Swami Nigamanand

As Baba Ramdev broke his nine-day-old fast at Dehradun’s Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences (HIMS) surrounded by famous gurus and under the glare of TV cameras, a fellow fasting swami in a nearby ward lay dying to protest the Uttarakhand government’s refusal to ban mining along a stretch of Ganga near Rishikesh. On Monday, Swami Nigamanand died virtually unnoticed, after fasting for 115 days. The 35-year-old ‘Save the Ganga’ crusader, a seer at Haridwar’s Matri Sadan Ashram, had been on fast since February 19. On April 27, officials shifted him to the Haridwar district hospital as his condition deteriorated. But he still refused to touch food. When Nigamanand slipped into a coma on May 2, he was rushed to HIMS and put on life support. The death of the fasting sadhu was seized by the Congress to hit out at Uttarakhand’s BJP chief minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank for tending to Ramdev to gain political mileage and ignoring Nigamanand, who was fasting for a serious cause. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh blamed the state government for the death, saying it had ignored the sadhu’s pleas to check the illegal stone quarrying and rampant mining along the 80-km Ganga stretch from Muni-ki-Reti to Rishikesh in Tehri district and further up to Laksar town in Haridwar. Vijay Verma, a close aide of Nigamanand and president of the Haridwar Citizen Council, alleged the seer suffered a heart attack at the district hospital after being injected poison by hospital staff, who worked in collusion with the land mafia. Haridwar district magistrate R Meenakshi Sundaram said an autopsy would be conducted following complaints of poisoning. On May 15, a Matri Sadan functionary, Brahamchari Dayanand, had lodged an FIR in Haridwar accusing a member of a stone-crusher association and a senior doctor of poisoning the swami. Matri Sadan Ashram also accused local police of succumbing to the pressure of the mining lobby and dragging its feet to arrest those named in FIR.