‘We were planning to celebrate Diwali together': Father of Bhopal engineer beaten to death by cops recalls last conversation

CCTV shows the 22-year-old student being rounded up by cops and thrashed with stick.

A 22-year-old engineering student died, allegedly after being beaten by police personnel in the early hours of October 10 in Bhopal.

He was identified as Udit, a BTech student at Bhopal’s TIT College. A purported video of the incident showed him being hit with a stick by a policeman while another holds him.

On October 9 evening, Rajkumar Gayake, a Bhopal-based engineer with the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board, asked his son, 22-year-old BTech student Udit Gayake, where he was going. Udit told his father he had some "college work" in the city.

Unknown to his father, Udit had just received a job offer from an IT firm in Bengaluru and was meeting with friends to celebrate.

During the last conversation with his son, Rajkumar didn’t know was he would never hear his son’s voice again.

Hours later, Udit's family received a phone call from one of his friends in Bengaluru, who told them to go to AIIMS (Bhopal). According to a report from The Indian Express, Udit was allegedly beaten to death by policemen that night. His father found his son's body at the hospital with injuries to his head, shoulder, back, groin, and eye.

“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 was quoted by The Indian Express as saying.

The incident was captured on CCTV. In the video, Udit can be seen dancing with his friends in the Piplani area, then later sprinting into a narrow lane with a policeman chasing him; being beaten with a wooden stick.

Cops arrested, sent to judicial custody for 14 days.

Based on the footage, the Bhopal police registered a case of murder against two of their own, constables Santosh Bamaniya and Saurabh Arya, on October 11. On October 12, both the cops were arrested and sent to judicial custody for 14 days.

DSP के साले का ये हाल है प्रदेश में तो आप सोच सकते है आम जनता और छात्रों का क्या हाल होगा

इस युवा एंजीरियर की मौत हो चुकी है 🙏😢 pic.twitter.com/9IgAJsFedk

— Manjeet Ghoshi (@ghoshi_manjeet) October 11, 2025

Udit, a BTech student specializing in Computer Science and Cyber Security at Vellore Institute of Technology in Bhopal, was the youngest member of a large family. His father and three uncles worked as engineers, while 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.”

Urging relatives to eat the meal prepared for Udit’s last rites, Rajkumar was quoted by as saying: “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 he studied up to Class 12, former classmates recall him as an avid football enthusiast who loved playing as a forward.

“He liked adventure, he liked to explore. He recently went to Indore and Pachmarhi with his college group,” Udit’s friend Aditya Vyas told The Indian Express.

'Wanted to start something of his own'

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.”

That Thursday night, 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, adding, “He was a baccha (child). They (police) could have just hit him once and left him.”