Odisha chief minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Monday ordered the Crime Branch to take over the probe into the missing judicial inquiry report into the 2008 killing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Laxmanananda Saraswati.
Event Context
A first information report (FIR) was registered last month on a complaint by the state home department over the disappearance of the Justice AS Naidu Commission report and the Revenue Divisional Commissioner’s inquiry report on the 2016 SUM Hospital fire in Bhubaneswar.
Laxmanananda Saraswati and four associates were shot dead by Maoists at his ashram in Odisha’s Kandhamal district on Aug. 23, 2008. The killings triggered one of the state’s worst episodes of communal violence, leaving at least 38 people dead and hundreds of homes and places of worship damaged. The Naidu commission submitted its report in 2016.
The Revenue Divisional Commissioner submitted the report on the October 2016 SUM Hospital fire in 2018. The blaze killed 24 people after smoke spread through the intensive care, dialysis and emergency wards of the private hospital in Bhubaneswar.
In its police complaint, the Odisha home department’s joint secretary Sarat Chandra Marandi said they had been unable to locate the two reports despite an extensive search.
“The two reports are presently untraceable at the CMO. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of these two reports create a reasonable suspicion that the reports may have been intentionally removed, retained, concealed, destroyed or otherwise unlawfully dealt with,” the FIR said.
This is the sixth investigation handed over to the Crime Branch since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government headed by Mohan Charan Majhi assumed office in June 2024.
Team Analysis
Among the earlier cases assigned to the agency are the alleged custodial abuse, assault and sexual harassment of an Indian Army officer’s fiancée inside Bharatpur Police Station of Bhubaneswar in September 2024; the self-immolation of a 20-year-old student of Fakir Mohan College in Balasore following allegations of sexual harassment by a professor and alleged irregularities and question paper leaks in the Odisha Police Sub-Inspector recruitment examination, which was subsequently transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Besides, the lynching of a Government Railway Police constable near Bhubaneswar over allegations that he attempted to assault two women was handed over to the Crime Branch, as well as the alleged conspiracy behind errors in Odisha school textbooks.
