India
Station master’s ‘OK’ sends a train, his life on the wrong track – Times of India
The station master had ended an angry telephone conversation with his wife with this word, but it was mistaken as a green light to send a train into Maoist territory, setting in motion this stranger-than-fictional chain of events.
The station master is from Visakhapatnam and his now divorced wife is from Durg. Court evidence shows that they married on October 12, 2011, but the bride was unhappy due to her previous relationship with another man and her admission that she was not over it. This led to friction at home.
The train journey to the Maoist-affected area cost the railways Rs3cr
The station master appealed to her parents, who gave guarantees, but the woman never stopped communicating with her lover. She even called him when her husband was sleeping next to her.
The marriage was already hanging by a thread when one evening she called the station master when he was on duty and they had another argument. Since he was at work, he ended the conversation by saying, “We’ll talk at home, okay?”
He didn’t realize his work microphone was on. His colleague on the other end of the line only heard the ‘OK’ and mistook it as the green signal to send a freight train on a restricted route in a Maoist-affected area. Fortunately, there was no accident, but still it was a violation of night restrictions and caused a loss of Rs 3 crore to the railways.
The station master was suspended. The punishment aggravated his marital problems and the officer, now at the end of his rope, filed for divorce at the Visakhapatnam Family Court. His wife filed a complaint under IPC section 498A (cruelty and intimidation) against him, his 70-year-old father, his elder brother, who is a government servant, his sister-in-law and maternal cousins.
The woman said she feared for her life, went to the Supreme Court and managed to have the case transferred to Durg. When the Durg family court rejected his divorce petition, the railwayman appealed to the Chhattisgarh high court, said his counsel Vipin Kumar Tiwari.
In a recent judgment, a division bench of Justices Rajani Dubey and Sanjay Kumar Jaiswal held the woman’s actions as ‘cruelty’ and quashed the case. judgment of the family court and granted the man a divorce.
HC found that the woman had falsely accused her husband of having an affair with his sister-in-law. The dowry and cruelty complaint was also found to be false. The woman did not provide specific details about the dowry. Moreover, the charge of cruelty against the in-laws could not be proven as they did not live with the couple.
The division bench granted the husband’s divorce but noted that the wife’s argument with him on phone, which led to the ‘OK’ incident, filing false reports and leveling baseless allegations of mental cruelty against him formed.
