Three days after two doctors, a nurse and a sister-in-charge at Maharani Laxmibai Medical College were fired for using an accident victim’s severed leg to prop him up, a blame game has ensued. Multiple versions of what actually transpired in the ward have been doing their rounds. A report in The Hindustan Times said that the staffers at the hospital have refused to blame the doctors for the appalling act and are in fact blaming the person who shot the video.

A five-member internal committee set up by the Jhansi District Magistrate have probed into the matter and have found the hospital guilty of medical negligence. But from the looks of it, the ruckus around it refuses to die down. District Magistrate Shiv Sahay Awasthi himself told The Indian Express that there is still no clarity about who is the actual perpetrator of the act. The hospital is now putting the blame squarely on the person who shot the video. Strangely, the patient Ghanshyam’s family has no recollection of the event and the hospital also claims that the CCTVs were switched off.

The victim Ghanshyam was a bus driver who ferried children to school and back. He got grievously injured when the bus swerved in a bid to avoid crashing into another vehicle. He was wheeled into the emergency ward at Maharani Laxmibai Hospital, but the family alleges that nothing was done to conserve his legs. The amputated leg was not covered in a polythene or preserved in ice.

The family alleges that the patient was not given a pillow for his head and they had to fish out a dirty rag from the dustbin, which was then put under his head. But they have no idea who used the amputated leg as the prop. The principal of the medical college, Dr Sadhna Kaushik refuted the family’s allegation by saying that the injured leg couldn’t be salvaged.

Additionally, the hospital authorities have pinned the blame on Amit Goyal, the proprietor of a Hindi weekly newspaper called Veerangna Times in Jhansi since 2008. They allege that the incident was engineered by the Goyal himself who instigated the family to keep the leg under the patient’s head. A senior administrative staff said that the journo had an axe to grind with the hospital since his father, an ex-faculty member, had sparred with the hospital over clearance of some dues.

Goyal, on the other hand, said that there was no mischief on his part. Apart from taking the video, he had no other role in the appalling incident.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 16, 2018 02:06 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).