Satyendra Dubey, however, was not unsung. The IIT-Kanpur alumni became an instant hero, civil society’s poster boy for courage and integrity. And yet, four years after his murder, he is forgotten today. At best, he has become a martyr, to be remembered once a year on his death anniversary.

The same people who marched the streets to protest his murder, undertook relay fasts, wrote blogs, held public meetings, donated money and expressed outrage that Dubey’s honesty led to his killing, accepted the official CBI version a few months later, that a simple robbery had led to his murder. Apart from a few exceptions, once the CBI charge-sheet was filed in September 2004, no one probed further. The hope for a peoples’ movement for change, for recognising the principles Dubey stood for, for simply getting justice for him, also died.

Today, four years later, the murder-for-robbery case carries on in Patna, no end in sight. The IIT-alumni supported, US-based Satyendra Kumar Dubey Foundation, set up just after his murder, is almost defunct. The Whistle-blowers Act, meant to protect other whistle-blowers like Dubey, is a distant dream. Dubey’s own family and friends have all but given up hope of justice. Years of false hopes, tokenism and frustration have added cynicism to the burden of loss that the family carries with it constantly.

It was after the Dubey story faded from collective memory that my quest to make a documentary on him began. It is extraordinarily difficult to shoot a film on a person without meeting him. All we had were reference points — Satyendra as son, brother, student, friend, mentor, co-worker, boss, role model. But the picture that emerged was so real and so heart-warming, that the one overwhelming regret the entire crew had was that we would never meet the person people were describing with such warmth and admiration. Peons, steno-typists, co-workers, IIT batch-mates and close friends spoke of a man who always went the extra mile, made the extra effort.

“Zabardast insaan the”. “He used to go to the site even late at night to get the work completed, he was absolutely fearless and wanted to do his job perfectly”. “He used to tell us, ‘you private sector people, your horizon is your company, mine is the country, you will walk on our roads to your success’”. The stories as well as his small, spartan office room in Gaya with a towel draped over the chair, revealed choices that made sense only when we went to his roots, his small village, Shahpur, near Sivan, Bihar.

When an entire village tells you their own favourite Satyendra story — of how he helped with advice/ books/money etc — you begin to see why he could never have taken the easy way out and joined the multi-national or gone abroad. When you spend time with his dignified father who returned a compensation cheque, you realise why Satyendra could never have accepted the bribes or not blown the whistle. He was telling the truth, he was doing his job.

When we interviewed young students at IIT Kanpur and asked if he was a role model for them, almost all said they admired his honesty and courage but felt he could have been smarter, gone to the media first, protected himself.

Let his life and death not go to waste. Else, it would have been better to have let the Dubey family grieve privately four years ago. And Satyendra Dubey would have been another unsung, forgotten hero.

Vaid, a documentary film-maker, has directed the film ‘Satyendra Jayate: The story of a whistle-blower’ that was telecast on November 27, 2006 on NDTV 24/7 and is being re-telecast today on the same channel, in partnership with the Indian Express