The mysterious death of a class IX student in one of Lucknow’s most prestigious schools has triggered loud protests and allegations of a cover-up against the school management and the state police, besides drawing political parties into the brewing imbroglio.
On April 11, Rahul Sridhar (15) reportedly leapt to his death from the fourth floor parapet of La Martiniere Boys College’s landmark building, Constantia — a drop of 100 ft. While the sequence of events leading to his alleged suicide is not clear, statements made to the police by the school’s principal Carlyle McFarland indicate that Sridhar came to school that fateful morning but skipped the morning assembly. Around 11.30 a.m, he climbed to the fourth floor of Constantia clutching his red school bag and some papers which he set on fire, before leaping to his death.
Initial statements to the media and police by McFarland — a teacher of 31 years experience and former head of the English department at Lucknow Christian College who was appointed principal of La Martiniere Boys’, Lucknow (estb. 1845) ranked the city’s #1 boys’ day school in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2014, in 2011 — ascribed the tragedy to “some affectionate angle” as evidenced by a note “Goodbye Juliet” recovered from the spot. Curiously, not one of the 4,144 students of the school saw Rahul make his way up to the fourth floor or jump from it. The bleeding student was rushed to the nearby Sri Shayama Prasad Mukherjee Hospital where he was declared dead.
The teen’s grieving family immediately countered the police version of suicide and filed a First Information Report (FIR) which was written after six days. According to the deceased student’s elder brother, Rohit the police is “under pressure”, a charge of some substance because the name of an MLA’s son has since figured in the investigations.
Rahul’s family is convinced it’s a case of murder. In support of this contention, they say none of the “three injuries” mentioned in the post-mortem report seem to have been suffered as a consequence of the fall. Secondly they question why most messages and call details on Sridhar’s mobile phone, found almost 30 hours after the incident, were deleted. “Even as Rahul lay in a pool of blood, time was wasted by the school’s on-campus doctor who treated him for a mere leg wound. We were not informed before he was taken to hospital and the so-called suicide note produced by the police is not in Rahul’s handwriting,” says Rohit. The suicide theory is also contradicted by classmates who describe Sridhar as a fun-loving boy whose Bitstrips avatar featured him in a cheery pink t-shirt, while his teachers described him as “most obedient”.
Unsurprisingly, the tragedy has been seized upon by political parties in Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the Samajwadi Party which has an unsavoury reputation with 49.5 percent of its 224 MLAs in the state legislative assembly facing serious criminal charges. Some sources hint a teenage love triangle with the son of a ruling party MLA behind Rahul’s tragic murder/suicide. The opposition BJP and Aam Aadmi Party have demanded a high-level probe into the matter.
If as rumoured a ruling party politician’s family is involved in the tragedy, monitors of UP’s political theatre rule out any progress in the investigations. The deceased student’s parents are ‘outsiders’ of Tamil origin, modestly employed as lab technicians in the Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, without the influence to push for a thorough investigation.
According to social activist Nutan Thakur, a fair probe into the matter cannot be expected as this top-ranked K-12 school is patronised by “some of the state’s most powerful people”, with its governing body including a senior judge of the Allahabad high court’s Lucknow bench, the state’s chief secretary and commissioner among others. “It’s a minority institution impervious to the RTI Act, and enjoys the patronage of the most powerful people in the state,” she says.
This is the second recent student death in a La Martiniere school. On February 12, 2010 Rouvanjit Rawla, a class VIII student of La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata (estb. 1836) committed suicide after being caned by principal Sunirmal Chakravarthy. The principal and three teachers were arrested on February 4, 2010 and acquitted of a murder charge in September 2012.
Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)