Who’s lying on Sunanda autopsy: AIIMS or doc?
Govt seeks details; hospital denies doctor’s charge of pressure from UPA minister to fudge death report
NEW DELHI: The government on Wednesday sought a report from AIIMS on allegations made by its head of forensics that a powerful UPA minister had tried to pressure him into manipulating Sunanda Pushkar’s autopsy report. However, hospital authorities categorically denied the charge.
Pushkar, wife of Congress MP and former Union minister Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in the city’s Leela Palace hotel on January 17. A threemember autopsy team, headed by Dr Gupta, ruled the death “sudden and unnatural”.
Late Tuesday, TV channels reported claims by Dr Gupta that he had resisted pressure to report the death as natural. In an affidavit to the central administrative tribunal and central vigilance commission and a letter to health minister Harsh Vardhan, he also said an order would soon be passed to replace him as head of AIIMS’ forensic medicine department.
“Sir, the malafide agenda to oust me... has its genesis in the Sunanda Pushkar and Nido Tania cases since I had taken a professional stand that went against the vested interests of certain persons in AIIMS,” he wrote to Vardhan.
“The AIIMS administration categorically denies any such allegation that there was an attempt to pressurize Dr Sudhir Gupta to change the post-mortem report,” the hospital responded.
Vardhan confirmed receiving a complaint from Dr Gupta earlier but denied knowledge of the alleged pressure tactics. “I met him last month but he only discussed his promotion. He didn’t say anything about pressure from the AIIMS administration or elsewhere to change the report.”
Tharoor, MP from Thiruvananthapuram, responded to the controversy with a statement on Facebook: “From the beginning, I have requested a thorough invest i g ation… conducted and concluded rapidly and transparently. The Pushkar family has also taken the same view and we all cooperated with the authorities. I reiterate my request to bring this protracted inquiry to a clear and definite conclusion so as to put all speculation to rest.” Rubbishing the allegations, sources close to former health minister Gulam Nabi Azad said the reason was interdepartment rivalry. “AIIMS has given a detailed clarifica- tion and I don’t think there is any need to say more,” one source said.Before the postmortem re port, the Delhi Police had swung widely from theories of self-imposed starvation and drug overdose to poisoning, largely on the basis of preliminary investigations and the viscera report. It had subsequently ruled out a criminal investigation after finding no culpability. On Wednesday, commissioner BS Bassi said the police were open to reexamining the case and would examine both Dr Gupta and Tharoor, if the need arose. Senior police officials also maintained the current controversy had its roots in a “spat centering around a job promotion and professional frustration”.