Judge Loya’s death: More questions than answer so far

Days after the Caravan report on disturbing questions following the mysterious death of the CBI court judge, Indian Express, NDTV and Times of India reported that the family does not suspect any foul play and quoted Bombay High Court judges debunking the report in The Caravan on the death of the 48-year-old judge.

TO ASK OR NOT TO ASK IS THE QUESTION

• Who is Ishwar Baheti and how did he get hold of judge Loya’s phone?
• Who deleted call records and messages from the phone?
• How was the post-mortem done with his shirt on?
• If calibration errors show the wrong date on ECG, can it also show the wrong name?
• Was the judge offered `100 crore and a house in Mumbai as bribe?
• Justice Brijgopal Loya’s sister Sarita Mandhane along with their father Harkishan.

In Nagpur they have a Harley Street of their own. There are at least 500 doctors’ rooms sitting above posh showrooms stretching from Jhansi Square in the middle of the busy marketplace of Sitabuldi till southward to Lokmat Square. Yet, despite this profusion of doctors in a city which houses Asia’s largest hos¬pital, the Government Medical College Hospital, there were not many other hospitals for decades that inspired confidence.

Then, some years ago, among the first private hos¬pitals to come up in the city was the Dande Hospital, a trauma care centre. It is strategically placed at the first square as you enter the city from the Bombay- Aurangabad-Amravati Highway. Its location keeps the Dande Hospital busy all night, as ambulances rush accident victims to the hospital from the highway and with an industrial area and many villages and small settlements beyond, the Dande hospital is never short of trauma-tised patients.

However, in the past decade, Nagpur has grown many more private and better equipped hospitals.

Dande Hospital may or may not have had its ECG unit in working condition but the Wockhardt Hospital which is as close (if not closer than Dande Hospital) to Ravi Bhavan, the VIP government guest house, where Judge Loya was stay¬ing, would certainly have been in top form. People who frequent Nagpur for healthcare may not be very demanding of hygiene and health standards but those from Bombay would and the Wockhardt Hospital leaves not much to complain about in that regard. It would certainly have had its cardiac unit in top condition so there is merit to the question being raised as to who decided to take Loya to Dande rather than Wockhardt — if the deci¬sion was made by a local, the choice was clear. Though Pinak Dande, the director of the Dande Hospital, is politically well connected across political parties and therefore his hospital often becomes the first point of reference for any politician or govern¬ment official.

The Caravan story on Judge Loya’s mysterious death quoted his sister describing Dande Hospital as “obscure” which it is not in terms of the patients it gets every day. But it may not be of the standard and quality of some other hospitals, private and corpo¬rate, that have mush¬roomed all over Nagpur and the controversy over the date on Judge Loya’s ECG report published by Indian Express is clear tes¬timony to that.

The report has a date of November 30, 2014, 5.00 am while all reports and players in the episode, including Dr Dande, avow that he was brought to the hospital on December 1, 2014, 24 hours later. Dr Dande says the discrepancy was a ‘calibration error’ but even if that is accepted at face value, the least one can say is the hospital does not maintain high standards and should not have been the one where a local judge is said to have rushed Judge Loya to. Rushing him to a better hospital might have saved his life.

There are two points where the Caravan report¬er, who was working on the story for nearly a year, might not have done due diligence - talking to Dr Dande himself and seeking out Ishwar Baheti, the RSS worker who is said to have taken Judge Loya’s phone in his possession and returned it to the family three days later.

With the famed Bahetis in Nagpur, many of who are similarly ideologically inclined, reporters in Nagpur went crazy trying to locate Ishwar Baheti - with both the family and the RSS denying they knew anyone by that name. NDTV later reported that he owned a drug store in Latur but then why was the deceased judge’s phone in his possession? That mys¬tery has not yet been cleared up.

While reporters in Nagpur remember cover¬ing the story of the judge’s death and recall that Justice Bhushan Gavai, the senior administrative judge, was indeed at the Meditrina Hospital, a cardiac care centre where Judge Loya was brought dead in an ambulance from Dande Hospital, they have no recollection of any follow up report the newspapers there might have done at the time.

But that then leads to a discrepancy in the time lines - if Judge Loya was declared dead at 6.15 am and despatched to the Government Medical College Hospital sooñ after, how and why was Judge Gavai still hanging around the Meditrina hospital sev¬eral hours later?

Moreover, the biggest mystery of the death still prevails — the bloodstained clothes of Judge Loya. The Indian Express report quotes some doctors as say¬ing that it is possible for blood to spill from the body cavities onto the clothes of the corpse during post mor¬tem while his sister Anuradha Biyani, herself a doctor, says from experi¬ence that this is impossible.

The question Indian Express then should have asked the doctors who con¬tradicted her is: was the reputed Government Medical College Hospital then conducting the judge’s post mortem in his street clothes when bodies are usually stripped naked before a post-mortem and then merely covered with a sheet?

Did they then remove the clothes from the judge after the post-mortem and pack them up in a plastic bag while the body was sent to Latur wrapped in a sheet? The least one can say about such a bizarre opera¬tion is that it would be impossible and a case of terrible malpractice.

Moreover, when Judge Loya’s father does not know of an uncle, nephew or cousin (or even cousin’s cousin) in Nagpur, who was this Dr Pradip Rathi who signed on the police documents as his paternal cous¬in? And how did the police authorities release the body to him without ascertaining from the judge’s relatives his identity? Some heads must roll on that score alone.

The Indian Express follow up has raised even more questions than before and añ already murky story has only got muddier. It merits an independent investigation by authorities and given the nature of the allegations - that Judge Loya was offered a bribe of `100 crore to discharge BJP national president Amit Shah and ensure that he does not have to undergo a trial in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case he was hearing - that inves¬tigation needs monitoring by the Supreme Court.