Meet bus conductor Ashok Kumar—the murderer who wasn’t

When he was just 15, Ashok Kumar, accidentally fell off the mountain and got severely injured in Ghamroj village on the outskirts of Gurugram. But the pain that he experienced then, according to him, is nothing compared to what he underwent after he was accused of attempting to sexually assault a seven-year-old student of Ryan International School and brutally killing him.

“It (the accusations) shattered me completely,” he says, tears about to roll down his face.

Seven-year-old Pradyuman Thakur was brutally murdered in early September last year, in the washroom a School in Gurugram. The child’s throat was slit using a sharp weapon and Haryana Police apparently found a knife in the sink, which they declared was used by bus conductor Ashok Kumar to murder Pradyuman. Kumar, the police claimed, had stolen the knife from the toolkit of the bus. The mystery of the murder was solved, claimed Gurugram Police.

The police’s theory was based on the blood stains on the conductor’s clothes, and Ashok even accepted committing the crime with the media panning its camera towards him, showing the face of a man who had just brutally murdered a child after failing in his attempts to sodomise him, as per the police’s claims. But soon, the simple looking murder case turned mysterious.

Gardener Harpal, who was present at the spot, claimed that the blood stains on Kumar’s clothes were the outcome of him helping the school management in taking the injured body to the car, on the instructions of school teachers. Soon Saurabh Raghav, the driver of the bus on which Ashok was deployed, said, “there was no knife in the toolkit of the bus”. Ashok’s lawyer Mohit Verma and his family members too came out in the media and claimed that the conductor’s confession was ‘extracted under pressure and under the influence of drugs’. Soon, everything started to look fishy.

After vehement protests by the kin of the deceased child, the case was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation. CBI’s stance from the start came as a relief to the conductor and his neighbours. In the charge sheet filed by the investigating agency, Ashok has been granted a clean chit.

“Gurugram Police’s severe beatings to extract confession and their fear has gripped Ashok in such a manner that he rarely moves out of his house. The police will beat him up, he says,” said one of his uncles to National Herald. “He doesn’t even get proper sleep and doesn’t eat properly either,” he added.

“Jau to kaha jau? Koi kaam bhi nahi hai abhi, toh ghar pe hi rehta hu (Where would I go? I don’t even have a job, so I stay at my home),” Ashok tells NH. After getting out on bail, he spends most of his time with his family and sometimes sits alone in a temple barely 100 metres from his house, completely aloof from others. “Ab bhi darr sa hai aur dard bhi abhi bhi hai (I’m still scared, and the physical pain is still there too),” he informs. “He still cannot sit on the ground due to the beating given by the police, it hurts him so much,” adds Kela Devi, Ashok’s mother.

Although he willingly talks about some of his physical pain, he abstains from talking about the case. “He rarely talks about it. It is not about the physical pain he is going through, but the mental trauma. It still haunts him,” his wife Mamta informs, while she cooks breakfast for their children who are about to leave for school. As time for school draws near, Ashok joins his wife in helping her prepare roti (bread).

Before joining the Bhondsi branch of Ryan school, Ashok was working with Vivek Bharti School in his village Ghamroj. He was being paid ₹5,000 for the job but “was being made to overwork”. His friends in Ghamroj were employed at Ryan International School and it was they who informed him of the bus conductor’s job, where he would earn ₹7,500. Financial crunches left him with no choice but to take up the job. But as it turned out, not everything that glitters is gold and in his case, it turned out to be “a decision that changed everything”.

“Parmatma ne naseeb me ye din dikhana likha tha to dekhna pada (God had destined for me to go through this and so I am),” he says with a sardonic smile.

Family of six (his parents, wife and two kids along with him) today just has one man working and earning the day’s meal; his old father. “Unke bas ki nahi hai kaam, lekin majboori hai (he isn’t capable of working anymore, but it is a compulsion)”. His father earns ₹4,000 and both his parents get senior citizen pension of ₹1,800 each. Of this, ₹1,500 goes for his children’s school fees and with the rest, they “manage somehow”.

This man falsely accused of the brutal murder of an innocent kid, had saved his friend’s life in 1990 when he was just 15, by putting his own life in danger. “We were breaking rocks on the mountain and suddenly, I noticed that the hollow rocks and boulders were about to fall from the mountain above. My friend was completely unaware of it and I forced him to go down using the steep way in which only one of us could have fit in. As soon as I forced him to leave, the rocks fell from above and I fell from the mountain,” he narrates.

Media, which was seen hounding the conductor when he was released on bail, forcing him to “answer one more question” even while the man was in such terrible physical condition that he was barely able to stand, forgot all about him, now that he is no longer a source from which to gain TRPs.

When asked why he was caught for Pradyuman’s murder, when there were others present at the scene as well, he just concedes that “only the Gurugram Police knows that”.

Indeed, only the Gurugram Police knows why a man now lives permanently scarred by the trauma of being accused of a heinous crime which, the CBI notes, he did not commit.