Who killed Judge Loya? | Suresh Khairnar

Perhaps in my reading list of books, this will have to be included in the most surprising book of the year 2024. That is why in the state level program of West Bengal NAPM, when I was specially asked to speak as the keynote speaker, I first tried to say this book and what kind of people have India in their hands in the present times and freeing it should be our first goal. Who can do what in the intoxication of power? This is what one feels after reading this book. And how all the seventy-five year old constitutional institutions of our country are forced to support these executioners due to helplessness in front of those rulers? In the present times, when India’s record in research journalism has gone to a very low level, people like Niranjan Takle give a glimpse of some rays of hope.

There is someone in a country of 140 crore population! Whose conscience is intact! And he has done the work of exposing Savarkar instead of the so-called hero he was! He has already done the work of exposing this! To what extent the rulers of the present time can go for power? Niranjan Takle has laid aside his and his family’s safety! The pains he has taken to collect facts for this book! For this, he deserves the world’s highest honor in journalism!

Seeing his work, I was reminded of the boldness with which he had written in the seventies in the Calcutta Ananda Bazar Patrika, in the year of the birth centenary of Gour Kishore Ghosh, against the then government and the so-called Naxalites, ’Aam ake Bolte Daav!’ (Let me speak). The cover stories published in Ananda Bazar and Desh magazines under the title ’Lets Speak Me’ are available in the form of books in English translation under the title ’Lets Speak Me’. The foreword of which was written by Barrister V.M. Tarkunde. And the most surprising thing is that due to this writing, the Janata Court of the so-called Naxalites sentenced him to death. But Gour Kishore Ghosh neither took government protection nor did he accept the protection given by the Ananda Bazar group. This is the same Gourakishore Ghosh who, on seeing the declaration of Emergency by Mrs. Indira Gandhi on the Anand Bazaar teleprinter on 25 June 1975, first got his hair shaved off by a barber sitting on the pavement below his office and performed a satyagraha like ’Janta tantra mara gaye’! And the then Chief Minister Siddharth Shankar Ray, with folded hands, turned down his request to go home and remained imprisoned in Alipore Jail for 19 months!

Niranjan has tried to save the honour of Marathi speaking people! Otherwise, from the inception of the Sangh to Hindu Mahasabha, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena, Nathuram Godse and Savarkar who prepared him were also Maharashtrians! You are trying to make amends on behalf of all of them! That is why I have specially started taking this book to every corner of India in the coming time to congratulate you!

Probably in the eighth grade, when I was studying, at the insistence of my geography teacher B.B. Patil, I started going to RSS shakha for a few days. And how heartless the Muslim kings were in the shakha. After listening to stories of murdering or imprisoning everyone who came in the way of power, starting from their fathers and siblings, and after listening to stories of atrocities committed on Hindus during the time of partition, a very bad image was formed about the Muslim community. And before coming home from the shakha, I would deliberately go to the Muslim locality and return only after abusing them. But the living conditions of all the people of the Muslim community in our village were the same as those of Dalits and tribals. Because they were dependent on people like us who had land and property, they did nothing except staring at me with their eyes. And I considered this as my bravery!

This is the situation in the entire country, more or less. Hindus are more than eighty percent. And mostly the upper class people have control over the entire society. And this is why Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar had appealed to the Dalits to "leave the villages and move towards the cities." Dalits, tribals, minority communities, all have to live by the grace of the upper caste society. And the Sangh takes advantage of this fact and spreads hatred among the people of the Bahujan Samaj in the branches through stories, so-called intellectuals and even their sports are anti-Muslim. And some Narendra or Amit from the same branch starts walking through life at the age of seventeen with this poison inside him. So how can we expect anything else from him? This is the Indian edition of Germany’s SS ninety years ago.

The political unit of the same Sangh calls itself Party With Difference. Looking at the ugly face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it seems that "perhaps in the game of power, everyone is equally naked in the hammam." From the Ram Mandir Janmabhoomi movement to the Gujarat riots, and then to establish itself as the only Hindu Hriday Samrat, the decade after 2000 years in Gujarat alone will be considered as a black chapter for Gujarat. The 2002 riots, the 2003 murder of former Home Minister Haren Pandya, and twenty-two murders in the three years from 2003 to 2006.

