Kharar Influencer Manjit Kaur Dies Weeks After Being Set Afire; PGIMER Records Second Such Death in a Week

Punjabi social media influencer Manjit Kaur, based in Kharar, died at PGIMER after being set afire in a Morinda kidnapping case — days after a Mohali schoolgirl died the same way. Full details, police response, and the wider pattern of violence against Punjab’s digital creators.

North Desk Correspondent

Chandigarh/Kharar/Mohali, August 29

Two women, one trauma ward, one devastating pattern: within days, PGIMER Chandigarh recorded the deaths of two females — an eight-grade schoolgirl and a 28-year-old social media influencer — both victims of deliberate fire attacks by men who had been warned off before they struck. Their deaths, days apart, have reopened uncomfortable questions about how much warning the police had, and what they did with it.

The schoolgirl: a warning slapped away

The 16-year-old, a Class 8 student, died on Friday, five days after she was set ablaze at her home in Mohali’s Phase 1 area. She had suffered 80% burns.

According to police, the attack followed a confrontation on August 21 between the girl’s family and Deepak, 24, a neighbourhood youth whose “unwanted advances” toward the teenager the family had objected to. During the altercation, a family member allegedly slapped Deepak. Enraged, he returned — this time with relatives in tow — allegedly to take revenge.

Police say Deepak barged into the girl’s room, poured sanitiser on her, set her alight, and locked the room from outside before fleeing. Her family broke down the door after hearing her screams and rushed her first to the civil hospital in Phase 6, then to PGIMER. While hospitalised, she gave a statement naming Deepak as her attacker.

He was arrested within hours. His father, Ramesh, and uncle, Mohan, were subsequently taken into judicial custody; two cousins named as co-accused remain at large. The case, initially registered under sections covering attempted murder, outraging modesty, causing hurt, and house trespass under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, along with Section 12 of the POCSO Act, now carries a murder charge following her death.

Punjabi social media Influencer Manjit Kaur: kidnapped, tied to a tree, and set alight

Punjabi social media Influencer Manjit Kaur, who has 1.46 lakh Instagram followers and roughly 4,000 on YouTube, died on August 26 — nearly two months after she was allegedly kidnapped, assaulted and set on fire. She is survived by a seven-year-old son.

Her mother, Kanta Devi, told police that on July 3, two acquaintances identified as Shubhi and Pinda called Kaur to a spot near a liquor shop in Chandigarh’s Sector 34, forced her into a car, and drove her to Morinda. There, she was allegedly assaulted, tied to a mulberry tree, and set afire.

A friend who arrived at the scene used a blanket to douse the flames and rushed her to a hospital in Morinda; she was later shifted to a private facility in Mohali before being admitted to PGIMER on July 9. She briefly regained consciousness on August 5, before succumbing on August 26.

Kharar Influencer Manjit Kaur: Police have registered a case of kidnapping and murder against the two named suspects at Chandigarh’s Sector 34 police station, under BNS sections covering kidnapping, murder and joint criminal liability.

A police officer said investigators have leads on the suspects and are conducting raids, cross-checking CCTV footage along the Chandigarh–Morinda route and questioning Kaur’s acquaintances to reconstruct the sequence of events. Neither Shubhi nor Pinda has been arrested yet, and the motive remains unestablished — Kaur’s content largely featured cosmetic product reels and Punjabi/Haryanvi song videos, giving police little to go on so far.

“We told you so”: the accountability gap in both cases

Punjabi social media influencer Manjit Kaur’s death: Both families say the system had a chance to intervene before tragedy struck — and didn’t take it.

The schoolgirl’s family had already flagged Deepak’s harassment of the teenager before August 21; the confrontation that triggered his revenge attack happened precisely because they had pushed back on his advances.  

Kharar Influencer Manjit Kaur’s mother has gone further, publicly accusing the Kharar police of negligence. Devi alleges that when her daughter briefly regained consciousness on August 5 and wanted to give a statement, police were notified but no one came to take her dying declaration — evidence the family believes could have been decisive.

Denying any lapse, a Kharar police officer said the jurisdiction for the case lay with Chandigarh Police since the offence occurred in their territory, and that Kharar police “provided full assistance,” including facilitating the FIR at Chandigarh’s Sector 34 station.

That jurisdictional back-and-forth — Kharar pointing to Chandigarh, Chandigarh’s case built partly on a medico-legal report initiated by Kharar — is itself worth interrogating: did the boundary between two police jurisdictions cost Manjit Kaur her chance to name her attackers on record while she could?

A wider pattern: violence against Punjab’s digital creators

Punjabi social media Influencer Manjit Kaur’s death doesn’t sit in isolation. It comes barely two and a half months after the killing of Ludhiana-based influencer Kanchan Kumari — known online as “Kamal Kaur Bhabhi” — who was strangled and found dead in a car near Bathinda on June 11.

Kumari, who had over 3.83 lakh Instagram followers, had been lured from Ludhiana under the pretext of a promotional event and killed, police say, after self-styled radical Amritpal Singh Mehron and his associates targeted her over content they deemed “vulgar.” Mehron fled to the UAE hours after the killing; two associates have since been arrested.

Punjab Police’s Cyber Crime Division has since taken down over 100 social media accounts found glorifying the killing or amplifying the accused’s justifications.

Kharar Influencer Manjit Kaur’s death: Two Punjabi women influencers, killed within three months of each other, both targeted through deception and physical violence rather than online harassment alone — that’s a pattern serious enough to warrant its own sustained beat, independent of how the Manjit Kaur investigation resolves.

Kumari’s case shows what happens when a moral-policing mob decides a woman’s content is worth killing her over; Kaur’s shows how vulnerable a woman can be even absent any clear ideological motive, kidnapped by people she knew. Together they point to a working environment for Punjab’s digital creators — most of them young women building a following and a livelihood on Instagram and YouTube — that currently offers them no real protection once someone decides they’re a target.

What’s still open

Punjabi social media influencer death: Deepak’s two cousins named as co-accused in the schoolgirl’s case remain unarrested.

Shubhi and Pinda, named by Manjit Kaur’s mother, are still being hunted; no arrests have been made.

The motive behind Kaur’s abduction and killing hasn’t been established.

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