Chandigarh Pharmacy Murder: Who Killed Janki Das, and Turned Celebration to Cremation in Seconds?
Chandigarh Pharmacy Murder: A cashier at a one-year-old pharmacy. His wife, an outsourced PGI employee, had just won a panchayat election back home. The family has no answers. Neither, so far, does Chandigarh Police.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, June 15
Ina Machret goes to PGI every day for work. Last week, her husband’s body came to PGI too.
Ina is an outsourced employee at the country’s premier medical institution — one of thousands of contractual workers who keep PGI running from its margins. Her husband, Janki Das, 45, worked at a pharmacy in the Sector 11 market just outside PGI’s gates. Two people from the same Himachal Pradesh family, both connected to the same sprawling medical campus, both trying to build a stable life in Chandigarh’s working-class neighbourhood of Dhanas.
On Saturday, June 14, that life was destroyed in seconds.
Two masked men walked into Shri Kumar Medical Hall in Sector 11 and fired thirteen rounds at Janki Das as he stood at the cash counter. He was rushed to PGI — the same hospital where his wife works, the same institution their lives had organised themselves around. He did not survive.
Ina Machret’s question, three days later, is the only one that matters: Why was my husband killed?
Her family has no answer. The police, so far, have not provided one.
Janki Das: A New Shop, A New Job
Chandigarh Pharmacy Murder: Shri Kumar Medical Hall had opened roughly a year ago in the Sector 11 pharmacy corridor — a dense stretch of chemist shops that has grown around PGI’s enormous patient footfall over the years. The shop was new. Which means Janki Das could not have been there long either though his family had moved to Chandigarh 20 years ago.
He was a cashier. Not the owner, not a partner, not someone with a business stake in the establishment. A man hired to handle transactions at a counter. Whatever dispute — extortion, rivalry, personal enmity — may have brought two masked gunmen into that pharmacy on a Saturday afternoon, Janki Das was, by every family account, entirely outside it.
The Kumar Brothers own a chain of shops in the same market and even in other sectors. They had previously received extortion threats.
According to sources, Shri Kumar Medical Hall — a separate entity, though operating in the same corridor and trading on a similar name — had received no such calls.
But Janki Das’s family is clear: he knew nothing, was involved in nothing, had said nothing to suggest he feared anything.
Celebration to cremation
Chandigarh Pharmacy Murder: The cruelty of the timing is particular.
Back in their Himachal Pradesh village in Rohru district, Ina Machret had just won election as gram panchayat pradhan. She was supposed to take oath on Monday when she instead was forced by fate to accompany her husband’s body to Rohru for his cremation.
It was a moment the family had earned — a first step into public life, something to celebrate. Janki Das knew—he had gone to cast his vote earlier this month. The family was looking forward to marking it together.
Instead, Ina Machret is now a widow and a pradhan-elect who has not had a moment to think about either.
What Police Are Saying — and Not Saying
Chandigarh Pharmacy Murder: DGP Sagar Preet Hooda visited the crime scene personally. SSP Sumer Pratap Singh confirmed CCTV footage had been secured. A “major breakthrough” was promised. CFSL teams processed the site. A PCR van now sits outside the shop. A policeman stands at the door.
What police have not yet said publicly is why Janki Das — a cashier at a one-year-old pharmacy, a migrant from HP with no known enemies in Chandigarh — was the man those thirteen bullets found.
Ina Machret is waiting for that answer. So is her family. So, frankly, is this city.
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