The Supreme Court has used the term "extra judicial killings" for these twenty two murders. These include the murders of Sohrabuddin, his wife Kausarbi and his partner Tulsi Prajapati. Due to a letter written by Sohrabuddin’s brother Burhanuddin to a Supreme Court judge, the Supreme Court had specifically ordered the Gujarat Police to conduct an internal investigation. And for this, the Gujarat government asked a woman officer named Geeta Johri to conduct an internal investigation. And in her report given in 2006, she has written that "Amit Shah had a hand in these murders." And in 2007, many police officers had to be sent to jail.

And finally in 2010, the Supreme Court handed over the case to the CBI. Even before that, Amit Shah had to go to jail in July 2010 (although he came out on bail within three months. That is a different matter.) And this case was first handed over to Justice J.K. Utpat in the CBI Special Court. But he was transferred in June 2014, which was a violation of the Supreme Court’s 2012 order. The Supreme Court had ordered that the case should have been tried under the supervision of a single judge.

But Justice Brijgopal Loya was entrusted with this responsibility. And on the morning of 1 December 2014, he was found dead in a guest house named Ravi Bhawan (VVIP) built specially for the guests of government officials of Nagpur. And in his place, new Justice MB Gosavi took over the case on 15 December. He gave the final verdict within two days. That too without taking cognizance of more than a hundred witnesses, more than ten thousand pages of chargesheet and hundreds of telephone call records. What can be the meaning of a verdict within 48 hours? On 30 December 2014, Amit Shah was acquitted of all charges by calling it a political conspiracy.

And on 19th April 2018, the highest court of our country talked about the mysterious death of Justice Loya, throwing the demand for investigation into the dustbin and stamped the accused as innocent, in which the Supreme Court was not prepared to investigate. The way this whole case was handled, in which due to a huge conspiracy, all the accused were easily freed and some of them were reinstated on the posts of handling the responsibility of law and order in India.

On top of this, what kind of government are we living in? And who is controlling our country’s constitution and constitutional institutions? This includes the Lok Sabha, the highest assembly of laws in our country! From the farmers’ bills to the citizenship bill, and whatever laws and rules the workers had made for themselves after hundreds of years of struggle! All those laws have been changed in the interest of industrialists!

The same thing about handing over the public sector to private masters! And in the name of national security, what will you call the act of eliminating our human rights one by one? In which the issue of violating freedom of expression is being used conveniently! By digging out old cases of hate speech and people who speak and write against them! The work of punishing them is continuing unabated in the present times! And no one should dare to speak or write against the government! And the ongoing action against Newsclick is another recent example!

On 25 June 1975, Smt. Indira Gandhi had formally declared emergency. But for the past eight years we have been living under an undeclared emergency. This was told to Shekhar Gupta of Indian Express. On the occasion of 40 years of emergency (2015), in an interview LK Advani said that "we have been living under an undeclared emergency for the past one year." And today it has been more than eight years. The duration of emergency of Smt. Indira Gandhi was only 19 months. This is nine years and six months. The way in which in 1977, all democratic parties and people from civil society had jointly protested, today, like that, all democratic forces have come together again to fight these fascist forces. Especially today, by coming together to defeat BJP in the 2024 elections. Keeping aside all differences, to fight this government. We will have to start immediately from today itself to declare a BJP-free India! Otherwise, in the coming days, we will not even be allowed to write this post! And meetings and conferences are far away!

Speaking on the current national and international situation at the West Bengal NAPM event at 18 Surya Sen Street, Kolkata on 29 October 2022!
The book I have in my hand! That is research journalism, there are a few journalists in India at present! Who are trying to fulfill their true duty of journalism! One of them Mr. Niranjan Takle first published in Caravan magazine, and now in May 2022, published by Dhamma Ganga Publications of Aurangabad, is a 315 page book named Who Killed Judge Loya?! Its second edition has been published immediately in June! And Marathi translation has been done! And now translations are being done in Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada and Bengali!

This is one of the books written on the controversy surrounding the death of CBI Special Court Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya on the night of November 30 and December 1 in Nagpur.

