Over two years after the sucide of 17-year-old Lavanya in Thanjavur, the CBI has ruled out any religious conversion angle as alleged by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the BJP. The CBI informed the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court of its findings on September 18 and added that the child had taken her own life because she had been forced to do administrative work at the Christian missionary-run boarding school she had been studying at.
The court had been hearing a plea by the main accused Sagaya Mary, the school’s hostel warden, to quash the CBI’s charge sheet against her.
Lavanya, a student of the Sacred Hearts Higher Secondary School in Michaelpatti, died by suicide on January 19, 2022. Her death led to a political storm in the state with the BJP and VHP attempting to portray it as a case of a ‘forced-conversion’ of a Hindu to Christianity.
Before the child succumbed to her injuries, Muthuvel, the VHP’s Ariyalur district secretary, recorded four videos of her giving details of what she faced in school. Of these, one went viral in which she alleged a certain Raquel Mary had tried to force her and her parents to convert to Christianity.
It was suspected at the time that Lavanya had been tutored to say this. This was the only video in which Lavanya made such an allegation. In another video which police discovered Muthuvel had deleted from his phone, Lavanya blames Sagaya Mary whom she says forced her to do hostel accounts work which she did not understand and caused her to fall back on her studies. Lavanya’s parents had not made allegations of forced conversions in the initial complaint on the basis of which an FIR was filed by the Tamil Nadu police.
TNM also reported from the ground at the time that Muthuvel and three other VHP men who had been instrumental in turning Lavanya’s sucide into a religious controversy had been involved in vigilante-style attacks in the district in the past five years.
On January 31, 2022, the Madurai Bench transferred the case to the CBI after Lavanya's father petitioned the court that he had lost faith in the investigation. The CBI filed an FIR on February 15 of that year naming Sagaya Mary as one of the accused.
