A lawyer of Faizan Ahmed has alleged in a letter to the West Midnapore superintendent of police that a Facebook post in which some of the IIT students had purportedly said Faizan was subjected to humiliation for refusing to take part in ragging in a hostel, has been deleted by the admin of the page.
Faizan was found dead in a hostel room last month.
Lawyer Aniruddha Mitra has alleged in writing to district police chief Dinesh Kumar that a Facebook post and related comments on “IIT KGP confessions 3.0”, “has been deleted after the hearing of the writ petition” on Faizan’s death in Calcutta High Court on November 3.
One of the students purportedly wrote there in a post last month: “It was during the Glorified AP (Assimilation Programme) during Feb-March 2022 at Rajendra Prasad hall of residence. Faiz refused to be a part of the AP program. ….What happened next? He was forcefully brought down from his room and was downright insulted and humiliated in front of his 130-odd batchmates.”
In the writ petition, the lawyers have annexed the Facebook post and argued that Faizan was harassed for declining to take part in the “assimilation programme,” which, the lawyer has contended, was a “glorified term” for “collective ragging”.
“As this (deletion) amounts to a destruction of evidence, you are requested to interrogate the administrators of the Facebook page and find out on whose instructions, the same was deleted,” the lawyer has written.
The lawyer told Metro: “I wrote this because the deletion, which took place on Thursday night, raises suspicion.”
Calls and text messages to SP Dinesh Kumar went unanswered.
When contacted Amit Patra, the deputy director of IIT Kharagpur, said: “Since the matter is sub-judice we won’t comment.”
The letter was written two days after Justice Rajasekhar Mantha, who is hearing the writ petition, said in his order that “it is expected that superintendent of police, West Midnapore, shall look into as to whether the guidelines of the Supreme Court” on anti-ragging “were in place in the Hostels concerned of the IIT, Kharagpur”.