Party, drugs, mystery: How the Phogat tragedy has rocked Goa

On the morning of August 22, 42-year-old Sonali Phogat, her 39-year-old manager Sudhir Sangwan, and his 33-year-old associate Sukhwinder Singh, landed in Goa. By the next morning though, Phogat — actor, fledgling politician, and Instagram star — was dead.

On the morning of August 22, 42-year-old Sonali Phogat, her 39-year-old manager Sudhir Sangwan, and his 33-year-old associate Sukhwinder Singh, landed in Goa. It was meant to be a work trip, and Phogat had conveyed to her mother that she would be back in Hisar by the 25th. By the next morning though, Phogat — actor, fledgling politician, and Instagram star — was dead. And the two men that she came with were accused of drugging her in one of Goa’s most controversial and popular bars.

(HT Photo)

The setting

At around 10:30pm on August 22, dressed in a red crop top and black shorts, Phogat entered the Curlies Bar in Anjuna, with Sangwan and Singh in tow. For a while, nothing seemed untoward. Goa’s inspector general of police Omvir Singh Bishnoi said that video footage from Curlies showed Phogat and her aides “dancing normally”.

Started in the mid-1980s, Curlies is restaurant by day, calm and serene — its two floors often populated by families. Once the sun sets, Curlies transforms into an entirely different avatar, one that has earned it both popularity and infamy. Flashy, fluorescent laser lights gyrate across the interiors, as trance and electronic music blare through the speakers. The upper floor has a soundproof dance floor that turns into a nightclub. The entire beach stretch of south Anjuna, home to several similarly themed beach shacks, has even given rise to a genre of music called “Goa trance”.

In May 2008, British teenager Scarlett Keeling, a regular at Curlies, attended a party at the nightclub, hours after which her partially decomposed body was found on the beach. While the police first dismissed the case as down to an accident, a second postmortem examination, the result of her mother’s dogged fight for justice, revealed that Keeling was drugged, assaulted, raped, and killed.

The incident

At 1.25am on August 23, there was the first sign of something out of the ordinary. Video footage shows Sangwan pouring a drink in Phogat’s mouth, her face tilted upwards, on a crowded dance floor on the first floor of the restaurant. Bishnoi, in a press conference on August 26, said that this was the moment Phogat was plied with an “obnoxious chemical”.

“From the video it is seen that one of the accused is forcefully making the deceased drink some substance. Sudhir Sangwan and Sukhwinder confessed that they had intentionally given the accused some obnoxious chemical after which the victim wasn’t herself and needed to be taken care of,” Bishnoi said.

Since then, police investigations have revealed that the “obnoxious chemical” was methamphetamine, or MDMA, a popular synthetic party drug used to induce a euphoric high. Sangwan has told the police that he procured the drugs from the bellboy, Dattaprasad Gaonkar, at the Grand Leoney Resort hotel the three were living in. Gaonkar, in turn, had procured the drug from a peddler named Rama Mandrekar, police said. Both Gaonkar, and Mandrekar have been arrested by Goa Police.

An hour after she was given MDMA, video footage from the restaurant shows Phogat becoming noticeably unstable, and staggering towards the bathroom on the first floor. Police say that she stayed inside the bathroom, where there are no CCTV cameras, for a little short of two hours, being held up as she vomited incessantly.

At 4.27am, Phogat exited the bathroom, and then Curlies, barely able to stand with Sangwan propping her up. Footage shows her staggering as Sangwan holds on to her, his right arm across her right shoulder.

Sangwan and Singh hired a taxi, among those waiting in the parking lot atop a cliff behind the shack, and headed back to the hotel 2km away. The taxi driver, who drove the trio, has corroborated to the police that Phogat was passed out in the back of his car.

Around 10 minutes later, back in her room, Phogat was now showing no signs of consciousness. Officials in Goa Police told HT that a panicked Sangwan and Singh began chest compressions in an effort to revive her. “It is during these attempts to revive her, that Sonali may have sustained the blunt force injuries that were noticed during the postmortem examination,” one officer, involved in the investigations, said. IG Bishnoi has also said that it was possible that the blunt injuries occurred due to Phogat collapsing in the bathroom of the nightclub.

At around 7am, a prone Phogat was rushed to St Antony’s Hospital, a small private institution another 2km away from the hotel, that offers only minimal emergency response facilities. She was already dead.

Confusion and panic

At 8.30am, Phogat’s brother Vatan Dhaka received a call with Sangwan’s name flashing on his mobile phone. The call lasted less than a minute. Sangwan told Dhaka that Phogat had died of a heart attack at the hotel in Goa and disconnected the line. Shocked and refusing to believe what they had just heard, the family members tried to contact Sangwan repeatedly, but he did not pick up.

“We kept dialling his number from multiple phones but got no response,” says Dhaka, who runs the family’s jewellery shop in Hisar. An hour later, as a stunned family watched, the news of Sonali’s death was flashing across news channels.

Around the same time, Goa Police received a call from the St Anthony’s Hospital that a woman identified as Sonali Phogat had been brought dead after she complained of uneasiness.

But within the Phogat family, there was a sense of disquiet.

