The last conversation between the father and son happened on Thursday evening.
When father Rajkumar Gayake, a Bhopal-based engineer with Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board, asked Udit where he was headed, his son said he had some work in the city. “He kept saying it was college work,” Rajkumar recalled. “I said okay, come soon.”
He didn’t know that Udit had got a job offer from an IT firm in Bengaluru, and was meeting up with friends to celebrate. What Rajkumar also didn’t know was he would never hear his son’s voice again.
A few hours later, a phone call from Bengaluru led to anxiety. “Go to AIIMS (Bhopal), uncle,” was the caller’s plea. The family did not get more information. “It was a phone call from Udit’s friend in Bengaluru. I went to the hospital and saw my son’s body with injuries on his head, shoulder, back, groin and eye. He was killed like an animal,” Rajkumar said.
Udit was 22 when he died, allegedly following a beating by policemen that night. The chilling sequence was captured on CCTV: Udit dancing with his friends in the Piplani area; sprinting into a narrow lane with a policeman chasing him; being beaten with a wooden stick.
Based on the footage, the Bhopal police on Saturday registered a case of murder against two of their own, constables Santosh Bamaniya and Saurabh Arya. On Sunday, Bamaniya and Arya were arrested and sent to judicial custody for 14 days.
A BTech student of Computer Science and Cyber Security at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in Bhopal, Udit was the youngest in a large family. His father and three uncles were engineers, and his mother and aunts were government school teachers. Struggling to explain the police action, one of those uncles, K K Gayake, said: “Why would we behave rudely with anyone, especially the police? We keep our heads down, stay out of trouble and grow. That’s our culture.”
Story continues below this ad
Speaking softly while urging relatives to eat the meal prepared for Udit’s last rites, a serving of rice and dal, Rajkumar said, “All our children were doing well… We were planning to celebrate Diwali together. Now, my wife is barely conscious, my two daughters are grief-stricken, and I can’t understand why the police would treat my son like a hardened criminal?”
Both of Udit’s sisters are elder to him, engineering graduates and married. At Mount Fort School in Bhopal, where Udit studied till Class 12, former classmates remember him as a football lover, favouring the position of a forward. “He liked adventure, he liked to explore. He recently went to Indore and Pachmarhi with his college group,” said his friend Aditya Vyas.
On weekends, Udit played football with hotel workers near his home. “He used to teach them tactics,” Rajkumar said. “He told them how to play better. Those boys still don’t know that he is dead.”
Although Udit had bagged an IT job in Bengaluru, with a package of Rs 10-15 lakh per annum, what he really wanted was to build a start-up. “He was completing a course to add to his skills,” said Aditya. “He was searching for a Rs 20-lakh package, and wanted to start something of his own later.”
Story continues below this ad
Rajkumar said they were ready to back him. “We are all well-to-do. We would have spent money on his capital,” he said. “He knew we had his back.”
Those close to him describe him as an “over-thinker”, who constantly worried about the future. “He also had a big heart. He would call all of us,” Aditya said. “Even if he had not spoken for months, he would reach out suddenly. He would do anything for his friends.” Once, when Aditya was “going through a breakup”, Udit left his college exam midway. “He stayed with me,” Aditya said. “I wasn’t eating. He spoke to my mother and convinced me to eat.”
That Thursday night (October 9), Udit was with his friends “until about 1 am (Friday)”, Aditya said, adding, “Then everything happened.”
According to police records, CCTV footage purportedly shows constables Bamaniya and Arya intercepting Udit and his friends around 1.30 am. “When we saw the footage, we were shocked and stunned. He was assaulted so brutally,” Rajkumar said. “He was a baccha (child). They (police) could have just hit him once and left him.”
