Photo: World8115 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
A 48-year-old man has died after an argument over a seat reserved for senior citizens on a Delhi Metro train turned violent at Supreme Court station, and Delhi Police have arrested a former IAS officer and his son in the case. Police said the incident took place on October 8, and that both accused have since been sent to jail.
The dead man has been identified as Pawan Sharma. The accused are retired IAS officer Sanjay Pratap Singh and his son Siddharth Singh, who police sources said is a lawyer practising in the Supreme Court.
What the complaint says
The case rests on a complaint filed by Mr Sharma’s mother, Durga Sharma, who was travelling with him. According to her account in the FIR, the two of them were sitting on the seats set aside for senior citizens when two men, one older and one younger, boarded the train at Supreme Court station and rudely asked them to get up.
She said her son told the men there was no need to speak that way and that they would give up the seats. The older man then allegedly grabbed him by the collar and slapped him, and when he objected, the younger man allegedly held him by the neck and punched him in the chest several times.
Mr Sharma was pushed during the scuffle, fell to the floor of the train and suffered head injuries, the complaint says. Metro staff took him by ambulance to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Hospital, where he was declared dead.
Charges and the accused
The FIR was registered on October 9 at the Supreme Court Metro police station under Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which covers culpable homicide not amounting to murder, read with Section 3(5), which deals with acts done with common intention. The allegations have not yet been tested in court.
Police sources said Sanjay Pratap Singh had earlier been arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation in a bribery case, which reports place in 2015, when he was serving with the Delhi government.
What happens next
Police said they are investigating the circumstances that led to the altercation, and that further details of the sequence of events are still being established. The case will move to the courts once the investigation is complete.
The death has drawn wide attention because it began with an everyday dispute over a reserved seat, the kind of argument many commuters on the city’s crowded Metro network will recognise.
