Mumbai: “A man in police uniform, holding a rifle and looking angry, approached me and said: ‘Is desh mein rehna hoga toh Jai Mata Di kehna hoga (If you want to live in this country, you must say Jai Mata Di).’ Out of fear, I said ‘Jai Mata Di’ softly.
He told me to say it loudly or he would shoot me there and then. His rifle was pointed towards me. I caught hold of it and pointed it upwards and asked him, ‘Who are you?’ He replied: ‘Let go of the rifle or I’ll shoot you.’ I let go and he left, saying he’ll be back.”
This was the testimony recorded on Monday at the Dindoshi sessions court, by a passenger travelling on the Jaipur-Mumbai Superfast Express on July 31, 2023, when Railway Protection Force (RPF) jawan Chetan Singh Chaudhary allegedly shot dead four passengers. Chaudhary was on escort duty on the train that night and the victims were his senior and three identifiably Muslim passengers.
The RPF jawan, then 33, was subsequently dismissed from service. He is currently lodged at the Thane Central JaIl, from where he appeared in court on Monday via video conferencing.
The witness, whose identity is being withheld due to safety concerns, identified Chaudhary, and said emphatically during her cross-examination by advocate Jaywant Patil: “He came to me because I was wearing a burqa. We don’t say `Jai Mata Di’, that’s why he forced me to do so.”
The confrontation between Chaudhary and the witness took place in coach B3 at 5.30am, when the latter woke up to use the washroom, she said. Later, when the train halted at Borivali, she got off with her two children. On the platform, she saw dead bodies and realised what had happened in the train. But she and her children quickly left with her husband who’d come there to pick them up, she told public prosecutor Sudhir Sapkale in her examination-in-chief.
So traumatised was she that she refused to go to the police station to record her statement, the witness said. Even calls from the police were attended to by her husband. Finally, the police visited her house on August 6, 2023 to record her statement, she said.
The witness also identified the rifle that Chaudhary had pointed at her. But when the defence lawyer asked if she could have identified the weapon among a collection of rifles, she replied, “If similar looking rifles had been shown to me, I may not have been able to identify it.”
When Patil asked her if she had seen Chaudhary’s face on the news after the incident, she replied, “Yes, I’d seen him on the news and told my husband: ‘That’s him’.”
Last week, a passenger had testified how he had confronted Chaudhary when the latter pointed his rifle towards the passenger’s burqa-clad wife.