New Delhi: Founder and managing director of the Mumbai-based tech firm Vakrangee, Dinesh Nandwana, is suspected to have suffered a cardiac arrest, which led to his death, while a team of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was searching his Andheri office Friday.
Officials of the central agency rushed the 62-year-old to the hospital, where doctors declared him dead.
As ThePrint reported earlier, a senior inspector from the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) police said Nandwana’s family informed the police about the “history of [Nandwana’s] ailment”. A case of accidental death has been registered and the autopsy would confirm the cause of death, the officer said.
In the backdrop of Friday’s incident, ThePrint takes a closer look at some recent instances of deaths of those facing probes by various investigating agencies.
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Cases in Madhya Pradesh
A day before the incident in Mumbai, the director of Jayshri Gayatri Food Products, Payal Modi, allegedly attempted suicide by consuming rat poison. She is under treatment at a private hospital. In a four-page long note, she alleged harassment by the Economic Offences Wing of Madhya Pradesh Police, the ED, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India and authorities concerned with the collection of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The harassment, Payal Modi alleged, was at the behest of Chandra Prakash Pandey, a relative of Union Minister Chirag Paswan.
The previous month, businessman Manoj Parmar and his wife Neha were found dead at his office in UP’s Sehore district a week after the ED carried out searches at their residence.
The couple’s suicide became a major controversy with the family and state Congress leaders accusing the ED of harassing the couple at the behest of the ruling BJP owing to their political associations with the Congress party. One of their children had come under the spotlight when he gifted a piggy bank to Rahul Gandhi during his ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
Suicides after CBI raids
A sub-postmaster at the Lakhaoti sub-post office in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district died by suicide after he jumped before a moving train last December. The incident was reported from Bulandshahr district, a day after a CBI team probing the embezzlement of roughly Rs 2.5 crore of department funds questioned the sub-postmaster for hours.
On 19 December, the CBI booked him in the case on the complaint of the superintendent of post offices in the Bulandshahr division.
The sub-postmaster left behind a suicide note, claiming innocence and alleging that he was being falsely implicated by his colleague for allegedly exposing her extramarital affair.
Four months ago, the CBI conducted another round of raids at a post office in Bulandshahr against the then-superintendent Tribhuvan Pratap Singh. The very next day, Singh shot himself with his licensed pistol at his home in Aligarh. Earlier, he sent a suicide note to the Aligarh senior superintendent of police.
Aligarh district police later registered an accidental death report in the matter.
In November 2023, the Belagavi Cantonment Board chief executive officer K. Anand died by suicide at his home in a military camp, leaving behind a note about suffering huge losses in online gaming. An officer of the 2015 batch of the Indian Defence Estates Service, Anand took his life days after the CBI raided his home and office over alleged illegal constructions, encroachments, and appointments to various posts in the cantonment board.
In August 2023, customs superintendent Mayank Singh allegedly died by suicide after jumping into a pond in Navi Mumbai. A few days before the incident, the CBI had raided his premises as part of a case filed on 21 August on allegations of impropriety.
Earlier in March 2023, a joint director-level officer in the Rajkot office of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) died by suicide, hours after a CBI arrest for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 5 lakh. The officer, identified as Jawri Mal Bishnoi, jumped from the fourth floor of his office building in Rajkot.
(If you are feeling suicidal or depressed, please call a helpline number in your state)
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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