The relatives of the female athletes who had consumed a poisonous fruit Othalanga at the Water Sports Centre of the Sports Authority of India in Alappuzha, Kerala in a suicide pact last week have sought a CBI probe into the incident.
Four girls of the centre had tried to commit suicide last week — one of them died — by eating the fruit due to alleged harassment and torture by senior trainees and SAI staff.
Rejecting the reported exoneration of the senior trainees and staff of the centre in a report that SAI Director General Injeti Srinivas is said to have submitted to the Sports Ministry on the incident, relatives asked how the official could conclude that there was no harassment when he had not even talked to the girls.
They alleged that there was a move to sabotage the inquiries being carried out into the tragic incident and said they would continue with legal proceedings against the authority.
“We have no reason to trust the SAI authorities. Now, we can’t trust these investigations also,” said a relative of one of the three girls, still under treatment. “We will be satisfied by nothing but a CBI probe,” said the mother of one of the girls.
“We have lost all our hopes. If this is how things are progressing on the investigations front, the choice available to my entire family will be to commit suicide. We want to see those responsible for our tragedy taken to task. We want justice,” she said.
The reports from Delhi on Wednesday said that SAI chief Srinivas had submitted a report to the Centre giving a clean chit to the senior trainees of the Alappuzha centre and the hostel warden there.
Srinivas had also reportedly concluded that the reason behind the girls’ decision to attempt the extreme step could be purely personal.
Four girls of the SAI’s Alappuzha centre, including one Gold winner in the national level, had eaten poison fruit Othalanga on the afternoon of May 6 in a suicide pact due to alleged ragging and torture by senior students and SAI staff. One of the girls, Aparna Ramabhadran, died on the following morning at the Government Medical College Hospital, Alappuzha.
SAI chief Srinivas had visited the centre and met the girls’ parents on May 7 itself. Three investigations are now on into incident: By a team headed by DySP Parthasarathi Pillai of the Crime Branch of the Kerala Police, by Inspector General S Sreejith under orders from the State Human Rights Commission and by the State Sports Secretary.
The mother of one of the girls said, “My child used to tell me that she didn’t want to be there. The girls had told the magistrate who visited them (on the night of May 6) that certain Chechis (elder sisters – seniors) had been subjecting them to ragging and harassment constantly. The names of these seniors are there in the suicide note. How can they be exonerated thenIJ”
Meanwhile, reports quoted the three girls under treatment as saying that they had decided to attempt the extreme step after the harassment by the senior students became unbearable. All kinds of obscene comments were being hurled at them by the seniors and the situation at the centre was so bad that they were unable to even go near the others, they said.
“They would barge into our room and look everywhere asking us whether we had hidden any boys under the cots. If we are not seen for a moment during training, they would ask us whether we had gone to the boys whom we had hidden in the bushes. They even used to say that it would be better if we were dead,” a TV channel quoted one of the girls as saying.
The girls said that Aparna, the girl who died, was their roommate but the seniors had not allowed her to stay in their room. She had cried before us over this and other things in front of us and the matter had been reported to the warden, they said, adding that the seniors used to say that they could not be trusted.