Of all the major incidents that took place in the Capital in 2016, the one that was arguably the most talked about was the suicide of four members of the family of bureaucrat Bal Kishan Bansal, who was under the scanner for corruption charges.
The circumstances under which the family hanged itself on two different days, two months apart, as well as the role of CBI officers, whose alleged harassment drove them to suicide, and even the police’s reluctance to register a case despite a dying declaration left by the members, set the case apart.
Suicide notes
On September 27, Mr. Bansal, a former director general with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and his son Yogesh were found dead in his flat in Neelkanth Apartments at Madhu Vihar in east Delhi. This happened just two months after Mr. Bansal’s wife Satyabala and daughter Neha had ended their lives in the same flat.
‘Harassment by officers’
Satyabala and Neha hanged themselves on July 19, three days after the CBI arrested Mr. Bansal for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs.9 lakh.
In Mr. Bansal’s hand-written note, a seven-page document, he had mentioned how the CBI officers had humiliated and tortured him besides threatening to kill his family and that was what had driven him to commit suicide.
The father-son duo had taken great care to ensure that the matter reached the public domain by sending copies of the letter to news organisations.
In a second set of suicide notes, the name of a prominent BJP leader was also mentioned, but nothing seemed convincing enough for the police to register a case.
On their part, the CBI recused its Deputy Inspector General Sanjeev Gautam from the team probing the graft charges against Mr. Bansal. The CBI has maintained that it has evidence against Mr. Bansal and that he was caught red-handed.
Questions remain
Yogesh himself had purportedly disclosed about Rs.2.39 crore under the Income Declaration Scheme just two days before he and his father committed suicide.
The harassment angle has never been probed. Cops have either remained evasive about queries or have preferred to discuss the graft charges.
Since there are no survivors in the immediate family and relatives are reluctant to speak, the fate of the case is unclear.
