How a station master’s OK sent train & his life on wrong track

How a station master’s OK sent train & his life on wrong track

Partha.Behera@timesofindia.com 07.11.2024 TIMES OF INDIA CHENNAI 

Raipur : A train chugged off where it wasn’t supposed to, railways suffered a ₹3-crore loss, a station master was suspended, and a divorce battle dragged on for 12 years from Visakhapatnam to Supreme Court and Chhattisgarh’s Durg — all because of an ‘OK’. The station master had said ‘OK’ to his wife during a fight over a phone call, which was mistaken for the green light to send a train into Maoist territory, triggering this strangerthanfiction chain of events. 

The station master hails from Visakhapatnam and his now divorced wife is from Durg. They married on Oct 12, 2011, but within a few days, it was evident that it wasn’t going to be a blissful ever-after. From court evidence, it’s learned that the bride was unhappy with the wedding due to her past relationship with another man, and her confession that she wasn’t over it. This led to friction at home. The station master appealed to her parents, who gave assurances, but the woman never stopped communicating with her lover. She would call him even with her husband sleeping right next to her, leaving him feeling insulted. 

The marriage was hanging by a thread when, one night, she called the station master when he was on duty and they again quarrelled. Since he was at work, he ended the call by saying, “We’ll talk at home, OK?” He didn’t realise that his work microphone was on. His colleague on the other end only heard the ‘OK’ and mistook it as green signal to dispatch a freight train down a restricted route in a Maoist affected area. 

Dowry, cruelty charge turns out to be false 

Thankfully, there was no accident, yet it was a violation of night-time restrictions, and caused railways a loss of ₹3 crore. The station master was suspended. The punishment worsened his marital woes and the officer, now at the end of his tether, filed for divorce in Visakhapatnam family court. His wife filed a complaint under IPC section 498A (cruelty and harassment) against him, his 70-year-old father, his elder brother, who is a govt employee, sister-inlaw and maternal cousins. Saying she feared for her life, the woman moved Supreme Court and managed to get the case transferred to Durg. When the Durg family court rejected his divorce petition, the railway man appealed to Chhattisgarh high court, his counsel, Vipin Kumar Tiwari, said. 

In a recent judgment, a division bench of Justice Raja ni Dubey and Justice Sanjay Kumar Jaiswal deemed the wife’s actions as ‘cruelty’, reversed the family court judgment and granted the man divorce. HC found that the wife had falsely accused her husband of having an affair with his sister-in-law. The dowry and cruelty complaint also turned out to be false. The division bench granted the husband divorce while noting that the wife’s arguing with him on the phone, which led to the ‘OK’ incident, the filing of false reports, and making baseless accusations constituted mental cruelty towards him.