Veteran film actor and BJP MP Hema Malini, who was injured in a car crash in Rajasthan that killed a four-year-old girl, remained in hospital on Friday even as her driver was arrested for rash driving.
Prateem Tamboli of the Fortis Hospital here said that “Hema Malini stable and on liquid diet after undergoing a two-hour surgery.”
Meanwhile, relatives of the girl have alleged that the child was lying at the accident spot for nearly 20 minutes and could have been saved had she been taken to the hospital along with the BJP MP.
“Hema Malini was taken to a hospital in Dausa by a doctor immediately after the incident. He then took her to Fortis hospital while Sonam was lying at the spot for 15-20 minutes. Nobody asked about her,” alleged Shirish Gupta, uncle of Sonam who succumbed to her injuries on way to hospital in Dausa last night.
“Had she (Sonam) been taken to the hospital along with Hema Malini, she would have been saved,” Gupta said.
Apparently her speeding sedan rammed into another car coming from the opposite direction, leaving the child in that vehicle dead and four others injured, including the girl’s parents.
In her first statement, Hema Malini expressed “deep sorrow over the accident” and being “deeply pained by the death of an innocent child”. “I am aware that what the family must be going through after the loss of their daughter.”
“In this hour of sorrow, I pray to lord Shri Krishna to give strength to the family to bear this shock,” she said.
Earlier, her driver, Mahesh Thakur, was arrested on charges of rash driving and causing death by negligence besides other offences, police said.
“We have arrested the driver, a resident of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh,” a police officer at Dausa told IANS over phone.
At the SMS Hospital in Jaipur, the distraught father of the girl who died was inconsolable while the injured mother kept asking “Chinni kahan haiIJ,” not knowing that her daughter was dead.
The family was even more hurt that neither the actor nor her aides bothered to ask about their well-being though, they say, the accident was caused by her speeding car.
Sonam’s father Hanuman Mahajan, his wife Shikha (35), Somil and Seema were shifted to the SMS hospital here.
Mahajan has filed a complaint with the Kotwali police station in Dausa against Hema’s driver Ramesh Chand Thakur.