On November 30, Judge Loya along with his other judge friends had come especially from Mumbai for the wedding of a judge’s daughter. "Except, on 29 November, 2014, Loya was told to join two colleagues on a sudden trip to Nagpur, Maharashtra. Judges Kulkarni and Modak had come to Loya’s office, insisting on his company, Was this about a meet - and - greet, an expert review of legal briefs, a family emergency ? Turns out, judge Sapna Joshi’s daughter was getting married in Nagpur. In 2014, he was staying at a government guesthouse called Ravi Bhavan in Nagpur. He was 47 years old. And the most surprising thing is that on 30th November, he talked with his wife from 11-45 in the night. And after 12 o’clock, in the name of ill health, he was taken from Ravi Bhavan to an ordinary hospital in Ravinagar, Nagpur, that too by autorickshaw. There are no autorickshaw stands within 2-3 kilometers of Ravi Bhavan.

And most importantly, Ravi Bhawan being a guest house reserved exclusively for government guests, there being presence of some or the other government officials with vehicles, a CBI court special court judge travelling in an autorickshaw, who is equivalent to a High Court judge, there being no vehicle for him. And a week before his arrival in Nagpur, who took the decision to remove his Z Plus security and why?

And for the marriage in Nagpur, two people named Kulkarni and Modak forcibly took him from the court itself on the Mumbai-Nagpur Duronto train, which also seems very suspicious because a judge suddenly did not receive any invitation in advance. (If he had known about it beforehand, he would have told his wife that he had to go to Nagpur on such and such a day. But suddenly he called his home from Haji Ali and asked her to pack his bag and take his luggage straight to Mumbai railway station before the departure of Mumbai-Duronto train.) That means people named Modak and Kulkarni suddenly told him, in a way requesting him, at the last moment. That is why he needed to call his home and call for his luggage for his stay. And these same Kulkarni and Modak who had requested him and taken him to Nagpur.

They were the ones who took Loya sahab to Dande hospital in Ravinagar Chowk in an autorickshaw on the night of 30th November. In spite of the presence of two government medical colleges and two private medical colleges and Wockhardt and other hospitals related to heart diseases in Nagpur. The decision to take him to Dande, a hospital for a common treatment, also raises a lot of questions. Because of this. Regarding his suspicious death, one of his relatives, his elder sister, Dr. Anuradha Biyani of Dhule Civil Hospital, after seeing his dead body, demanded for second postmortem! Because "stuck under his neck. She saw an injury on the back of his head" clothes were handed over in a polythene bag. It included his shirt - - soaked with blood. The belt on his jeans was twisted and put in the opposite manner. The broken buckle was on the right side of the belt" but no one listened to her! And in the darkness of midnight! The last rites were done quietly, without any kind of media persons!

A non-smoking, non-drinking fitness freak (with no cardiac history in the family) dies of a cardiac arrest at the age of forty-seven. Bloodstains, broken buckles. Signs of head trauma. A post-mortem done in the death of night, apanchanama never supplied. A replacement judge who conducts the trial for tow days, before reserving his order for more than a dozen. A captain who retires in the middle of a test tour. And the aspersions were not yet over.
In the above mentioned book, all these questions have been discussed in detail. After reading this, I am surprised that how dangerous can the people sitting on the highest posts in our country be? And the most serious thing is that they have the responsibility of maintaining law and order for 140 crore people.

In a country where a judge has to lose his life, what importance can ordinary people have there? This gives an idea of ??the condition and direction of our parliamentary democracy.

At the beginning of this book, in the Prologue, page number IX, the writer-journalist Shri Niranjan Takle writes that "My story, in fact, greatly concerns one of the pillars of the BJP.

As I write, Mr. Amit Shah is fifty-seven years old. He is currently India’s Minister for Home Affairs, following a six year spell as BJP’s President. He is most likely, as the Prime Minister’s right-hand man, the second most powerful politician in the India.

On 20 November 2017, I posted an article for The Caravan that related to a trial in which he was one of the main accused. "A Family Breaks Its Silence: Shocking details emerge in death of judge presiding over Soharabuddin trial". This was followed, a day later, by another piece :"Chief Justice of. Mumbai High Court, Mohit Shah offered Rs 100 crore to my brother for a favorable judgment in the Soharabuddin case :Late Judge Loya’s sister".

