Death of Chhattisgarh ex-speaker: 'Fake' cardiologist, private hospital booked for culpable homicide

Bilaspur | ‘Fake’ cardiologist Narendra Yadav alias Narendra John Camm and a Bilaspur hospital have been booked for culpable homicide over the death of former assembly speaker Rajendra Prasad Shukla 19 years ago, an official said on Sunday.

Besides culpable homicide not amounting to murder (section 304), charges for cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code have been included in the FIR that was registered against Yadav and the private hospital on Saturday night, he said.

Yadav, who was arrested over the death of seven patients after botched surgeries at a hospital in Damoh in Madhya Pradesh, had operated upon Shukla at the private facility here, following which the ex-speaker died, Bilaspur Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Rajnesh Singh said.

Shukla, then a Congress MLA from Kota assembly constituency, died in 2006 at the private hospital in Bilaspur. He had served as the first speaker of the Chhattisgarh legislative assembly from 2000 to 2003.

The former speaker’s son, Pradeep Shukla, recently filed a police complaint, alleging that Yadav was associated with the private hospital when his father was admitted there.

“Yadav performed heart surgery on my father, and then he was kept on a ventilator for 18 days before being declared dead on August 20, 2006. The hospital management had taken Rs 20 lakh from the state government for my father’s treatment,” the complaint said.

Pradeep Shukla said they recently learnt about Yadav and the deaths at the Damoh hospital through media reports.

Police have found Yadav’s degree to be fake, and the document of his registration with the Indian Medical Council/Chhattisgarh Medical Council has not been traced yet, SSP Singh said.

Without proper scrutiny, the hospital management played with the life of ex-assembly speaker Shukla as well as many other heart patients by employing Yadav as a cardiologist, he said.

Yadav was arrested after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) received a complaint claiming seven persons died at the Mission Hospital, Damoh, where he operated on patients in the name of treating heart diseases.

The director of an Indore-based employment consultancy firm had last week said Yadav had sent his resume three times between 2020 and 2024 for a job by claiming he had operated on thousands of patients.

In a 9-page resume sent to his firm in 2024, Yadav had described himself as a senior cardiologist and gave his permanent address as Birmingham in Britain. In the resume, he had also mentioned that he was involved in the operations of thousands of heart patients, including 18,740 for "coronary angiography" and 14,236 for "coronary angioplasty", the director had said.

Yadav has called himself a victim of a "big conspiracy" and claimed that his degrees are genuine.