BHU student shoots at his teacher; next day he is found dead

The police say it was a suicide, Manish’s relatives say it was not. They allege the police and university’s Proctorial Board (BHU’s own 500-strong campus police) hada role to play in his death. The students say the university authorities are responsible for creating the situation which led to his death.

The university is tense and the police fear violence though most of the students are yet to come back from vacation. Battalions of the Rapid Action Force (RAF) and the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) are stationed outside the campus with arms and a water cannon.

The attack on the professor and death of the student have put BHU once again on the edge. For the campus of 18,000 students, violence is not news but this time students are more agitated than ever before.“The university is trying to cover up its role. Even if Manish committed suicide, he was driven to it by the prevailing situation in the campus,” says Anil Prasad Shukla, an LLM student.

Students and teachers agree that Manish’s death shows all that has gone wrong with the university. There has been incidents of student violence and no student union for the past two years. “The atmosphere isrepressive. If a student like Manish has a problem with marks, where does he go? The Proctorial Board uses third degree,” says Chittaranjan Singh, a PUCL activist who has studied the situation in the campus.

Even the teachers agree. “It’s a typical case of system failure, the absence of any communication for students,” says a professor who has been with BHU since 1971. Adds Deepak Mullick, a commerce professor: “This is the result of absence of democratisation and because of the autocratic regime of the VC.”

Manish’s family has registered a case against teacher S.K. Balasubramaniam, the university authorities, the Proctorial Board (which is in charge of campus security) and other unknown persons for conspiring to kill him. The family is demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry. The police have already recommended an inquiry by the state Central Investigation Department (CID).

The family says there are enough discrepancies in the police’s version. Despite two post-mortems, no bulletcould be recovered and there is no exit wound for the bullet.

Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of police Arvind Kumar Jain said Manish had developed “criminal contacts” over the past one year. “He was not in good company and his performance had deteriorated. Our investigations have shown that he had been approaching bad elements with money to either get his marks increased or kill the teacher. There is no doubt that he committed suicide,” the DIG said.

However, he could not explain the missing bullet. “Actually they had sucked the region with some machine before the post-mortem, so probably the pellet too was sucked out and thrown into the dust-bin,” DIG Jain said.

In a letter headlined `Confession’ — the police are treating it as the suicide note — Manish wrote: “I didn’t want to kill him so I used training bullets. I had cleared my exams and was about to join the company but this man failed me in his subject.”

Manish wrote that he had pleaded and even wept before the teacher who was“happy.” Calling his teacher a “sadist”, he wrote that he could have killed him with one more shot “but I left him to live to realise his fault”. He apologised to his family for hurting them, asked for their forgiveness and wrote: “I don’t want to live anyway.”

Manish’s family, however, does not think that it is a suicide note. “Nobody writes a suicide note like this and that too with the word `confession’ at the top. He wrote it under duress, I am sure,” says his father Vijay Pratap Rai, a superintending engineer in the electricity department.

The family is alleging that Manish’s failure in the examination is related to his “sought-after” job in Wipro. His brother Anish alleges that Manish’s troubles began in September when he got intimation of his selection. He failed in micro-electronics. He appeared in the supplementary and again failed, receiving just three marks out of 40 in the sessional, his brother says.

The family also alleges that the Training Placement Officer (TPO) at theuniversity, Ramji Aggarwal, even refused to give Manish his letter of appointment saying that it was a mistake as the job was reserved for students of computer science. “Manish got the letter only after he re-confirmed with the company,” Anish says.

While Balasubramaniam is still in the hospital, recuperating, he is said to be in no condition to talk about the “distressful” incident, placement officer Aggarwal refused to comment saying that only the Vice-Chancellor (VC) was authorised to speak.

VC Hari Pratap Gautam assigned university spokesman Vishwanath Pandey to give the “official version”. “It is an unfortunate incident and the Vice Chancellor himself has asked for a CBI enquiry,” said Pandey.

He said the allegations that the university authorities tried to prevent Manish from getting the job was baseless.“There is nothing unusual about our IT boys getting a job. The placement of students from the Department of electronic engineering is 100 per cent. In fact, most of them get at least twooffers each. And anyway Wipro is no coveted job, it is not a big company. Our boys get jobs in bigger companies,” Pandey said.