Maharashtra: Artist Chintan gets life sentence for murder of estranged wife

Artist Chintan Upadhyay and three others have been handed life imprisonment in the double murder case of 2015 in which his wife, artist Hema Upadhyay, and her lawyer were found dead.Upadhyay and the other convicts, who were present in the court, showed no emotions when the verdict was read out by Judge SY Bhosale at the Dindoshi Sessions Court. Lawyer Bharat Manghani requested that Chintan's family be given some time to meet him before he was taken to prison. Chintan's brothers and artists such as Sanjiv Khandekar and Vaishali Narvekar were present in court to meet him.

Special public prosecutor Vaibhav Bagade had sought that Chintan and the three others — Vijay Rajbhar, Pradeep Rajbhar and Shivkumar Rajbhar — be given the maximum punishment of death, claiming that the murders of Hema and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani were “cold blooded and calculated”.

Hema Upadhyay, an installation artist, and her lawyer Bhambhani were allegedly smothered to death on December 12, 2015 and their bodies were packed in cardboard boxes and dumped in a drain in the Kandivali area of suburban Mumbai. The murders came to light after the two bodies were spotted by a garbage collector.