Prem Pawar, 24, now remembers the love of his life, Geeta, through her photos and videos on Instagram. He keeps returning to Pandavleni, the Buddhist caves in Nashik that turn lush green during the monsoon, gathering fragments of the memories they made there.
Geeta Govardhane, 23, died on July 12, days before she was to marry Prem, a Dalit man from her village, Sanjegaon. Her family initially said she had died of a snake bite. A complaint by Prem led to a criminal investigation, and an FIR registered a month later alleges that Geeta’s parents killed her because she wanted to marry him. Her parents, Anil Govardhane and Anita Govardhane, have been arrested in connection with the case.
More than a month after Geeta’s death, Prem is grieving her loss but remains determined to seek justice. Her death has left Sanjegaon, a village in Igatpuri taluka around 30 kilometres from Nashik, shrouded in silence, tension, and whispers, as questions continue to surround what happened to her.
Geeta and Prem had known each other since their teenage years, when they went to the same school. Their friendship later developed into a romantic relationship during their college years. Geeta, who was a high-performing student, completed BSc and BEd and began working at Dolphin, a private consultancy in Nashik, where she handled day-to-day operations. Prem, meanwhile, was pursuing German-language training. He aspired to get a job in Germany and settle there with Geeta, where, he hoped, caste barriers would not follow them.
The couple decided to focus on their careers first, which would enable them to become financially independent, marry, and live together. They kept their relationship secret, as they were aware of the “potential risks”.
In July 2026, Geeta’s cousin saw her and Prem together on a bike near their village and confronted Geeta. “She admitted that she was in love with me and would marry me. She told me all this over a phone call,” says Prem, who filed a detailed complaint about her suspicious death at the Deputy Superintendent’s office in Aadgaon on July 20, 2026.
When Geeta’s cousin confronted her about the relationship, he asked her to break up with Prem, saying that he was not from the same caste as Geeta, who belonged to the Kunbi-Maratha community. Prem belongs to the Mahar caste, a Dalit community in Maharashtra, and the cousin told her that marrying him was not possible because of her family’s reputation in the village. He later informed Geeta’s parents about the relationship.
“The family members also confronted Geeta, but seeing her determination, they confined her at home, allegedly beat her, and abused her for choosing to marry a Dalit man,” Prem says.
“Geeta told me everything over WhatsApp chat secretly, that her parents were harassing, abusing, and beating her. Due to this, we decided to marry as soon as possible and coordinated everything over calls and texts. In fact, her last WhatsApp texts to me before her death were the documents she sent me for arranging a court marriage,” says Prem.
July 12, the day Geeta died, was also the day she was supposed to leave her home and meet Prem. They planned to get married within the next two days. But, according to Prem, a family member allegedly saw their WhatsApp conversations, after which Geeta’s mother and father decided to kill her rather than allow her to “tarnish the honour of the family”.
According to the FIR registered by the police at Wadivarhe police station in Nashik rural on August 11, a month after Geeta’s suspicious death, her parents were agitated by her determination to marry the man she loved and decided to kill her. The FIR does not mention Prem’s name.
The FIR alleges that Geeta’s mother held her hands and legs while her father poured pesticide into her mouth and pressed her nose and mouth with a piece of cloth to prevent her from screaming or escaping. Once they believed she was dead, the FIR says, they called relatives early in the morning and informed them that Geeta had died of a snake bite. In the presence of a few relatives, Geeta was cremated at Sanjegaon’s crematorium before 10 am.
When this reporter visited Sanjegaon and approached residents, they appeared hesitant to speak. No one seemed to know “exactly how Geeta had died.” There was a chilling silence and visible tension in the village. No poster or banner paying tribute to Geeta was displayed anywhere in the village, which felt unusual in rural Maharashtra. There was also no tribute message for Geeta in the Sanjegaon WhatsApp group, which we accessed through a source.
After multiple requests for an interview, the former sarpanch of the village, Shankar Govardhane, said, “This matter is sub judice, so I can’t make any comment.”
When asked about the caste dynamics of the village, he said, “For the past few years, I have lived in Nashik city for my children’s education and hardly visit Sanjegaon, so I am unaware of what happens in the village.”
After the FIR was registered, police arrested Geeta’s father, Anil Govardhane, and her mother, Anita Govardhane, on August 11. Both were granted judicial custody on August 17 after six days in police custody. Both accused have filed bail pleas, and the hearing was scheduled for September 2 at the Nashik District and Sessions Court. The court has given a further date of hearing for the bail plea.
