Chhattisgarh police take custody of fake cardiologist from MP jail over death of ex-assembly speaker

Bilaspur, May 2 (PTI) The Chhattisgarh police have arrested alleged fake cardiologist Narendra Yadav, alias Narendra John Camm, from a Madhya Pradesh jail over the death of former assembly speaker Rajendra Prasad Shukla, an official said on Friday.
    Yadav had operated upon Shukla at a private hospital here in 2006, following which the ex-speaker died, said police.
    The alleged fake heart specialist was earlier arrested over the death of seven patients after botched surgeries at a hospital in Damoh in MP. He had been lodged in a jail there.
    Yadav was taken into custody from Damoh district jail on Thursday and was brought here on Friday morning after obtaining necessary orders from courts in both states, Bilaspur Senior Superintendent of Police Rajnesh Singh said.
    Shukla, then a Congress MLA from Kota assembly constituency, died in August 2006 at a private hospital in Bilaspur. He had served as the first speaker of the Chhattisgarh legislative assembly from 2000, when the state was carved out from MP, to 2003.
    The former speaker’s son, Pradeep Shukla, recently filed a police complaint, alleging that Yadav was associated with the private hospital when his father was admitted there.
    “Yadav performed the heart surgery on my father, and then he was kept on a ventilator for 18 days before being declared dead on August 20, 2006. The hospital management had taken Rs 20 lakh from the state government for my father's treatment,” the complaint said.
    The Bilaspur police on April 20 booked Yadav and the private hospital under charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder (section 304), and cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
    Police have found Yadav's degree to be fake, and his registration with the Indian Medical Council/Chhattisgarh Medical Council has not been traced yet.
    “All the patients treated by Yadav during his tenure at the private hospital (in Bilaspur) have been included in the investigation. During the investigation, it was found that another patient, Bhagat Ram Dodeja, had also died after being treated by Yadav. The probe is underway to ensure strict punishment to the culprits,” Singh said.
    Yadav was arrested after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) received a complaint claiming seven persons died at the Mission Hospital, Damoh, where he operated on patients in the name of treating heart diseases.
    The director of an Indore-based employment consultancy firm said last month that Yadav had sent his resume three times between 2020 and 2024 for a job by claiming that he had operated on thousands of patients.
    In a 9-page resume sent to the firm in 2024, Yadav had described himself as a senior cardiologist and gave his permanent address as Birmingham in Britain. In the resume, he had also mentioned that he was involved in the operations of thousands of heart patients, including 18,740 for "coronary angiography" and 14,236 for “coronary angioplasty”, the firm's director had said.
    Yadav has called himself a victim of a “big conspiracy” and claimed that his degrees are genuine.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)