'Hang them where they killed my son'

Kolar: S Manjunath's parents want justice. Their son, an IIM graduate and an employee with the Indian Oil Corporation, was brutally murdered when he blew the whistle on a fuel adulteration racket at a petrol station in Uttar Pradesh?s Lakhimpur Kheri district.

When he raised the stink about the malpractices going on at the petrol pump and ordered the closure of the station, he was shot dead by the pump owner Monu Mittal.

A family shattered

His death has left his Karnataka-based middle-class family shattered. His mother Pramila is inconsolable and his aged grandmother in a state of numb shock.

"They (the killers) should be hanged at the same petrol bunk where my son was murdered in public view," a livid M Shanmugam, Manjunath's father said.

Shanmugam , who is a manager at Bharat Earth Movers Ltd and lives in Kolar, says his son was aware of the dangers of his profession but never flinched from his duties.

"My son was a very calm, very honest and very obedient person and he had never harmed anybody, but the reward he got for all his good qualties was the heinous crime committed and I don't want it to happen to anybody of his calibre" Pramila said.

For Manjunath's brother Raghavendra, it's his brother's trophies from the IIM that will be the only constant reminders of his absence.

"He was always very honest, very jovial. But for the last one month whenever he called he didn't speak for long," Raghavendra said.

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Manjunath's teachers at IIM-Lucknow described him as a student with a difference.

"Manjunath was not a typical IIM student, he was a boy with a heart. He had shared with me the problems he was facing in his job and that they were never tought about such issues and the ways to tackle them," Dr Debashish Chatterjee, a professor at IIM-L said.

Manjunath was, infact, the first IOC employee to blow the whistle on the petrol station owned by Sulakshan K Mittal and run by his son Monu.

He had conducted a surprise check on Mittal's pump to investigate if the outlet was selling the right quality and quantity of fuel. When he found out that the station was selling adulterated fuel, he ordered the closure of the station.

A mission for the vision

His friends now want to start a web campaign to fight for justice and protection of similar individuals who risk their lives for a cause.

Manjunath is being dubbed as Karnataka's Satyendra Dubey.

Satyendra Dubey was the civil engineer involved with the Golden Quadrilateral road-linking project.

He was shot dead in Bihar's Gaya district by the construction mafia after he blew the whistle on poor quality material being used in the crucial project.

And even as the Whistleblower Bill gets drafted and re-drafted at the Centre, more Dubeys and Manjunaths are at stake.