How suspicion led to the FIR, arrests, and questions over the caste angle
Geeta was an ambitious woman who consistently scored good marks in school and college. She wanted to become a doctor and serve people, but her family did not allow her to pursue medicine. According to Prem, based on his chats with Geeta, her extended family members discouraged her parents from allowing her to pursue medicine, asking, “Why are you wasting all your money on two daughters? After all, they will be married off and your son will take care of you.”
“Geeta used to tell me about her dreams,” says Prem. “Even though she could not pursue medicine to serve people, she used to help villagers in many other ways. She helped many women from our village enrol for the Ladki Bahin scheme, housing schemes, etc. She only helped me get my passport.”
When Prem heard about her death over a phone call from his friend, he was in Nashik city preparing for his German-language examination. “I was shocked. I could not believe the news. She sent me the documents required for our marriage just one day before and told me about the hostility at home. Due to this, she asked me not to call her mobile and said she would contact me when she could confidently escape,” says Prem.
After confirming that it was Geeta who had been cremated, Prem and his uncle Tushar Donde went to the Wadivarhe police station to file a complaint about her suspicious death. But the police did not entertain them, Prem and Donde allege.
If it was a snake bite, why didn’t her parents take her to a hospital or primary health centre? If she was not taken to a hospital for treatment, why was there no post-mortem report that could have determined the cause of death? Why did her parents cremate her in such a hurry, before 10 am? Who declared her dead? Why was there no death registration at the village panchayat before the cremation? How could they perform her last rites without informing the police?
These are the questions Prem and his family have raised. They were also detailed in a complaint Prem submitted to the DSP’s office at Aadgaon on July 20. TNM has accessed copies of the complaint and FIR.
According to Prem, he and his family members followed up with the police for eight days, but their complaint was not entertained.
“When we intervened, tried to meet the DSP, and warned them of an agitation, the police started taking the matter seriously. We also uploaded a video on Facebook about this ordeal. Then, finally, police accepted Prem’s complaint. Because of our constant follow-up, police at least, much later, filed an FIR and arrested the accused,” says Chetan Gangurde, an anti-caste activist and Nashik district president of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi.
Gangurde questions why Prem was not made a party to the case despite submitting a detailed complaint and evidence from his chats with Geeta, and why his complaint was not mentioned in the FIR. He also alleges that the police are avoiding the caste angle in the case.
TNM contacted Dhiraj Mahajan, an investigating officer in the case, with questions about the month-long delay in filing the FIR, why Prem was not made a party to the case despite submitting a detailed complaint and evidence from his chats with Geeta, why his complaint was not mentioned in the FIR, and how the caste angle was being investigated.
“We did a fair investigation. We went to the crime scene on July 12, the day when Geeta was cremated, recorded statements of relatives and family members, and when her parents didn’t cooperate with the questioning, our doubt became stronger. We approached the court, received the court order to detain the parents, did further questioning, and filed an FIR and arrested them,” Mahajan told TNM.
He added, “FIR is a preliminary document. If we find more evidence, we’ll do the appropriate work under the guidance of senior police officers.”
Mahajan also said that the village has a history of caste violence and that, in order to avoid clashes between the two communities, Maratha and Dalit, police are taking cautious steps.
The history of Sanjegaon
Sanjegaon is populated by roughly 2,500 people. Most of them are Maratha households. Many also identify themselves as Kunbi and have demanded reservation under the OBC category. After the 2016 Kopardi gang rape case, the issue of Maratha reservation became a major part of the politics in Maharashtra. On one hand, Marathas with less landholding have demanded reservation, and the state government has also responded affirmatively, asking them to search their records for evidence of Kunbi identity. On the other hand, when it comes to caste pride, many in the community identify themselves as Maratha, considered a ‘dominant caste’.
Most families in Sanjegaon are Maratha/Kunbi, with the surname Govardhane, the same as Geeta’s. They possess significant agricultural land, with farming as their main occupation.
There are 25-30 Dalit families living in ‘Rajwada’, a Dalit settlement visibly separated from the other households. There were more than 50 Dalit families in the village, but many migrated in the aftermath of the 2016 caste violence in the village.
In 2016, Dalit families in the village were brutally attacked and ‘held accountable’ for something they had no connection to. A young girl from the Maratha community was allegedly raped by a Dalit man in Talegaon, another village in Igatpuri taluka. This prompted outrage among the Maratha community. Unverified WhatsApp messages and rumours were circulated, targeting the entire Dalit community. As a result, Dalit families in Sanjegaon and a few other adjacent villages were beaten with hockey sticks, rods, and swords among other things, according to the 2016 fact-finding report of the Republican Panther, an anti-caste collective.
