal of the prime accused hangs fire for six years, Mehar battled for her life and it finally ebbed away in city hospital in Delhi today.

Mehar Bhargav may have grown up in genteel Lucknow of the 50 and 60s, a vanished age with very pucca ideas of discipline, breeding, ceremony and poise, but she never resented when the refinement crumbled and standards withered.

... contd.