In the past few days, the Indian media space was flooded with news of a 53 year old man lynched by mob for allegedly consuming beef.
While this is a condemnable act and should be rebuked at all levels, this issue had been politicized. At the same time an honest engineer working for Indian Railways killed brutally, lacks the much needed political attention and media coverage for obvious reasons.
The unnecessary political attention of this case can be substantiated from the fact that the victim’s family was given 45 lakhs compensation and a government job and that too for the fact that he was not the earning member of the family, whereas last year a similar case occurred in UP where a Delhi Municipal worker was killed because he was carrying the dead carcass of a cow to cremate, but was misunderstood by the mob and murdered. Again if you see the case of Saurabh Kumar, no such compensation has been declared. Now is this what you expect as a return of honesty?
India has seen this time and again, shutting down honest government officials all over the country by murdering them. Be it Satyendra Dubey, Manjunath and this time Saurabh Kumar. The Indian Judiciary has proved it repeatedly that they cannot protect the honest government officials.
Saurabh Kumar, a depot chief material engineer, who was responsible for railway scrap tendering, refused to accept bribe for signing a particular tender, because of which he was brutally murdered. He was an alumnus of BIT Sindri (2004-2008) in Production Engineering stream. A protest march was organized by the students of BIT Sindri who demanded justice for him.
The worst part in this case is that the police refused to register an FIR even after getting the complaint, which points towards political interference in this case. Here is the copy of the letter that has been written by Saurabh’s brother to the police.
According to the police report, the death occurred due to snake bite, which his family members ruled out and demanded a visceral report. When his dead body was found at his residence, his face was completely destroyed by what seems to be an attack with a heavy weapon and burn marks which indicates there has been a foul play with the post mortem report.
Moreover the Kharagpur region is infamous for being safe haven for mafias and it is believed that there is mafia-political nexus, which makes investigation even more difficult.
Even there are flaws in the whistle blower act where the employees of state government are not included in it.
We all have learnt that honesty is the best policy, right? However, is the cold-blooded murder of an engineer the reward of being honest? There is a mystery over the death of that honest officer in Kharagpur. From the prima facie approach of the police it seems that police is trying to cover up something and protecting the perpetrators.
However Suresh Prabhu has initiated a probe to investigate the possible cause of death.
But if the same trend continues how can we expect a corruption free India?