Prem’s family, including his mother and aunt, were beaten by men from the Maratha community. “I still remember those wounds. Men beat, thrashed, and abused me brutally. We live with the same fear today. Although Govardhane killed their own daughter, we fear for our lives because she was in love with my son,” says Prem’s mother, who works in a nearby winery.
Prem’s father, Suresh Pawar, works in a private company as a casual worker in a nearby village and expressed the same fear. “We mourn the loss of a poor child (Geeta) silently, because being vocal about it means inviting trouble from the ‘upper’ castes. Even though we had nothing to do with her death and, in fact, want justice for her, we are unable to come to the forefront in this legal battle. Every day I think about my son and wife’s life. What if they attack me and my family? Police do patrolling every day, yet fear persists. I don’t speak to anyone these days, I walk with my head down. We have asked Prem not to come to our home in Sanjegaon; he lives with relatives,” says Suresh Pawar.
The Pawar family is landless and struggling with poverty. “We can’t migrate to other places, because everything we have is here. One needs a community, and there is rising inflation; housing in cities is very expensive,” adds Pawar.
Pawar’s ordeal is reminiscent of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s argument about villages. He argued that Dalits could not achieve social and economic freedom within the traditional village system, where caste, landlessness, segregation, and economic dependence reinforced each other. He saw urbanisation and industrialisation as pathways to economic mobility and freedom from dominant-caste control. He didn’t mean simply leaving villages, but breaking the social and economic structures that sustained caste oppression in villages.
Ironically, Sanjegaon has a progressive history, too, which people seem to have forgotten. Comrade Punjababa Govardhane was a fierce CPI leader and Marxist ideologue born in the same village who dedicated his life to empowering tribal, peasant, and marginalised communities in Nashik and Igatpuri against feudal exploitation. He was a key figure in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement and later became a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly in 1957. Punjababa was influenced by Mahatma Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar and tried to eradicate caste discrimination. However, his contribution and work have been forgotten by many in Sanjegaon, which continues to practise caste-based discrimination.
Prem’s uncle, Tushar Donde, explained the repercussions of an inter-caste relationship. But according to him, both Geeta and Prem loved each other so much that they could not even think about ending the relationship.
“Geeta was determined to marry Prem. I gave him (Prem) examples of films like ‘Fandry’ and ‘Sairat’ to warn him of the potential risks of an inter-caste marriage, but I never thought this would happen for real in my nephew’s life,” says Donde. “I asked Prem to get a good job so that I, along with respected people, could have gone to her family with a marriage proposal,” he adds.
The Govardhane family never spoke to Prem’s family or relatives about their objection to the relationship. “They didn’t tell us to keep our son ‘in line’, otherwise we would have done it. Prem, his father would drop Geeta many times to her home on his bike. In fact, her father knows Prem’s father very well. They shouldn’t have killed their daughter. I still hope she comes back from somewhere,” says Aasha Donde, Prem’s maternal aunt.
Caste killings (‘honour’ killings) in Maharashtra
There were 19 ‘honour killing’ cases registered in Maharashtra from 2017 to 2021, of which 16 were registered in 2017 and three in 2018. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)’s 2023 report, published in 2025, India registered a total of 38 cases in which the motive of murder was recorded as ‘honour killing’. However, there are reporting limitations, and not all such cases may be properly classified in official records.
‘Honour’ killing is not a separate crime category in NCRB data, but is recorded under broader crimes such as murder. NCRB separately records the motive behind murders, with ‘honour killing’ listed as one such motive, which is how the annual figures for honour killings are recorded.
India has no Union legislation specifically addressing ‘honour killings’, despite calls from legal and feminist policy scholars for a separate legal framework. Such cases are prosecuted under existing provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), formerly the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including provisions relating to murder, culpable homicide, and conspiracy.
“Police generally try to avoid caste angles in cases of caste violence to appease the dominant caste communities. The caste consciousness, or rather blindness, of the police is prevalent due to their own caste locations also. We have seen it from the Khairlanji case. I was a member of the fact-finding committee on caste violence in Sanjegaon in 2016. We approached the police with our findings to file FIRs, but the police didn’t entertain us even then,” says Sudhir Dhavale, an anti-caste activist and scholar.
In October 2022, Maharashtra’s Home Department issued guidelines to prevent honour killings, Khap panchayat diktats, mob violence, and lynchings, in line with Supreme Court directions. The guidelines direct police to identify vulnerable areas, act against diktats targeting inter-caste and interfaith couples, register FIRs, and provide protection to threatened couples and their families. Officers who fail to act can face disciplinary action, while Khap meetings must be monitored and video-recorded.
With inputs from Ekta Sonawane.