New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday refused to rule on a petition filed by Sandip Ghosh, the former principal of Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, where a woman junior doctor was found raped and murdered last month, challenging the CBI investigation into alleged financial irregularities at the state-run institute during his tenure.
A panel led by CJI D.Y. Chandrachud said that Sandip Ghosh had no right to intervene in PIL proceedings as an accused because the Calcutta High Court was supervising the investigation and had delegated it to the CBI.
Senior counsel Meenakshi Arora, representing Ghosh, stated that the case filed before the Supreme Court did not dispute the CBI investigation into the alleged financial irregularities but rather questioned its link to the alleged rape and murder of the doctor in the hospital.
At this, the Bench, comprising Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, said, “Both aspects are a matter of investigation.”
Arora maintained that there was no connection between the purported sale of biomedical waste and the incidence of alleged rape and murder and that Ghosh would suffer substantial damage if adverse observations recorded in the Calcutta High Court were not expunged.
“I am not objecting to the CBI probe but aggrieved with certain observations,” she explained. The senior counsel further highlighted that the Calcutta HC had previously dismissed identical petitions.
However, the apex court said that the Calcutta High Court made only “prima facie” observations, where the issue of biomedical waste was a “trigger.”
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“We cannot order CBI to investigate only this and nothing else, which could be likely an offence,” the CJI-led Bench said, clarifying that it would not stultify the CBI probe.
The special leave petition filed by Ghosh before the apex court challenged the August 23 order of the Calcutta High Court directing the CBI to investigate the alleged financial irregularities when he was in charge of the medical hospital.
There had been several complaints about financial irregularities at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital when Ghosh was the principal at the helm of affairs there. The charges include tendering of different contracts to private and outsourced parties of his confidence without getting the necessary approval from the state Health Department and the college council, getting the infrastructure-related tasks of the hospital done by private outsourced entities or individuals instead of following the standard practice of getting them done by the state Public Works Department (PWD) and selling biomedical wastes of the hospital, including organs of the unidentified bodies coming to the hospital mortuary for post-mortem purposes, outside.
Acting on a petition by the whistleblower, Akhtar Ali, a former deputy medical superintendent of R.G. Kar, a bench of Justice Rajarshi Bhardwaj of the Calcutta HC, said the CBI inquiry will be court-monitored. On the same afternoon, Ghosh approached a division bench of Justices Harish Tandon and Hiranmay Bhattacharya, challenging the single-judge bench order. However, he was given no instant relief and was advised to get a copy of the single-judge bench’s order first.
Instead of approaching the division bench again with the single-judge bench’s order copy, Ghosh chose to move to the Supreme Court.
Following the high court’s ruling, CBI investigators raided and searched numerous places in Kolkata. The CBI’s Economic Offences Wing arrested Ghosh and three others on September 2 in the evening. On Tuesday, a special court in Kolkata sentenced Ghosh, arrested for alleged financial irregularities at the state-run college, to eight days in CBI detention.
Ghosh had been grilled in both the financial irregularities case and the horrific rape and murder of R.G. Kar’s junior doctor on hospital grounds last month. Central agency authorities are undertaking simultaneous investigations in both of these cases, which are court-directed and overseen.
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–IANS
(Photo: IANS/Kuntal Chakrabarty)
