According to a directive by Delhi’s lieutenant governor, controversial and mysterious cases like Sunanda’s should be handled by a three-member medical panel. The reason: a single doctor conducting a post mortem could be manipulated or influenced by interested parties. Logically, one would assume that the three doctors would be from different hospitals or mortuaries. Curiously, in Sunanda’s case, they were from the same hospital, AIIMS, and from the same department — forensic medicine. The panel was headed by Sudhir Kumar Gupta, professor and head of department, and included Adarsh Kumar, assistant professor, and Shashank Pooniya, senior resident. This created the first doubt about the veracity and objectivity of the post-mortem report. A forensics doctor from another hospital asked: “How can the three-member panel be dubbed independent or impartial, if it was headed by the senior-most doctor in a department, and included two junior colleagues? Could the juniors question the conclusions reached by their senior? Wouldn’t the fear of a bad annual confidential report, which a senior submits about his juniors, compel the latter to toe the head of department’s line?” Several sources that India Legal spoke to maintained that this had become the norm with the Delhi police. In several cases in the past few years, the post-mortem panel of doctors was constituted to include forensic professionals from the same hospital or mortuary. This helped the police to extricate a tailor-made report that proved its suspicions, rather than raise fresh questions. In fact, there have been a few cases where post-mortem reports were conducted by independent panels, which provided breakthroughs to the police. One such case dealt with the death of Anju Illyasi, the wife of TV journalist Suhaib Illyasi, in January 2000. One of the panel members concluded that the knife wounds on her body were not self-inflicted and, therefore, it was a case of murder, and not suicide. This forced the investigators to pursue a different path. A source who insisted on anonymity alleged there was informal pressure from the union health ministry, which monitored AIIMS and Delhi police in such criminal cases, to gloss over uncomfortable issues that Sunanda’s post-mortem would have raised. Although this could not be proved conclusively, the post-mortem did seem like an exercise in haste.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:24:04 +0000
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