Judge Loya’s death: How media were managed

The day Caravan magazine broke the story on the mysterious death of CBI Special Court Judge Brijgopal Loya, there was palpable silence inside the BJP.

The story gained significant momentum and went viral on social media. Officials in the Prime Minister’s Office that monitor social media messages throughout the day alerted BJP President Amit Shah about the story gaining traction on social media. By evening, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal was tasked with damage control.

Goyal’s first task was to ensure none of the mainstream media picks up and does a follow up on the Caravan story. Calls to owners of some of the mainstream print media accomplished that objective.

The next day Caravan released part 2 of the story with actual video testimonies from the family of Judge Loya. This took Goyal completely by surprise. In the meantime, regional language translations of the Caravan story started appearing in Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali.

By this time, Goyal realised that this needed a more concerted effort from the BJP to counter. A four-member team was assembled comprising of Amit Shah, Arun Jaitley, Devendra Fadnavis and Piyush Goyal.

Devendra Fadnavis is from Nagpur, the city where Judge Loya died. The two hospitals in question – Dande Hospital and Meditirina were alerted. A ECG report was obtained from Dande hospital. The two judges who accompanied Judge Loya to Nagpur, Justice Kulkarni and Justice Modak, were contacted but they refused to talk.

Two other judges who claimed to be with Judge Loya on the night of December 1, 2014 agreed to speak on record. Records from Meditrina Hospital, transcripts of quotes of these two judges, ECG reports from Dande Hospital were all collated and compiled as a dossier.

Piyush Goyal personally called the media houses to convince them to publish a story to discredit the Caravan story using the dossier. NDTV was the first publication to publish a counter story. This was an easy decision for NDTV since they had already aired two shows on the Caravan’s version of the story.

Next was Indian Express, which was under tremendous pressure to carry it on their front page which they did eventually. The NDTV and Indian Express stories were almost exactly similar with the same ECG reports.

On the morning of November 27 when the story appeared on the front page of Indian Express, Arun Jaitley and Amit Shah were on a telephone huddle with other members of the core team when they realised that there had been an error in the ECG report where the date mentioned was wrong. The ECG report was dated November 30, 2014 while the story said Judge Loya was brought to the hospital on December 1, 2014.

It was decided immediately that the hospital would issue a clarification claiming a ‘technical glitch’ for this error.

The judge’s son Anuj Loya who wrote a letter claiming Bombay High Court Chief Justice Mohit Shah had offered a bribe of `100 crores to his father to settle the case in favour of Amit Shah was put under intense pressure to retract. The family was explained the ramifications of a defamation suit and how their entire futures was at stake.

Judge Loya’s sister, Anuradha Biyani who is a doctor herself and expressed clear suspicion of the death of her brother on video to Caravan was also under pressure to do a television appearance to deny her earlier comments to Caravan.

This is expected to be the next salvo that is expected to be fired. The BJP’s core team is also in talks with the owners of Caravan magazine to take down the story post these retractions by the family members. Meanwhile, Justice Mohit Shah is expected to file a defamation suit against Caravan magazine and the journalist Niranjan Takle.