IIT aspirant to martyr Baba: Family,his guru fight to claim his body

Shivanand claims Nigamanand was poisoned,but doctors who attended on him for over a month said the only toxins in his body were those that were created as a result of his prolonged fast.

Nigamanands elder brother,Satyam Kumar Ashish,a 36-year-old software engineer who is here from Bangalore,alleged that Shivanand had forced Nigamanand to go on a fast-unto-death,and did not allow him to call it off even after he complained that he felt weak and tired.

Nigamanand died on Monday afternoon,116 days after he stopped eating,and 47 days after he was admitted to hospital and put on an intravenous drip. He was fasting to protest illegal mining and stone crushing units in Haridwar. He was 34.

He called me in the last week of April and said that he wanted to break the fast but Swami Shivanandji was not letting him do so. He had been on a fast since February 16. But before I could do anything,he collapsed on April 27 and was admitted to hospital, Ashish said.

Ashish alleged that Nigamanand had become a victim of the rivalry between the Swami and some stone miners. He had gone on a 72-day fast on an earlier occasion too,Ashish said,and had been warned by doctors not to attempt doing it again.

According to Ashish,Nigamanand was 17 years old and called Swaroopam Kumar Girish when he came to Delhi from the familys home in Darbhanga in Bihar to study for the IIT entrance exam. He enrolled at Greenfields Public School in south Delhi,Ashish said.

But within a year,Girish decided to become a sadhu and moved to Swami Shivanands Maitri Sadan,Ashish said. He virtually cut off connections with the family until recently,when he began to call and plead to be rescued.

Shivanand has alleged that Nigamanand was poisoned at the Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences (HIMS),at the behest of the mining mafia. The post mortem examination report put his death down to septicemia.

Dr Deepak Goel,neurologist at HIMS,said Nigamanand was already in a comatose state when he was brought here. All his limbs were paralysed and his sugar level had shot up to an alarming level.

When a person starves,there are physiological changes in the body and a certain kind of enzyme is released that acts like a poison and harms the body, Dr Goel said.

Shivanand has refused to hand over the body to his family. He has said that he wants to bury Nigamanand on the ashram premises and create a samadhi.

The district administration has,meanwhile said that the demands for which Nigamanand was allegedly fasting had been met as early as on April 26,after a higher bench of the Uttarakhand High Court ruled in Maitri Bhavans favour.

Maitri Bhavan had moved a petition against two mining and a stone crusher units last year,saying they were polluting the environment. After the court ruled that the units were licensed,they went in appeal,and obtained a stay. But even then,Nigamanands associates did not let him break the fast, Haridwar District Magistrate R Meenakshi Sunderam said.

Two days later,when his condition deteriorated we received an SMS from the ashram,and we shifted him to the district hospital, the DM said.

The officer explained that not all mining units in Haridwar were illegal,and the river bed needed to be cleared from time to time. There are 45 stone crushers and mining units in Haridwar that have a licence from the government. The river keeps changing course,and if we do not allow mining,the city will be flooded, the DM said.

Nigamanands uncle Subhash Chandra Jha,who is also in Haridwar,said,We suspect foul play in his death.

We had not been told either about such a long fast or about his deteriorating health. He was taken to the same hospital as Baba Ramdev but did not get adequate attention or care, said Jha,who teaches at the Mithila Postgraduate Study and Research Centre,Darbhanga.

(With Santosh Singh in Patna)