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Deaths of children trigger doubts about ashram affairs

AHMEDABAD: The death of two children under suspicious circumstances on two consecutive days in Asaram Bapu’s ashram school at Chindwara in Madhya Pradesh, after a similar end to two minor cousins in his Ahmedabad school last month, has raised serious doubts about the goings-on in the spiritual leader’s ashram complex.

While Chindwara district authorities have ordered a magisterial enquiry, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has ordered both a judicial probe and an independent investigation by the CID (Crime) into the mysterious deaths of Deepesh (11) and Abhishek (12), who were studying in standards V and VI in the ashram school here.

Like the deceased at Chindwara, Deepesh and Abhishek were also staying in the ashram hostel. On July 4, the cousins were reported missing from there and the next day their bodies were spotted in the Sabarmati river, flowing just behind the ashram at Motera on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.

Initially, both the ashram management and the police claimed that the deaths were accidental, caused by drowning, but the boys’ parents raised doubts.

An investigation by the Gandhinagar police failed to make any breakthrough and it depended entirely on the statement by Sunil Bannerjee, an Asaram devotee from Orissa, who was claimed to have spotted the bodies first.

Doubts were raised about his statement to the police, that he saw the bodies during a morning walk on the riverbed, when he himself was reported missing from the ashram soon after.

Even as a police team from Ahmedabad was dispatched to Orissa to look for Bannerjee, he resurfaced after about a week. He told the police that he was away at Dabhoi, near Vadodara, on office work as a medical representative. He was detained and put through lie- detector tests at the Forensic Science Laboratory, Gandhinagar, but the police failed to make any breakthrough.

Irked at the “slow and aimless” probe, Deepesh’s father, Praful Vaghela, began a fast, demanding a CBI inquiry into the death of his son and nephew. The parents suspected that the children were “sacrificed” for occult practices on the ashram campus.

The protest by Mr. Vaghela received support from all quarters including voluntary organisations and the State Congress. The people observed a total Ahmedabad bandh and later a partial Gujarat bandh.

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