Her brother Rinku Dhaka flew down to Goa the same evening, and filed a case of murder, accusing Sangwan of raping and murdering his sister, and naming Sukhwinder Singh as a co-accused. Within hours of his complaint, he accused Goa Police of “just sitting” on the complaint with the murderers roaming free. The police, on their part, insisted they would register a case only after the postmortem examination report was in.

On Thursday, August 25, the autopsy said that on Phogat’s body were multiple blunt force injuries, and a case under sections 302 (murder), 328 (poisoning) and 120(B) (conspiracy) were registered at Anjuna police station.

Rise of Sonali Phogat

Born Sudesh Dhaka on September 21,1979 in a conservative Jat family in Bhuthan Kalan village in Haryana’s Fatehabad, Sonali Phogat changed her name after marrying Hisar-based landlord Sanjay Phogat in 1997. Her father, Mahabir Dhaka, is a farmer who owns four acres of agricultural land, and her mother, Santosh Devi, is a homemaker.

Sonali’s brother Vatan runs a jewellery shop in Hisar, while another brother Rinku is a property dealer. Phogat has a 15-year-old daughter.

Her public career began in 2006 when Phogat became a TV anchor for Doordarshan. Two years later, she joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), going on to become the BJP Mahila Morcha national vice-president.

Within the next decade, an enterprising Phogat landed a role in the Zee TV serial “Ek Maa Jo Laakhon Ke Liye Bani Amma” in 2016. She acted in the Haryanvi film “Chhoriyan Chhoron Se Kam Nahi Hoti” in 2019, and featured in a Haryanvi music album “Bandook Aali Jaatni”. Her popularity on the ascent, Phogat has over 900,000 followers on Instagram.

“Marriage and motherhood did not deter her from pursuing her ambition of acting. She tried modelling, making TikTok videos, acting and even took part in the Big Boss reality show that made her a household name. Sonali was drawn towards politics,” said Vatan.

In 2016, tragedy struck. Her husband was found dead of a reported heart attack in the family’s farmhouse in Dhandoor, 10km from Hisar. “Sonali was going to attend a journalist’s wedding in Delhi when she got to know about her husband’s death. After that incident, she started staying frequently in Hisar, unlike earlier when she would prefer staying at her Noida flat or in Mumbai where she was pursuing her acting career,” Vatan said.

By 2019, Phogat was serious about her political career, and preparing to contest on a BJP ticket from the Nalwa assembly constituency in Hisar. The situation changed with the entry of sitting Lok Dal MLA Ranbir Gangwa into the saffron fold, and the BJP shifted Phogat to the Adampur seat, the citadel of former Haryana chief minister Bhajan Lal, where she went up against his son Kuldeep Bishnoi, then of the Congress.

Phogat lost by over 29,000 votes.

That loss, however, did not prevent Phogat’s political dreams, despite her unhappiness at Bishnoi’s entry into the BJP.

Hisar-based political expert Ramesh Punia, for instance, says that two days before her death, Phogat told him that the party had been mounting pressure on her to seek votes for Bishnoi’s son Bhavya. “She told me she had even spoken to the Congress for a ticket, but the party leadership had been non-committal arguing that the decision would only be made after a survey,” Punia claimed.

Speaking to HT from her home in Fatehabad, an inconsolable Santosh Devi said that for the world she may have been glamorous actor-turned-politician Sonali Phogat, but for her, she was still the pigtailed Sudesh.

“I remember I asked my grandson Rudra to call his Sudesh bua (paternal aunt) on August 22. Sudesh told me that she was in Goa for a film shooting and would return on August 25. During our conversation, she complained of uneasiness and I told her to take a medicine. When I told her that we were thinking of reconstructing our ancestral home, she told me to wait till she was back,” she said.

Arrests and investigation

Back in Goa, the police registered the Phogat case as murder, with Sangwan and Sukhwinder Singh sent to 10- day police custody till September 5. “At the moment we do not have any evidence whether this was a case of long running harassment. But behind every crime, there always is likely to be some economic interest, and I feel that in this crime too, there may be some economic interest,” IG Bishnoi said.

Police officials also said that the allegation of rape, as levelled by Rinku Dhaka in his complaint to the police, has not been corroborated as Phogat was “already in a relationship” with Sangwan, and the postmortem examination report has not substantiated rape.

Among the other arrests that have been made are Gaonkar, the bellboy, and Mandrekar, the alleged peddler of the 2.8 grams of MDMA recovered from the toilet of Curlies, based on Sangwan’s confession to the police. Edwin Nunes, the owner of Curlies, has also been arrested for allegedly facilitating the availability of drugs that led to the death of Phogat. The first floor of the restaurant, which includes the nightclub, has been sealed, and the police have said that they will begin the process to permanently close the Curlies beach shack.

For now, two crucial gaps in the story remain — what it was that actually caused Phogat’s death, blunt force injuries, a heart attack, or a possible overdose — for which Goa Police are awaiting results from the chemical analysis of the viscera, expected in a few weeks; and the motive.

With the attention across two states now firmly on the investigation, chief minister Pramod Sawant has said that Goa Police will find the truth.