Rub­bing salt on the wounds of the fam­ily, al­ready strug­gling to come to terms with the sad demise of their il­lus­tri­ous mem­ber Prof S A R Gee­lani who died of a mas­sive heartache, the Delhi po­lice, ap­par­ently with ‘in­struc­tions from above’ was at their heart­less best by forc­ing the fam­ily to give per­mis­sion for an au­topsy on his body be­fore be­ing taken to his an­ces­tral home in Kash­mir.

WHILE it may be a tech­ni­cal re­quire­ment to con­duct a post-mortem prior to air­lift­ing of a dead body, the Delhi po­lice and the Delhi ad­min­is­tra­tion and the hos­pi­tal au­thor­i­ties should have shown more pre­pared­ness and sen­si­tiv­ity while han­dling the case of Pro­fes­sor S A R Gee­lani.

The trauma that the fam­ily went through on the roads, with the po­lice pock­et­ing the keys of the am­bu­lance is shame­ful, to say the least. All plead­ings by the fam­ily mem­bers did not yield any­thing. The po­lice per­son­nel kept on pass­ing the buck from one of­fi­cer to an­other.

When will In­dian ad­min­is­tra­tion gov­ern­ment arrange to teach hos­pi­tal and po­lice per­son­nel how to han­dle the dead with dig­nity?