Barkha Dutt - How Namrata Damor's murder was cloaked as suicide
At the tiny, nondescript, government hospital in the temple
town of Ujjain, people gather under the shelter of a large banyan tree and in
wary whispers, point to the small, obscure post-mortem room that has become an
unlikely national talking point. This is where the autopsy on the body of a
young woman called Namrata Damor was conducted in January 2012. A medical
student who was reported to have got her seat through the now infamous ‘Vyapam’
admissions racket, she’d been found dead on the railway tracks 30 kilometres
outside of the city limits.
Today, no one at the hospital is ready to go on record or
even have a conversation off camera about how and why that autopsy report was
manipulated. No one except the man who wrote the report. Dr BB Purohit, a
forensics specialist, is an affable, excitable diminutive man with a big smile.
He seems slightly stupefied by the sudden media interest in him; no journalist
or investigator had bothered to get in touch all these years since Namrata’s
murder, he tells us.
Unflustered and unafraid he elaborates on why the nature of
her injuries made him come to the conclusion that she was strangled. “Violent
asphyxia” and “signs of homicide” were the lucid, unambiguous findings in his
report. Yet, filing a closure report two years later, the police disregarded
these findings and insisted that Namrata had taken her own life. And as so
often happens when young women are at the centre of a crime, the police
findings alluded to a love affair gone wrong.
To buttress their manipulation of the original autopsy the
police cited a second forensics report from a doctor who worked at the Madhya
Pradesh government’s state run medico-legal institute. Shockingly, this doctor
never even examined the body; yet he said that by looking at the photographs he
could tell that it was suicide. And this is how Namrata’s murder, one among
many mystery deaths of those accused in the Vyapam admissions scam, came to be
covered up. The cloaking of homicide as suicide may have also never been
investigated and discovered by the media, were it not for the sudden
inexplicable death of a young journalist immediately after he interviewed
Namrata’s family.
In his 30 years of practice, Purohit tells us this was the
first time that a post mortem report prepared by him had been subverted in so
deliberate and audacious a manner. His autopsy had also recommended more tests
to determine whether sexual assault of any kind had taken place; he says those
tests were never taken forward. Purohit reveals that the local police did not
even care to discuss or deliberate the findings with him, bypassing the
hospital to reach a conclusion that clearly suited someone.
I mentally contrasted his blunt and empathetic courage
with the officious, unconvincing responses I had heard in Bhopal from
politicians, bureaucrats and policemen. Even the judge heading the Special
Investigation Team probe panel had gone on record to tell me that so far
investigators had not been able to link a single mystery death, among the 48
seen to suspicious, to the admissions scam and the related cover-ups. But here
was concrete proof of how the truth behind the murder of a young woman was
buried in a graveyard of complicity and deceit.
The state leadership has argued that many of the deaths took
place before the FIR in the Vyapam probe was filed and thus could not be
connected to the admissions scandal. But every skeleton that tumbles out of the
Vyapam cupboard — literally and metaphorically —will raise more and more
questions about who is hiding what and why.
The emergence, for instance, of Sudhir Sharma, a billionaire
mining baron at the heart of the scam, has reinforced the impression that even
the racketeers now in jail, like Sharma, wielded extraordinary influence. A
2013 Tax Report clearly details how Sharma used to not just chair a group of
educational institutes; he also used to get kickbacks from two other colleges
linked to the Vyapam board, which he would then pass on to an aide in a state
minister’s office.
The report, written before the admissions scam erupted and
Sharma was imprisoned, also elaborates on how he used to bankroll travel and
other expenses for a host of BJP and RSS leaders, and a Congress legislator as
well. When Sharma was first raided by the tax authorities some details of what
they found were reported in the media. What’s peculiar is that once he was
imprisoned for Vyapam, the special task force never revisited those allegations
of financial links between a kingpin of the scam and the political
establishment.
As we are consumed by the political consequences of Vyapam,
the really frightening aspect of this corruption in admissions and recruitments
is of course not just about livelihood but life itself. Not just in MP, but
everywhere in India, with private medical colleges mired in controversies of
capitation fees and associated lowering of admission norms, are we creating a
generation of doctors not qualified to entrust our lives with?
Many of these private colleges are owned by politicians and
businessmen and the Supreme Court judgment delivered by then Chief Justice
Altamas Kabir that struck down a common national admission exam, disturbed many
for the carte blanche it provided to an insidious nexus of money and power in
the one sphere that should be spared for the sake of all our lives — medical
education.
Delivered on the eve of his retirement, the verdict sparked
a huge debate nationally and had a powerful dissenting note by Justice AR Dave,
who wrote about the need to constrain “unscrupulous and money-minded
businessmen operating in the field of education”.
Vyapam should make us revisit that question nationally.
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