8 years after double murder, artist Chintan Upadhyay convicted

Artist, three others found guilty in the sensational murder case of his estranged wife and her lawyer; prosecution to ask for maximum sentence

Mumbai: Eight years after the sensational murders of one of India’s leading artists, Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani, a sessions court in Mumbai convicted the artist and Hema’s estranged husband Chintan Upadhyay for conspiracy while the main accused, Vidyadhar Rajbhar in charge of the fabricating unit where the murders were executed, remains absconding. Three others, Shiv Kumar Rajbhar, Vidyadhar Rajbhar and Pradip Rajbhar, have been convicted for murder, destruction of evidence and breach of trust.

Artist Chintan Upadhyay walks out of Dindoshi court after being convicted on Thursday. Three of his accomplices, left to right, Shivkumar Rajbhar, Pradip Rajbhar and Vijay Rajbhar were also found guilty of the crime. (Satish Bate)

The investigators, who have pushed for the maximum sentence, relied on Call Detail Records, a confession from Pradip Rajbhar, which was subsequently retracted by his lawyer, and Chintan’s personal diary and drawings to establish motive for Hema’s murder.

In one of the notations in his diary in 2010, Chintan Upadhyay weighed his options: “If I move to Delhi what I lose (sic):

“I love connecting with Mumbai.

But what connections do I have?

My house

Friends: Sanjiv, Khalid, Rizvi, Amit

Driver: Suresh

Fabricator: Bansraj

Town”

Below this list, he wrote in all caps, as if to convince himself: “MOVING TO DELHI FOR SURE—before August 1.”

The MS University-trained artist was one-half of Mumbai art world’s It Couple. Feted, his large, fabricated baby heads superimposed with colourful paintings reminiscent of the miniature works from his home state, Rajasthan featured in several collectors’ homes…there was little that wasn’t seemingly going his way. What few people knew then was that as their careers soared, Chintan and Hema Upadhyay, an artist of even greater renown, were embroiled in a bitterly acrimonious battle. Their furious fights and his divorce petition prompted his move to Delhi.

Fours year later, a family court granted the couple divorce in 2014 saying the wild allegations they made against one another proved “the essence of their marriage had gone.” The court also ordered Chintan to pay an alimony of ₹16.51 lakh. However, Hema Upadhyay subsequently challenged the family court’s ruling. “I was thinking about my divorce and why Hema who doesn’t care for me wants to take revenge and punish me,” he wrote.

The diary, full of griping about the breakdown of their marriage, would have meant nothing more than cathartic outpouring had it not been for the fact that the next year, on the morning of December 12, 2015, a rag-picker rummaging through the detritus floating down a broad nullah in the back alleys of Kandivali discovered two life-size cardboard boxes. He pulled them towards him using all his strength, hoping to find something of value. Instead, he found two bodies, later identified as those of Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani.

In the heady art world of the noughties when artists shared page 3 celebrity with film stars and models, and auction houses sold their works for previously unheard of prices, Hema and Chintan Upadhyay forged very separate career trajectories. Hema, the more talented and quieter artist of the two, worked on ambitiously-mounted collages, “Using her troubles in her works to cathartic effect,” says her gallerist Shireen Gandhy. “There was a constant tension between the outsider and the insider in her art. For instance, one of her works showed migrants floating up in the sky looking down at the city below. The city was shown in exquisite detail: blue tarpaulin homes, temples, mosques. She became an observer of the city through her work.”

Chintan, on the other hand, imbibed the can-do spirit of Mumbai with snazzier and performative art. He once sat naked and invited people to daub him with paint, turning himself into an art work. He also referred to his studio as a factory, and termed his art works ‘Chintan Upadhyay Unlimited’.

“Hema was very moral and had several moral compunctions. If someone told her something unpleasant about Chintan, she would always defend him; she had a certain empathy for her spouse. Hema, if she were watching, would be horrified by what’s happening to him,” says Gandhy who had observed the couple through their meteoric rise in Mumbai’s art world. “Hema would never wish for him to be in jail, and he would never want her to die.”

In Mumbai’s art world, the only shock greater than Hema’s murder was Chintan’s implication in it. Some of India’s best-known artists rallied around him offering material and emotional support through the twists and turns of the police investigation. At the heart of the evidence in the case was Chintan’s personal diary seized by the police.

In 2014, the ugliness of their marriage became public when she filed a case against him for “indecent representation of women” for drawings he had scribbled on the walls of their jointly-held flat in Juhu. She had let in stray dogs into the apartment, during one of his periodic visits to the city, letting them pee and defecate all over the flat, including his room. Enraged, he retaliated by drawing a couple involved in oral sex on his bedroom wall. The police subsequently used those etchings to establish Chintan’s motive for Hema’s murder.

An artist friend of the couple who does not wish to be quoted, reveals how Hema had become anxiety-prone and reliant on her lawyer, the elderly Harish Bhambhani, who advised her in her ongoing feud with Chintan. The reason she and Bhambhani drove all the way to the Kandivali warehouse on the night of their murder was because Vidyadhar Rajbhar, the fabricator she shared with Chintan, had allegedly promised to show them videoclips that compromised Chintan.

Chintan, who was initially given a clean chit after 8 days of questioning by the Mumbai crime branch, was arrested for the murder on December 22, 2015 by the Kandivali police amid media clamour. Their claim about his involvement in the killings was backed by a confessional statement given by Pradeep Rajbhar recorded before a magistrate in March 2016. In his six-page confession, he revealed how the victims were lured to Bansraj Art Company’s warehouse, smothered using some chemical applied on handkerchiefs and how their bodies were packed in cardboard boxes and disposed of using the tempo owned by Shivkumar Rajbhar. Pradip’s lawyer subsequently withdrew the confession but the prosecution maintained it has evidentiary value.

In its case against the four Rajbhars and the missing main accused Vidyadhar Rajbhar too the prosecution relied on the confessional statement of Pradeep wherein he revealed how Chintan had called Vidyadhar to a friend’s home in Chembur and asked them to kill Hema for a fee of ₹2 lakh.

Besides, the prosecution also relied on CCTV footage wherein Hema and her lawyer were seen entering Rajbhar’s fabrication unit where they were killed, and also later when their bodies could be seen getting loaded onto the tempo.

Chintan Upadhyay had, however, denied all the allegations and claimed that he was being made a scapegoat in the absence of the main accused. His lawyers contended that he had no reason to eliminate Hema as his divorce plea had already been granted and that he had paid a major chunk of the alimony well before 2015. There was no evidence of the meeting where the conspiracy was allegedly hatched and that the CDR merely proved what was already well known, that Chintan and Vidyadhar Rajbhar knew each other as work collaborators.

The Dindoshi court will pronounce a detailed order on Saturday.