Vadodara: Even as the railway minister has ordered a probe in to the incident of chaos on Vadodara station of central Gujarat last night during the train based movie promotion tour of actor Sharukh Khan, in which one person died of heart attack, Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) Amit Kumar Singh today said that if police would not have controlled the mob in time there could have been a bigger tragedy.

The Vadodara DRM dismissed the allegation from some quarters that the incident was caused owing to use of force by police. He also rejected the criticism that there was not appropriated arrangement of force for the event.

Singh said that the incident took place soon after the train started moving out of the platform number 6. ‘People actually rushed towards the moving train to have a glimpse of the actor on board or getting a chance to shake hands with him one more time. Now, if the police had not controlled the mob a major tragedy could have taken place. You can imagine what could have happened if a large crowd would have pushed towards a running train uncontrollably. So police acted judiciously to keep people away from the moving train and averted a big tragedy,’ he said.

He said that the DG-RPF is investigating the whole matter now.

The DRM said that apart from the one dead, who was a heart patient, two police constables of GRP Jitendra Thakor (51) and Nagin Rana (45) also fell unconscious during the chaos have been admitted to hospital. ‘One of them is doing good while the condition of the other is said to be critical,’ he said.

Shahrukh had yesterday boarded August Kranti Express from Mumbai to go to Hazarat Nizamuddin station in Delhi to promote his upcoming movie Raees, reportedly based on the life of Ahmedabad based bootlegger don Abdul Lateef. The train arrived on platform number 6 of Vadodara station at 1022 pm last night and halted for around 10 minutes. Vadodara based cricketer brothers Irfan Pathan and Yusuf Pathan had also met the actor in the train.

Three AC coaches of the train were reportedly booked for the movie promotion.

Now questions are also being raised about this kind of ‘risky’ promotion tactics endangering lives of fans and other commuters.

DeshGujarat