Fresh and explosive claims demand probe of judge Loya’s death

Inquire into the property acquired by MB Gosavi, the CBI court judge who acquitted Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, demanded Uday Gaware, former president of the Latur Bar Association. He was speaking at a public meeting organised by All India People’s Forum in the national capital to demand an independent inquiry into the sudden death of judge Gosavi’s predecessor BH Loya in December, 2014.

Endorsing the demand, retired Bombay High Court judge BG Kolse Patil said that he had met judge Loya’s predecessor, Judge Utpat, in Pune. But the judge was so scared that he did not want to talk about the circumstances of his transfer from Mumbai despite the Supreme Court’s express instruction that he should hear the fake encounter case from the beginning to end.

Journalist Niranjan Takle of Caravan magazine, appearing in public for the first time after his sensational investigation into judge Loya’s death, confided that he had a three-and-a-half-hour-long audio recorded conversation with the late judge’s family members in November, 2016. He had followed it up with a video recorded conversation in November, 2017. On both occasions the family members had voiced apprehension of foul play in the judge’s death.

Caravan editor Hartosh Singh Bal pointed out that the authorities of Ravi Bhavan, the VIP guesthouse where judge Loya had apparently stayed, have now claimed in a reply to an RTI application that there was no record that the judge had stayed there. There was overwriting in the post-mortem report and the viscera report contradicted the post-mortem report, he claimed.

Takle said that the dramatic press conference addressed by the 20-year-old son of judge Loya in Mumbai raised more questions than answers. His conversations with people associated with the judge and his family members had spanned over a year. But within 12 days of his report appearing in Caravan, Anuj Loya was quoted as saying that he had no suspicion about his father’s death. “What happened in those 12 days,” asked Takle and said that people have the right to know who allayed the family’s suspicions and how.

Making a strong case for an independent inquiry into the death, Justice (rtd) Kolse Patil declared that before his death judge Loya had confided in him the pressure he was being subjected to. He was being summoned at midnight and asked to discharge the BJP president by the end of December, 2014. Gaware confirmed that on his visit to Latur during Diwali in 2014, weeks before his death, Judge Loya had confided to his friends in Latur that he had been offered Rs 100 crore in return of a favourable order.

While welcoming the gathering, Gautam Modi of AIPF declared that since Judge Gosavi had taken just three working days to hear the case, go through the chargesheet that extended to 10,000 pages and heard the CBI for all of 15 minutes before discharging the petition, there were bonafide reasons for an inquiry.

The burden of proof in the case of a crime, underscored Supreme Court lawyer Indira Jaising, was not on the family but on the state and the Supreme Court to allay all doubts. Having assisted the CBI in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case as counsel, she was privy to the evidence collected against the accused and as long as she was the CBI counsel, even the Gujarat high court had refused bail to the accused.

The moot question in the Loya case, she said, is whether the government is interfering in the judiciary. The real players are neither the Chief Justice of India nor the four judges of the high court—they are hidden puppeteers who need to be exposed, she said.