RAIPUR: A train chugged off where it wasn’t supposed to, railways suffered a Rs 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 – because of a cursory ‘OK’.
The station master had ended an angry phone call with his wife with the word, but it was mistaken for a go-ahead to send a train into Maoist territory, triggering this stranger-than-fiction chain of events.
The station master hails from Visakhapatnam and his now divorced wife is from Durg. Court evidence shows they married on Oct 12, 2011, but the bride was unhappy due to her past relationship with another man, and her confession that she wasn’t over it. This led to friction at home.
Train’s journey into Maoist-hit area cost Railways Rs3cr
The stationmaster 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.
The marriage was already hanging by a thread when, one night, she called the stationmaster 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 the green signal to dispatch a freight train down a restricted route in a Maoist-affected area. Thankfully, there was no accident, yet it was a violation of night-time restrictions, and caused railways a loss of Rs 3 crore.
The stationmaster was suspended. The punishment worsened his marital woes and the officer, now at the end of his tether, filed for divorce in a 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-in-law 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 railwayman appealed to Chhattisgarh high court, his counsel Vipin Kumar Tiwari said.
In a recent judgment, a division bench of Justices Rajani Dubey and Sanjay Kumar Jaiswal deemed the wife’s actions “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 wife failed to give specific details of the dowry. Also, the cruelty charge against the in-laws could not be proved as they did not live with the couple.
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.