Meghalaya chief minister wants full investigation into suicide

 A week after his niece Dana Sangma committed suicide, Meghalaya chief minister Mukul Sangma on Monday demanded a thorough probe into the alleged humiliation of the student that forced her to take the extreme step. At a media conference held in the city, Sangma asked for a “stringent follow up” of the case and also gave a call for the integration of the nation and fresh legislation to deal with “instances of discrimination and cases of atrocities” against students of the northeast.

Dana was a student at Amity University’s Gurgaon campus and had been hauled up by an invigilator for having a switched-on cellphone in her pocket during an exam. The Meghalaya CM said he intended to use the case to address the larger issues pertaining to the treatment of students from the northeastern states. For this, he called for a law that will act as a “deterrent” for all those with “limited knowledge of the huge diversity of the nation”. “I have already written to the HRD minister and will be taking up the same issue with other chief ministers,” he said.

“The present situation demands a larger engagement of all stakeholders, or putting in place a system that will deter the tendency of discrimination and atrocities in institutions/universities by insensitive administration,” he said in a statement.

The Meghalaya CM argued that his family chose to not seek exemption from postmortem because officials from the Meghalaya House, sent by Sangma, found “some indication that was obvious” that there was more to the suicide story.

Posted on May 1 2012. Filed under States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry