The Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the CBI probe into a schoolgirl’s suicide that has triggered a political storm in Tamil Nadu over BJP allegations that she had cracked under pressure from her school to convert to Christianity.

But the 17-year-old girl — who consumed pesticide in her school hostel on January 9 and died 10 days later — did not in her dying declaration before a magistrate mention any conversion pressure. She attributed her suicide attempt to an excessive burden of chores her hostel warden put on her.

The congregation in Thanjavur district that ran the school has denied both the allegations of conversion pressure and hostel workload, blaming the suicide on alleged ill-treatment by the girl’s stepmother.

While the ruling DMK, Congress and the Left accused the BJP of playing divisive politics over a tragedy, Madras High Court on January 31 directed a CBI probe on a petition from the bereaved father, who wants the conversion angle investigated.

On Monday, hearing a state government challenge to the high court order, the apex court asked the state not to make it a “prestige issue” and to “hand over all the relevant papers and documents to the CBI”. The next hearing is after four weeks.

“It might not be appropriate for us to interject in the investigation…. A lot has unfurled in the case which needs to be investigated,” Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who headed a bench that included Justice Bela M. Trivedi, said.

A video filmed by a known VHP activist had surfaced a day after the girl’s death, purportedly showing her agreeing to a suggestion that her parents’ rebuff to a proposal to let her convert to Christianity had led the school to ill-treat her.

The police have sent the mobile with which the video was filmed to a forensic lab.

The video, and the police’s alleged reluctance to investigate the charge of conversion, had prompted the father to move high court.

The Madurai Bench of the high court allowed the father’s plea, saying: “There is nothing inherently improbable in the allegation that there was an attempt at conversion. It could be true or false. The matter called for investigation and not outright rejection.”

Justice G.R. Swaminathan said the “investigation is not proceeding on the right lines” and that the court had a “duty to render posthumous justice to the child”.

The girl was a resident student at the Sacred Heart Higher Secondary School, run by the Puducherry-based, 178-year-old Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of The Immaculate Heart of Mary, at Michaelpatti, 340km from Chennai.

On January 16, a local cop and then a judicial magistrate recorded the girl’s statement, which blamed the chores ordered by the hostel warden, at Thanjavur Medical College and Hospital. An FIR was registered invoking the charges of abetment to suicide and provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act. The hostel warden, Sister Saghayamary, was taken into judicial custody.

On January 20, what appear edited clips from a video were circulated on social media in which a male voice seems to be questioning the girl in hospital.

At one point the girl is asked the leading question whether her parents’ rejection of an alleged suggestion from a school official that she convert to Christianity was the cause of her subsequent ill-treatment in school. The girl is purportedly heard saying: “Possible.”

Muthuvel, the man who filmed the video, said he did it at the behest of the girl’s parents. He has been booked for revealing the identity of the minor girl in the video.

State school education minister Anbil Mahesh told an interviewer the girl had been questioned in a “provocative manner” and had not given any clear-cut answer.

The BJP held a protest in Chennai on January 24, led by actor turned politician Kushboo, demanding a CBI probe and pressing for a new anti-conversion law in the state. BJP national president J.P. Nadda sent a women’s team on a fact-finding mission to Michaelpatti.

On January 29, residents of Michaelpatti submitted a petition to the Thanjavur collector complaining “outsiders” were visiting them daily and asking them to “speak of forced conversion in the school”.

In the high court, the counsel for the Congregation, Fr Xavier Arulraj, said the girl’s father had remarried some eight years ago after her mother died, and that she had told her friends that her stepmother treated her “in a very cruel manner”.

He said the girl therefore stayed in the hostel even during holidays. He added that the accused hostel warden had been paying the girl’s school and hostel fees.

It’s her “depressing domestic situation” that must have pushed her towards suicide, he contended, alleging the dying declaration had been “engineered” by the stepmother.

The high court order faulted the Thanjavur superintendent of police and some politicians who had spoken on the subject for “jumping to conclusions” in prematurely ruling out the “conversion angle”.

However, the high court said, “nothing set out in this order shall be construed as opinion on the merit of the case”.

The high court also questioned the additional charges on which Muthuvel has been booked — spreading rumours and promoting enmity between religious communities.