The Supreme Court has stayed the extradition of psychiatrist Dr Omesh Chandra Kashyap, who had helped expose Canada’s first and the world’s biggest paedophilia scandal involving the Roman Catholic Church, and who was himself accused decades later of sexual assault of his patients, on grounds of which Canada sought his extradition.

The apex court has now stayed the extradition of the 77-year-old doctor, the sanction for which was granted by a trial court and upheld by the Delhi High Court. Issuing a notice to the government, a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Navin Sinha sought to know “why the matter should not be remanded for reconsideration by the Union of India”.

Dr Kashyap, who was a practising psychiatrist in St John’s in Newfoundland in the 1970s, contended that the government had not taken into account the “circumstances” that had led to the extradition request. In order to know the circumstances, the Indian Express went through records before the additional chief metropolitan magistrate (ACMM), Patiala House Courts, who had conducted the extradition enquiry.

In 1967, Kashyap had moved to St John’s, a town that had an orphanage, Mount Cashel Boys’ Home, run by a respected 200-year-old Roman Catholic lay order, the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada (CBIC). In the mid-1970s, following allegations of physical and sexual abuse at the orphanage, Kashyap was in 1976 “asked to submit the Psychiatry Report for a child’s wardship to the Court of Judge Reid… The petitioner having examined the said child, submitted a report, which exposed the widespread beatings and sexual abuses of the children in distress”.

The incidents of abuse, however, were prevented from coming out in the open by alleged cover-ups. It hit the headlines in 1989, when Michael Harris, editor of the Sunday Express weekly in St John’s, interviewed a victim. Amid widespread anger, the orphanage was closed, sold and demolished. Many more CBIC assets faced liquidation proceedings to enable payment of court-ordered compensation to the victims. Many priests were arrested, and St John’s archbishop Alphonsus L Penney forced to resign.

In 1991, Kashyap returned to New Delhi, a decision he would later attribute to “widespread resentment against him” for testifying against officials of the local government, police and the church before a Royal Commission, headed by retired Justice Samuel H S Hughes, in 1991. The commission report endorsed the cover-up charges.

In the ACMM court, Kashyap submitted a book by journalist Harris, Unholy Order, Tragedy at Mount Cashel, that mentions his role in exposing the scandal. In the ACMM court, Kashyap contended that “the present case is an issue of political and religious persecution and a depravity of unthinkable magnitude… falsely implicated in the instant matter out of vengeance and gigantic scandal in the year 1975-76”.

He offered to be tried in India if need be. In 2003, the Indian government received the extradition request from the Canadian High Commission. Kashyap had been charged on four counts — one each of indecent assault and gross indecency and two of sexual assault — on three of his former patients.

St John’s

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