Surviving Burari brother trashes reports on mass suicide

He would call for a CBI probe if Crime Branch of Delhi Police come to the conclusion that eleven members of his family actually committed suicide, declared Dinesh Singh Chundavat (61) on Thursday.

In a fresh twist to what Delhi Police described as a bizarre collective suicide by the family, Dinesh Chundavat blamed the media and a section of the police for misleading the investigation.

Speaking on phone from Chittor (Rajasthan), Chundavat claimed that the handwriting on the diary circulating in the media was not that of his brother, Lalit. “Lalit’s handwriting was poor, virtually indecipherable. I was shown the diary by the police and I don’t think that the handwriting was of my brother,” he asserted.

Two members of the family, Dinesh Singh Chundavat and his sister Sujata, have survived the tragedy because they were away. But neither of them believes in the suicide theory and claim to have been ignorant about the family following any cult.

“I’m the eldest in the family and yet I was completely unaware of my youngest brother allegedly being in touch with our father’s soul,” he exclaimed. How was it possible that neither his mother, sister or any of his brothers would take him into confidence, he wonders aloud.

He rubbished media reports that his brother Lalit had credited their late father for the engagement of their 33-year old niece Priyanka, who was to get married in November. She was a ‘manglik’, deemed to be inauspicious for the spouse, but was engaged on June 17.

“My daughter is also a ‘Manglik’. Wouldn’t I have been told to connect with my father’s soul,” asks the 61-year old Dinesh. He scoffs at reports of Lalit being in communion with their late father. He remembers their father well and has no recollection of any strange or abnormal behaviour.

Pointing out that their family was in business, he asserts, “everyone in the family was educated. I served as an assistant manager in a paint factory in Saudi Arabia for ten years before returning to my home in Chittor (Rajasthan). One of my nieces was a school topper, other children were also brilliant and doing so well … there is really nothing to suggest that they believed in the occult or participated in strange rituals. Neither I nor my surviving sister knew anything about the stories circulating in the media,” he adds.

“We were so happy and excited about Priyanka’s wedding, we were all eagerly waiting and making plans,” he recalls and breaks down on the phone. One could hear his sister sobbing on Thursday afternoon. Asked how she is coping with the tragedy, Dinesh Singh wails, “ it seems she too would die soon of grief.”

CCTV footage leaked to the media by the police have shown family members carrying stools, five of them, which were allegedly used by 10 members of the family to hang themselves. The elderly lady Narayan Kanwar, Dinesh Singh Chundavat’s mother, was found strangled.

The police version that the family were participating in a ritual that went horribly wrong has many takers. One of the deceased, Dinesh Singh’s brother Lalit, say the police, took business decisions after receiving counsel from their late father. He had apparently persuaded others to follow the strange ritual and assured them eventually they would not die, that they would be saved at the last minute.

A senior police official told National Herald on condition of anonymity. “Lalit was hallucinating about his father’s soul giving directions and he was making notes of his imagined conversations with his father’s soul and the diary entries are shockingly similar to the sequence of events that panned out on Saturday night.”

Blaming the media for blowing things beyond all proportion and for spreading wild conspiracy theories, Dinesh Singh Chundavat had one last request before hanging up. “ Please take down the correct names of the deceased. The names being published in newspapers and aired on TV are mostly wrong,” he said.

The deceased , he said, were his mother Narayan Kanwar, brothers Bhavnesh Singh Chundavat and Lalit Singh Chundavat, sister in laws Savita Chundavat and Tina Chundavat, sister Pratibha, nieces Priyanka, Nidhi Kanwar and Monika Kanwar and nephews Dushyant Singh Chundavat and Dhirendra Singh Chundavat.

*This story was updated on July 05, 2018 at 07:58pm