Vishal Tomar

Bhopal, Nov. 21: The man accused and later cleared of murdering an Ujjain professor, who fell to student blows in one of the ugliest instances of election violence on campuses, committed suicide yesterday, apparently disillusioned with a “hoax” called politics.

Police said Vimal Tomar, a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the BJP’s student wing, was found hanging in his room by two friends.

The suicide came five years after the death of professor H.S. Sabharwal, who was roughed up during student elections in Ujjain’s Madhav College.

Tomar’s friends in Gwalior, where the 32-year-old had shifted from Bhopal after falling out with senior leaders of the ruling BJP in Madhya Pradesh, said he was bitter over his failure to move up within the party’s youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha.

“He used to say that politics is a hoax,” said Pawan Sharma, Tomar’s friend and one of the few the student leader reportedly spoke to hours before his death.

Sharma said Tomar often wondered why chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and others had turned their back on him even after visiting him in hospital when he was in custody.

What he probably meant was the lack of any special treatment after his acquittal.

A day before his suicide, Tomar had apparently told a friend “rajneeti bari bekar cheez hai, mere dost (politics is a waste, my friend)”.

Tomar had come under the glare after Sabharwal’s death on August 26, 2006. The political science professor had decided to cancel the college union elections after finding some irregularities and had collapsed after being beaten up allegedly by ABVP activists.

A sessions judge later acquitted four accused, including Tomar, after dozens of witnesses turned hostile. The court in Nagpur, where the case had been shifted amid fears of political pressure, regretted that the prosecution had “failed to put up evidence to prove its case”.

Informed sources said Tomar, after his acquittal, started living in Bhopal but soon fell out with BJP leaders, forcing him to move to Gwalior and Shivpuri. He had also been removed from the posts of ABVP organisation secretary and general secretary.

Police sources said he did not leave a suicide note. City superintendent of police Ramji Shrivastava said two of Tomar’s friends who entered his room raised the alarm when they saw him hanging.

Leader of the Opposition Ajay Singh demanded a high-level probe. “The police first said he died of poisoning and now they are saying he died due to hanging. There is something fishy,” the Congress leader, son of the late Arjun Singh, said.

“Tomar was hot-headed and a doer,” said an ABVP office-bearer who did not want to be named. “Perhaps he felt let down by the organisation.”

Sabharwal’s son Himanshu said: “It is sad and shocking to know that Vimal Tomar is dead.”