By Yash Sadhak Shrivastava
New Delhi/Bhopal: In the early hours of April 30, 1999, Jessica Lal was shot dead for refusing to serve a drink. Twenty-six years later, as her birthday is remembered once again (January 5), the central irony of the case has only sharpened: the man convicted of her murder is today linked to a successful liquor business.
Jessica Lal was working as a temporary bartender at a private party at Tamarind Court in South Delhi when Manu Sharma, son of Congress leader Venod Sharma, demanded alcohol after last orders. According to court findings, Sharma fired a shot into the air and then fired again, killing Lal. She was declared dead shortly after midnight.
When the system almost let him walk
Despite eyewitness testimony, the case collapsed in its first trial. In 2006, a Delhi court acquitted Sharma after key witnesses turned hostile. The verdict provoked public outrage, sustained media pressure and street protests that refused to let the case fade.
Later that year, the Delhi High Court overturned the acquittal, holding Sharma guilty of murder and sentencing him to life imprisonment. In 2010, the Supreme Court of India upheld the conviction, criticising the manner in which the investigation and prosecution had been undermined.
A recent Scroll account by a former Delhi Police chief revisits that period, documenting how close Sharma came to escaping punishment altogether, not because the evidence was unclear, but because influence worked steadily in his favour until public pressure forced the system to respond.
Prison ended. The story did not.
Sharma served close to 16 years in prison. In 2020, he was released after being granted remission for good conduct. By then, he had legally changed his name to Siddharth Vashisht.
What has unsettled many since is not merely his release, but his rehabilitation and where it has taken place.
Sharma is associated with the family-promoted Piccadilly Agro Industries group, which has substantial interests in distilleries and alcoholic beverages. The group’s premium whisky brand, Indri, has in recent years received international awards and glowing media attention.
The contrast is jarring. A man convicted of killing a bartender for refusing to serve alcohol is now part of a business ecosystem built entirely around it.
The irony that refuses to soften
There is nothing illegal about Sharma’s post-prison business life. Indian law allows remission. Convicts are entitled to rebuild their lives. But the symbolism is impossible to ignore and impossible to separate from the crime itself.
Jessica Lal’s case once stood for something rare: that outrage could force accountability, that power could be checked. Today, it stands for a quieter, more uncomfortable truth that punishment can end, reputations can be reworked, and public memory can fade, even when the facts do not.
On her birthday, Jessica Lal remains frozen in time, a woman who said no and paid with her life. Her killer, meanwhile, has moved on, rebranded and prospered, in an industry that makes the circumstances of her death impossible to forget.