Muskan Rastogi and Sahil Shukla were sentenced to death by a Meerut court on Wednesday for the murder of Muskan's husband, Saurabh Rajput. District and Sessions Judge Arvind Kumar Mishra called it a "rarest of rare" case. Both convicts followed the hearing on a video link from jail. Rajput's mother and brother were in the courtroom.
Nobody saw the killing. The defence said so repeatedly. The court went ahead on scientific and circumstantial evidence.
Then there was the scripture. Rajput's lawyer told reporters the judge cited the Mahabharata and said that punishing wrongdoers is also a form of dharma. Some outlets say Gita, others Mahabharata, and the judgment text hasn't been widely published yet.
Rajput was 29, and he and Muskan had been married for years. Police say she and Sahil knew each other from school and got back in touch through a WhatsApp group in 2019. According to the prosecution, Muskan and Sahil drugged him and stabbed him at his home in Indiranagar, Meerut, in the first days of March 2025. They cut up the body, pushed the pieces into a blue plastic drum and filled it with cement and sand. Then they left for Himachal Pradesh.
It was Muskan who told her family. Police registered a case, and both were arrested in mid-March.
The trial opened in July 2025. Twenty-two witnesses took the stand, among them shopkeepers who had sold the drum, the cement, the sand and the cutting tools. A knife and a razor were on the list too. Prosecutors argued that this shopping trip alone showed the murder was planned. Phone records and tower locations put Sahil at the house. Police have separately alleged that Muskan had been plotting since November 2023, though that's an allegation and the court's order is what matters now.
The September 30 verdict had come with its own small scenes. Muskan had reportedly spent three days praying in jail beforehand. Sahil had stopped talking to the other inmates and kept asking staff whether word had come. On the day, the judge said such a crime had no place in a civilised society, and the prosecution's lawyer told reporters both convicts looked defeated. He added that the court was competent to award death, though the call was the judge's alone.
The prosecution pointed out in court that the drum had become shorthand for violent infidelity in public talk. It got an odd amount of attention. NDTV, for one, ran a piece on why plastic drums are blue.
Before the conviction, Rajput's brother Rahul told reporters that anything less than death would be taken to the High Court or Supreme Court. After the sentence, his mother Renu Devi said the family was deeply satisfied. She said they'd got the justice they wanted. She has cut ties with her daughter-in-law.
Muskan's parents filed a written statement earlier on Wednesday saying they would not oppose a death sentence for their daughter. They described Rajput as a very good man.
Muskan and Rajput married in 2016, against his family's wishes. They had a daughter, who was six when her father was killed; earlier reports said her remark that her papa was inside the drum shifted the investigation.
A second daughter was born to Muskan in jail in November 2025. Jail officials said then that the baby would stay with her mother and be registered with the jail's anganwadi.
What happens to either child now isn't clear. Renu Devi says her priority is the elder girl and that she wants unconditional custody. Coverage on Wednesday said little about the baby, and several TV channels simply asked who will raise them.
A sessions court can't finalise a death sentence in India. The Allahabad High Court has to confirm it. One lawyer in the case said a bench is expected to deliberate within roughly three months and that execution can only follow confirmation. The convicts can appeal as well, and reports say they want to meet the jail superintendent to start that. After the High Court, the Supreme Court is still available.
