Jessica Lal Case: A Refused Drink, a Bullet, and the Headline That Shamed India Into Justice

The Thursday party at Qutub Colonnade, in Delhi’s Mehrauli, was the kind of night Delhi’s rich and famous went to be seen. Socialite Bina Ramani ran the restaurant. That night, 29 April 1999, her daughter Malini and a 34-year-old model named Jessica Lal were behind the bar. Hundreds of people passed through.

Around 2 am, the bar had run out and closed. A young man walked up and asked for a drink. He offered money. Jessica said no. According to the witnesses the courts later believed, he pulled out a pistol and fired twice: one bullet into the ceiling, one into Jessica’s head.

She died in hospital. The man walked out of the party, and was gone before police arrived.

His name was Siddhartha Vashisht, known as Manu Sharma. He was the son of Venod Sharma, a Congress politician and former Union minister from Haryana.

Bina Ramani followed the man to the gate and told her husband, George Mailhot, to note which car he got into: a black Tata Safari. Two days later, the Safari was found abandoned in Noida. It was registered to a company where Manu Sharma was a director.

Police said the Sharma family was absconding. Manu Sharma surrendered in Chandigarh on 6 May 1999. His friends Amardeep Singh Gill, known as Tony, and Vikas Yadav, son of Uttar Pradesh politician D.P. Yadav, were accused of moving the Safari to protect him.

The pistol, a .22 Beretta sold to Manu Sharma that January, was never recovered. That gap would matter enormously.

The trial began, and then the case began to fall apart. One by one, key witnesses turned hostile. The most famous was the actor Shayan Munshi, who had been at the bar and whose statement formed the basis of the first police report. In court in 2001 he said his statement had been written in Hindi, a language he said he did not know well enough to read, and that it did not say what he had told police.

Others followed. Of the dozens of witnesses, around thirty would end up being treated as hostile. A forensic report, meanwhile, said the two empty cartridges appeared to come from two different weapons.

In 2003, even the Supreme Court lamented that nobody came forward to help the prosecution.

On 21 February 2006, Additional Sessions Judge S.L. Bhayana acquitted all nine people on trial. The eyewitnesses had not identified Manu Sharma, the weapon had never been found, and the forensic evidence pointed to two guns. He blamed shoddy police work.

Sabrina Lal, Jessica’s younger sister, who had spent seven years following the case, said money and muscle had won.

Money and muscle power won at the end of the day.

The next morning, a newspaper front page summed up what millions of Indians felt in four words. The Times of India’s headline, as the media critic Newslaundry later recalled it, read: NO ONE KILLED JESSICA.

What happened next had no real precedent in India. NDTV launched an SMS campaign asking viewers to text ‘Jessica’ to support a petition to the President. Within two days it had more than 84,000 messages, and later accounts put the total above 200,000.

People lit candles outside the restaurant. On 4 March 2006, crowds gathered for a candlelight vigil at India Gate, an image that many linked to the film Rang De Basanti, released weeks earlier. Students marched on Parliament Street. For the first time, India’s middle class had used text messages and television to put pressure on a court case.

Delhi Police appealed against the acquittal on 13 March 2006, calling the verdict a grave error.

In September 2006, a sting operation by Tehelka and Star News alleged that witnesses in the case had been paid off. Venod Sharma, by then Haryana’s power minister, denied any wrongdoing but resigned from the cabinet in October.

No court ever made a finding against him. Of the hostile witnesses, the Delhi High Court later sent only two for trial on charges of lying in court: Shayan Munshi, who was granted bail in 2013, and a ballistics expert, whose case the Supreme Court quashed in 2016. We found no report of how Munshi’s case ended.

The Delhi High Court heard the appeal day after day from October 2006. On 18 December 2006, Justices R.S. Sodhi and P.K. Bhasin reversed the acquittal. They relied on what they called the courageous testimony of Bina Ramani and her husband, and dismissed the two-gun theory as a concoction.

Two days later, Manu Sharma was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judges refused the death penalty, saying he was not a habitual offender and could be reformed. Vikas Yadav and Tony Gill got four years each for destroying evidence. The other accused remained acquitted.

On 19 April 2010, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. The judges said that even without Munshi’s evidence, the case against Manu Sharma hardly changed. They also had a message for the media that had campaigned so hard.

The acts of journalism and not as a special agency for the Court.

In September 2009, Manu Sharma was given parole, officially because his mother was seriously ill and for family business. It was extended into November. Then his mother was seen at a press conference in Chandigarh, and he was spotted at a Delhi nightclub.

The outrage was instant, and it was aimed at Delhi’s government under Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, who said everything had been done according to the rules. He was back in Tihar on 10 November 2009. Over his sentence, he would get 12 paroles and 24 furloughs in total.

In 2017, Manu Sharma was moved to an open jail. In 2018, Sabrina Lal wrote to the jail authorities that she had no objection to his release and did not want compensation, citing the charity work he had done in prison. She also said she had not forgiven him, and probably never would.

On 11 May 2020, Delhi’s Sentence Review Board recommended his early release, and the Lieutenant Governor approved it. He walked out of Tihar in early June 2020. Prison officials said he had spent 17 years behind bars, which counted as 23 years and four months with remission.

Sabrina Lal died on 15 August 2021, of complications from liver cirrhosis, in her early fifties. She had spent most of her adult life on her sister’s case.

Vikas Yadav, convicted in this case of destroying evidence, went on to murder Nitish Katara in 2002 while out on bail. He is serving 25 years without remission for that killing.

Raj Kumar Gupta’s film No One Killed Jessica (2011) told the story with Vidya Balan as Sabrina and Rani Mukerji as a fictional television journalist. Sabrina said the film would make Jessica kind of immortal.

The Jessica Lal case is a story about two kinds of power. One is the power of a politician’s family to make witnesses forget what they saw. The other is the power of ordinary people, armed with candles and text messages, to refuse to accept it.

It also shows the limits of both. The conviction came only after a public outcry, the sting proved nothing in court, and the man who pulled the trigger was free before his victim’s sister died. But on a night when hundreds of people saw a woman shot for refusing to pour a drink, India eventually got the answer it demanded: someone did kill Jessica.