These articles were a storm, grabbing National and international attention (it is probably the reason that you, dear reader, kept an eye out for this book.) The number of readers who searched these links and perused through these stories are in the millions. Civil society, activists, alternative media, political parties and even the Supreme Court took cognizance of the report. I recall how, while admitting two Interventions, the Supreme Court called it "an extremely serious issue" and ordered the transfer of two other PILs from the High Courts to itself. An unprecedented move.

I won’t delve into the nitty-gritties of the story right now. It is already available to the public domain, and will also be retold in this book. But what I will say is this :while the articles never swift to claim the blame upon themselves, and upon Amit Shah.

Shah was jailed in July 2010 over his alleged involvement in the death of Soharabuddin Shaikh and his wife Kausarbi in 2005, not to mention the death of Soharabuddin’s associates Tulsiram Prajapati a year later. A CBI Special Court was appointed by the Supreme Court to carry out the Soharabuddin trail. Amit Shah was the prime accused.

The presiding judge, at first, was JT Utpat. He was then transferred to Pune in June 2014. This was in violation of the 2012 Supreme Court order, stating that the Soharabuddin trial should be conducted by the same officer. But you know, they will was done.

Utpat was replaced by Brijgopal Harkishan Loya.

Judge Loya died in the mysterious circumstances in the early hours of 1 December 2014. A new judge, MB Gosavi, resumed the hearing on 15 December, and concluded it two days later.

When trial that involves over a hundred witnesses, a charge sheet greater than 10,000 pages and hundreds of call data records concludes within 48 hours, than even toddlers can foresee the upcoming verdict. And, tru enough, on 30 December 2014 Amit Shah was discharged, Judge Gosavi citing political motivations behind the allegations.

If official records are to be believed, Judge Loya passed away at 6:15am from coronary artery insufficiency. But my investigation uncovered facts which point to much more sinister conclusions. The obstacles I faced on my way to revealing the truth - - as well as the truth itself - - reflect politicians who have broken the judiciary to suit their whims, institutions that would rather preserve the status quo and individuals who champion apathy over action. It is a substantiated, realistic recounting of the broken bodies which govern our country.

Above all else, it is a tragic tale of an esteemed judge who was silenced before he could speak, of a family coerced into compliance and of the people who have lost complete faith in human beings, let alone the government. This book is there story as much as it is mine - - if not more.

As investigative journalist, I tried to enforce change within the system. I researched with utmost caution and, in my articles for the Caravan, laid the facts on the table. I trusted the people with the truth. Four PILs and Interventions later, it went nowhere.

Five months after the story saw the light of day - - on 19 April 2018, to be precise - - I watched with dismay as the Supreme Court dismissed pleas seeking an independent probe into the sinister circumstances surrounding Loya’s death. Let me be clear: this does not mean that any alleged conspirators were declared innocent. It means that the court did not find it necessary to even begin a probe.

To call this travesty of justice is to assume that justice was ever on the cards.
Herein lies my source of increased cynicism with the Supreme Court. India’s justice system was never perfect, but judicial hypocrisy is a small symptom of a larger cancer that, arguably, began with the Sohrabuddin trial.

The profound frivolity with which that case was handled, the stench of bribery, conspiracy and murder surrounding it, and the ease with which the perpetrators have been allowed to roam free (not only on streets, but in corridors of power) knows no bounds.

Due to a lot of controversy over this death, two PILs were filed in Mumbai High Court and two PILs were filed in the Supreme Court of India and the details of their hearing can be seen from last page number 286.

Seventeen pages till 303 have been given in detail in the case number fifteen named The Judgement. First of all, a former judge of the Bombay High Court has written a letter to the then Bombay High Court demanding a judicial inquiry. And former Supreme Court judge A P Shah has publicly acknowledged it. Similarly, two PILs were filed in the Bombay High Court. One on behalf of an activist and the other on behalf of the entire Mumbai Lawyers Association. In both the PILs, an independent inquiry into the death of Justice Loya was demanded. But the work of burying all this forever has been done in a very cunning manner by the highest court of our country. And the remaining respect and dignity of our country has been put at stake. Now the only lesson that the public needs to learn after reading this book is to try especially to bring down the present government on the path of Mahatma Gandhi through community Satyagraha and movements at various places.

Dr. Suresh Khairnar, 15 December 2024, Nagpur.