May 11: Even as the mystery surrounding the death of Delhi-based Business Standard journalist Nirupama Pathak at her home in Jharkhand’s Koderma refuses to recede despite the police investigating the case for the past 12 days, it has now become a judicial battlefield for the dead girl’s family and that of her boyfriend, also a journalist in Delhi.
Torn between the conflicting claims of a distress-driven suicide and murder for family honour, the 23-year-old Pathak’s unnatural death on April 29 has got entangled in a questionable autopsy and an apparently directionless police investigation. The wave of confusion thrown up due to the disputed reasons of her death and the divergent statements made by her family and that of Priyabhanshu Ranjan, her boyfriend, have impacted the ongoing investigations perhaps irredeemably, say analysts.
On Tuesday, a Koderma police team that interrogated Ranjan, who works with the PTI (Bhasa), and his friends in Delhi for three days returned with hardly any significant clues even as the autopsy report, which had dubiously ascertained the cause of Pathak’s death as asphyxia due to smothering, was referred to a top Jharkhand hospital for conclusive opinion from experts.
The Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ranchi would now opine on the autopsy report, which was already rejected as incorrect by a former forensic expert with the AIIMS in New Delhi. While Pathak’s family insists she committed suicide after sexual exploitation and cheating by Ranjan, his family in Darbhanga in Bihar asserts that the budding journalist was harassed and murdered by her family for her inter-caste love affair.
Significantly, DIG M.S. Bhatia in Hazaribag, Jharkhand, said that Pathak was under distress as she was “pressured by her parents to quit her job” after they learnt of her affair with Ranjan, who, according to Bhatia, was also delaying their marriage plans despite Pathak being three-months pregnant. These findings came from the conversations the police had with common friends of the two lovers, said Bhatia.
Both the warring families, who have moved the Ranchi high court, have sought a CBI probe. The petition by Ranjan through his lawyer Rajiv Kumar in the high court seeking a quashing of the FIR lodged against him could not be admitted on Monday due to technical reasons. The Pathak family’s lawyer Arun Kumar Mishra has demanded both a CBI probe and trial by a fast-track court.