(Bihar Times): What a tragedy it is! The Patna police let Uday Chaudhary give a slip for the second time within 18 months on the day the IIT students from Bihar, under the banner of I-Desire, organized a four-day workshop “dedicated to the fond memory of late Satyendra Kumar Dubey.”

“It is unfortunate. What can we do now,” was how Pratik Vimal of IIT Kanpur, and one of the organizers of the workshop, reacted while talking to Bihartimes. com. “Incidents  like this only firm our resolve to work hard in his memory.”

I-Desire is the brain child of Sushil Singhania, an IIT-ian from Bihar, now living in California, US, and a couple of others, with the sole purpose of helping students from the state crack the IITJEE. Though it started holding workshops in 2002 the gruesome murder of Dubey in November 2003 near Circuit House of Gaya came as a stimulant to many other IIT-ians from Bihar.

Dubey the Project Manager of Golden Quadrilateral Project of the National Highway Authority of India, was originally from Shahpur village of Siwan district. He did his civil engineering from IIT Kanpur before qualifying the Indian Engineering Service.

The shocking aspect of the Monday incident in Patna’s civil court is that the police exhibited criminal negligence on the day when Prashant Kumar, Ankit, Purshottam Sinha, Atiullah Faridi, Rahul, Namisha Gupta, Pratik Vimal and many others from different IITs had been literally toiling to make the workshop a success. Incidentally, at the very outset of the workshop in Bharatiya Nritya Kala Mandir, Atiullah Faridi gave a brief sketch of the life and schievements of Satyendra Dubey not knowing that only two kilometers from there the police had just let, one of the accused in his murder, go free.

How can this happen and that too twice since December 2006 and that too in the identical fashion? How can it be that the oversized handcuff was once again responsible for the escape of Uday.

By allowing the accused escape the police appear to have rubbed salt into the wounds of Satyendra Dubey’s family members and all those closely associated with his cause. He was killed by the criminals in Gaya only a few minutes after he got down from Howrah-Mumbai Mail. He was in fact coming from Koderma in Jharkhand.

Weeks before his murder Dubey wrote a letter to the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s office about the alleged corrupt practices of the official-supplier nexus in the execution of the Golden Quadrilateral. The letter, however, got leaked. After that he received a reprimand from his seniors. The Vigilance office of the National Highway Authority of India officials reportedly cautioned him for the impropriety of writing a letter directly to the PM. The whole story was broken by Indian Express then.

Uday’s repeated escape is not the only intriguing aspect of the whole development. It needs to be mentioned that two other suspects in this case, Shivnath Shah and Mukhindra Paswan had earlier died in a mysterious circumstances. While family members charged that they were tortured to death the CBI, which investigated the case, said the two had committed suicide.

The Senior SP of Patna, Amit Kumar, told mediapersons that a massive manhunt has been launched to re-arrest Uday, a native of Katari village of Gaya district. He may be arrested once again. But how long will the authorities allowed to play cruel joke with the departed soul, who sacrificed his life for honesty and integrity. Is there some big fish behind these incidents?

*(Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based journalist).

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