PUNE — Siya Goyal’s mother sat before reporters on Thursday and did not ask for her daughter’s life to be spared. She asked for it to be taken.
“If she is guilty,” the woman said, “hang her. A mother is saying this.”
Her husband, Praveen Goyal, was at her side. “If my daughter is found guilty,” he told NDTV, “the court should not delay justice. She should be given the same punishment.” He added that Siya ought to be pushed from the very fort where Ketan Agarwal died, if that is what a verdict demands.
It was an extraordinary thing for any parent to say about their child. But the circumstances that produced Thursday’s statement were more extraordinary still.
Siya Goyal, 20, is the prime accused in the killing of Ketan Vishal Agarwal, her 26-year-old fiance and a real estate director from Gahunje in Pune district. Pune Rural Police allege that Siya and her alleged lover, Chetan Chaudhary, pushed Ketan from the battlements of Lohagad Fort near Lonavala on June 18. He fell into a gorge nearly 400 feet deep. Initially, police classified the death as an accident. It was camera footage, call data records, and forensic work at the site that led them to register a murder case and make arrests.
Ketan’s own mother, speaking separately to reporters this week, also demanded the death penalty for those responsible for her son’s death.
The case has held Maharashtra’s attention for the better part of two weeks. It draws scrutiny not only for the method alleged, but for what police say happened four days before the killing at the fort.
On June 14, Siya and Ketan visited Lohagad Fort together. Investigators say Siya attempted to push him from a cliff edge that day. He caught himself on a bush and survived. When Ketan confronted her, Siya said there had been a snake. She had been trying to push him clear of it, she claimed. He accepted the explanation.
He came back to the fort on June 18, this time with Chetan Chaudhary also present.
What police describe as the motive is a circumstance Siya had found no conventional exit from. She was in a relationship with Chetan and had no desire to marry Ketan. But severing the engagement, in the social world she inhabited, carried a cost she was unwilling to bear. So the two allegedly chose a different resolution.
In the hours after Ketan’s death on June 18, Siya posted a tribute to him on Instagram. She presented herself as a grieving partner. The post spread widely on social media. After the arrests, it spread again, for different reasons.
A constable posted at Lohagad Fort that day told Indian journalists he had noticed something about Siya’s manner in the aftermath. No tears, he said. No remorse. Only agitation.
Both Siya and Chetan Chaudhary were arrested by Pune Rural Police within days of the incident. A court ordered them held in police custody until June 29 as investigators work to assemble the formal charge sheet. The charges, expected to include murder and criminal conspiracy under Indian penal provisions, had not been formally framed as of Thursday.
Ketan’s family told reporters this week that investigators had surfaced additional detail about the planning involved. They said a passport belonging to Ketan had gone missing in the period before his death, and that Siya and Chetan had discussed a trip to Bali, details that investigators are now examining as possible evidence of an escape plan that was never used.
Chetan Chaudhary’s family has made no public statement. What he told police in custody has not been formally disclosed.
The Lohagad Fort carries weight in Maharashtra that extends well beyond this case. Known in Marathi as the “iron fort,” it sits at roughly 3,400 feet in the Western Ghats, a Sahyadri ridge fortification associated with Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s Maratha empire. It is classified as a protected monument by the Archaeological Survey of India and draws trekkers from Pune, Mumbai, and beyond throughout the year. Its stone battlements, spread across a narrow hilltop ridgeline, drop away sharply on multiple sides.
The case has been compared in Indian media to earlier incidents in which individuals were accused of engineering the deaths of unwanted partners to escape socially fraught engagements, including a killing in Indore whose details resurfaced this week because of structural parallels. Those comparisons are useful only up to a point. Every case is shaped by its own evidence, and this one has yet to be tested in a courtroom.
What makes the Pune case stand apart, for now, is what Thursday produced. In Indian criminal proceedings, the family of an accused typically arrives to affirm innocence, dispute the evidence, or say nothing publicly at all. Praveen Goyal and his wife did none of those things. They did not question the charges. They did not speak of their daughter as someone to be defended. They asked, instead, that she receive the harshest punishment available if found guilty, and they asked for it in front of reporters.
Whether they have seen something that has already settled the question for them privately, or whether Thursday’s statement was something else entirely, is not knowable from the outside. The investigation is still young. The evidentiary record is still being assembled. What happened at Lohagad on June 14 and again on June 18 has not yet been tested before a judge, where the standard of proof is different from the one that governs a press conference.
What is established is what Siya Goyal’s family has asked for in public. And what Ketan Agarwal’s family has demanded in response.
The court, when it reaches that question, will answer it alone.
