Forensic expert's death leaves a void

The sad demise of Prof. Chandra Sekharan leaves a big void. He came from an illustrious family of freedom fighters of Thanjavur district.

The privilege of organising a function to celebrate his completion of 80 years and 50 years of work in forensic science in the Raj Bhavan with the then Governor Rosaiah being the chief guest was mine. A stamp with his portrait and the institution of an endowment in his name at the Department of Criminology, University of Madras were done that day.

Chandra Sekharan was an innovative criminologist who had many achievements to his credit - notable among them being the innovation relating to zeroing in on criminals through identification of the skull and the peculiar patterns therein. His outstanding work was in identifying, in a surprisingly short period of time, that the Rajiv Gandhi assassin could only be a suicide bomber and he precisely pinpointed Dhanu with the help of photographs taken by Hari Babu.  

The professor had to tell media persons about his findings from the crime scene, but for some bizarre reason higher-ups in the Police department wanted to penalise him for that. The help of a journalist had to be sought to take it up with the powers that be during Governor’s Rule and get the action proposed against Chandru dropped.

His forensic analysis again helped the government to identify and recover the famous Sivapuram idol from a museum in London.  The people of Tamil Nadu may have reason to remember this signal contribution of his.

The professor came to my rescue as DGP by exposing the alleged photograph showing Dr Subramanian Swamy harbouring a detenu as fabricated and a trick photograph.

The investigation into the allegations against Dr Swamy was proved to be baseless, but this particular finding of Dr. Chandra Sekharan helped convince the then chief minister J.Jayalalithaa that the allegations against Dr Swamy were false. Chandru’s findings were important because there was a serious conspiracy then to frame false charges against Dr. Swamy and put him in prison to cause his demise by getting him beaten up by other prisoners.

(The writer is a former DGP of Tamil Nadu)