'Sar Tan se Juda': Chilling text to father creates mystery around Bhopal engineering student's death

In what was earlier suspected as a case of suicide, an engineering student from Bhopal was found dead on the railway tracks in nearby Raisen area on Sunday evening. However, a chilling text message received on the phone of student’s father just before his death has added mystery to the incident. 

Nishank Rathore’s father received a text which read: “Guztakh-e-Nabi ki Ek hi Saja, Sar Tan se Juda”. Notably, this is the same slogan which was chanted by the killers who beheaded a tailor in Rajasthan’s Udaipur in broad daylight last month and shot a video of the heinous crime. 

Screenshots of chat between the father and unidentified person is viral on social media. Another text received on Umashankar Rathore’s phone read: “Rathor Sahab, bhut bahadur tha apka beta”, which can be roughly translated into “Rathore sir, your son was very brave". 

The messages were sent from the phone of the 20-year-old student, purportedly just before he died. After an investigation, which involved train timings, CCTV footage and preliminary autopsy, police suspect it a suicide case. 

However, his father claims that Nishank would never kill himself. “Around 5:44 pm, I received a message on WhatsApp from Nishank’s number. It was not a forwarded message but a typed one,” Rathore was quoted by Times of India as saying. 

Nishank was in his fifth semester at an engineering college in Bhopal. He was a native of Seoni-Malwa tehsil in Narmadapuram, around 120 km from Bhopal, and had come to the state capital for his BE degree. 

According to the police, Nishank took a scooter on rent in Bhopal on Sunday and was driving towards Narmadapuram, but seems to have changed his mind and was driving back to the city. His body was found near Midghat railway station in Raisen, exactly halfway between Bhopal and Seoni-Malwa. 

Times of India quoted Raisen Additional SP Amrit Meena saying that around the same time when Nishank’s father received the WhatsApp message, a post was shared from the student’s Instagram with the same lines and one of his old pictures. 

Meena said no injury were above his waist and lower half of the body was cut by the train. Doctors have given a clear opinion that Nishank died after being run over by a train, he added.