If only he wore Grandpa on his sleeve

Worse, father Mahinder Mishra had to run from one police station to another for nearly six hours to lodge a missing report about his son. No one seemed interested. Until anxiety and frustration made him call the PMO: he is Atal Behari Vajpayee’s nephew.

They all woke up then — the police, railways and state. Ninenty minutes after a missing report was entered, they found Manish. Dead on the tracks near Mathura’s Kosi Kalan.

At the Mishra home, Manish’s parents and relatives can’t believe how 60 people in the coach remained mute spectators. Manish’s uncle Raj Mishra shakes his head: ‘‘Nobody tried to stop it. If only somebody had intervened, Manish would have been alive today. He was lying near the crossing from 6 pm to 2 pm the next day. Nobody said a word.’’

At 6 pm Saturday, after his son failed to return home, Mahinder called up the police control room but didn’t get any response. Thinking his son, a second year science student at BSA college, may have stayed over at a friend’s house in Mathura, he decided to wait until Sunday. But when there was no sign of his son, Mishra went to lodge a missing persons report at Kosi Kalan around 7 am. ‘‘I first tried Kosi Kalan. There they told me to go to Mathura. I went to Civil Lines. But they told me to go to Krishna Nagar since my son’s college is there. And there they asked me for an application and a picture of my son,’’ said Mishra.

‘‘My child was missing. They should have just filed a report… so I called the PMO.’’ The report was lodged at 12.30 pm and by 2 pm Manish’s body was found near a railway crossing.

He had been beaten up and thrown out of a general coach of the Chhattisgarh Express by a group of 12 men who had boarded from Meerut. The men, allegedly in an inebriated condition, had been teasing three girls.

On Tuesday, politicians made a beeline to Kosi Kalan. Railway minister Nitish Kumar was followed by Rajnath Singh, a string of UP ministers and MLAs and finally Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav who gave Rs 2 lakh compensation to Manish’s parents and Rs 1 lakh to Rakesh, the other youth to be hurled off the train but fortunate to have escaped with injuries. Manish lived in a modest two room house in the Jindal Factory campus at Kosi Kalan. His father Mahinder is an executive (commercial) who looks after the yard. Many in the neighbourhood found out about the family’s ties with the PM only after he visited them on Monday.

‘‘We don’t drop Vajpayee’s name. Nor have we taken any help from him. Nobody knew he was the PM’s nephew. Whatever we have, it’s because of hard work,’’ said Raj Mishra. The only sign of being related to the PM is a photograph of Vajpayee in the family album.

Meanwhile, it’s now learnt that two GRP men were travelling in the adjacent coach, attending to a magistrate. Additional Director General of Police (Railways) B K Bhalla has been asked to conduct an inquiry into the incident.

‘‘Nobody raised an alarm or pulled the emergency chain even after the first person (Rakesh) was hurled. They were all silent spectators. The GRP personnel too had no idea what whas happening in the next coach. Had they reacted then, at least they could have stopped Manish from being thrown off. He was the second to be hurled, 7 km later,’’ an official said.

The guard of the train, whose van was attached to the unreserved coach, got off the train at Kosi Kalan and reported the incident. ‘‘A message was sent to Mathura GRP, the main railway police station for the area. Even at that time, no GRP personnel or railway staff got on to the train to check. The train was allowed to leave Kosi Kalan,’’ sources said.