Victim recounts hate rants, abuse, threats by RPF train killer in 2016

Years before Railway Protection Force (RPF) constable Chetan Singh killed his senior and three Muslim men aboard the Jaipur-Mumbai Central Superfast Express in a hate crime on July 31, he harassed over the course of several days, and then unlawfully detained, assaulted and threatened to frame a 45-year-old Muslim auto driver in Ujjain as a “terrorist”, the victim of that abuse, Wahid Khan told HT.

The incessant abuse, with constant communal overtones, forced Khan to file a complaint against Singh. An inquiry was launched more than a year after the first complaint, and the policeman was eventually transferred to Bhavnagar in Gujarat.

Khan first came across Singh, who was posted in the dog squad of RPF, in the middle of 2016. He was an auto driver and his usual parking spot was near the “maal godaam”(luggage warehouse) of the Ujjain railway station. “One day, in the middle of 2016, Chetan saw me and asked me my name. There was a viciousness to him but he said nothing at that time. But from then, whenever he saw me, he would get me to take him to far off places for what he called ‘work’. He barely ever paid. Then he started to ask me to pick up things from his house and drop them. Initially I said nothing, but I began to realise he was targeting me,” Khan said.

In late January or early February 2017, as Khan was leaving the railway station to pick up his daughter, then in Class 12 from school, Singh jumped into his auto. “I told him I could not go with him because my daughter was waiting. He started abusing me and calling me a ‘traitor’ and a ‘terrorist’. He was full of hatred and went on a rant. He said Muslims are terrorists and their real place is in jail. It disturbed me, but there was little I could do,” Khan said.

But things came to a head on February 17, 2017. A railway guard known to Khan asked him to pick up his spectacles from a shop in the city, and drop them off at the railway station. Khan said he bought a platform ticket, delivered the glasses, and was on his way out. “Chetan stopped me and started harassing me. He said my activities were suspicious, and I was roaming around the platform with an ulterior motive. I told him why I was there but he didn’t listen. He dragged me to the RPF station, and asked me to sit there,” Khan said.

For an hour, Khan said, Singh kept abusing him, and told him that this was his last day outside of prison. Khan, well known with other RPF personnel, called someone he knew who arrived. “Chetan told him that I had entered without a platform ticket – he had torn it up himself when I showed it to him. But his colleague took me to the inspector in-charge Harsh Chauhan’s room, and the inspector told me I could go,” Khan said.

The next day, Singh spotted Khan again and began assaulting him. “He dragged me to an RPF outpost. He kept hitting me and said he would implicate me in a case. Bystanders intervened. I decided I had to take action,” Khan said.

On February 18, Khan filed a complaint that was marked to RPF officials in Ujjain, officials of the Ratlam division of Railways, and other senior officials that he was harassed for no other reason but his religion. “In the complaint I said he called me a terrorist, thrashed me and threatened to implicate me in a false case.”

Singh stopped harassing Khan after these complaints, but unsure of when he would erupt again, Khan pursued the case, and filed an RTI in September 2017 asking for details of action taken on his complaint. A year after he complained, an inquiry was ordered by the RPF commandant, and a team of RPF officials took Khan’s statement. “I was told they took disciplinary action as per RPF rules. They said they sent him to Kerala for training for a year, and were then transferring him to Bhavnagar. In any case, I didn’t see him after that,” Khan said.

A former RPF inspector, who asked not be named, said, “CIB was probing the complaint, but Khan used to visit to enquire about the action against Chetan. I counselled him and assured action according to rules.”

An RPF sub-inspector, who was part of the team that probed the case and asked not to be named, corroborated this. “Yes, there was a complaint that Chetan Singh had assaulted and abused an auto driver in Ujjain. The victim filed a complaint and CIB probed it. We found that the allegations were true. He also had an altercation with other colleagues and he was transferred. His increment was stopped for six months.”

HT reached out to Western Railways inspector general and principal chief security commissioner PC Sinha, but he could not be contacted despite repeated attempts to do so over phone.

Sumit Kumar, public relations officer for the Western Railways, declined comment citing the ongoing investigation into the killings.

Khan said he read about the case of the shooting in Mumbai in the newspaper, but did not immediately make the connection that this was the same Singh. When he did, he says, he was shocked. “If I had kept pursuing the case, I could have saved four lives.”