West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari on Sunday ordered an inquiry into the alleged hasty cremation of the victim’s body in the 2024 RG Kar Hospital rape and murder case. He also named three Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders accused by the victim’s family, as the government observed a two-minute silence across all hospitals to mark the second anniversary of the incident.
“The CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) is probing the main crime and also the alleged corruption at RG Kar Hospital under orders from the Calcutta high court. I cannot do anything there. But I have found one aspect that the police can probe. It is the cremation at the obscure Nataghat crematorium in the Ghola police station area,” Adhikari said at an event in Panihati, North 24 Parganas district, held in memory of the junior doctor whose body was found at the hospital, where she was a student, on the morning of August 9, 2024.
The post-mortem examination was completed within hours and the body was cremated by evening.
“I am asking the Barrackpore police commissioner to start an inquiry. In the cremation schedule, it was the third body on the list that day but the number was changed from three to one. According to rules, relatives of a deceased person must pay a cremation fee and sign documents but the victim’s family did neither,” Adhikari said.
“Nirmal Ghosh (TMC’s ex-Panihati MLA), Somnath Dey (TMC’s Panihati municipality councillor), and Sanjib Mukherjee (local TMC leader) did all this. They must be punished,” Adhikari added.
“I have not forgotten Abhaya (the name people gave to the victim). I am committed,” he added.
The memorial event was also addressed by Ratna Debnath, the victim’s mother, who won the Panihati assembly seat in May after contesting on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket against Nirmal Ghosh’s son.
“We will not rest till our daughter gets justice,” she said.
In May this year, the Calcutta high court division bench of Justices Shampa Sarkar and Tirthankar Ghosh ordered the formation of a three-member CBI special investigation team (SIT) headed by a joint director for a second investigation.
The victim’s parents, however, have expressed disappointment several times because the first CBI probe ordered days after the crime, reached the same conclusion as the Kolkata police, resulting in the life sentence of just one suspect, former Kolkata police civic volunteer Sanjay Roy.
“I know that the family is not happy with the CBI investigation. But the court has ordered it. We have to wait and see. I have been unable to find out even to this day why the Supreme Court took up the case suo motu in 2024 when the Calcutta high court was already hearing it. Nobody knows why Supreme Court intervened in the RG Kar case. It is a court monitored case. Hence as chief minister I cannot say anything more,” Adhikari said.
Nirmal Ghosh, who is wanted in a criminal case, Somnath Dey and Sanjib Mukherjee could not be contacted on Sunday evening despite several efforts. All three, however, denied the allegation over the past two years, saying they merely tried to help the young doctor’s grief-stricken parents.
The RG Kar crime was one of the key issues in the assembly polls that the BJP swept.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah both campaigned for the victim’s mother who alleged after the crime that senior TMC leaders and government officials hatched a conspiracy to kill her daughter to hide something.
On May 15, six days after being sworn in as the CM, Adhikari suspended former Kolkata police commissioner Vineet Goyal and two other Indian Police Service (IPS) officers, Indira Mukherjee and Abhisek Gupta, on charges of mishandling the case and offering money to the victim’s parents. Adhikari ordered a probe against them.
