10 Things To Know About 'Lady Singham' Dipali Chavan-Mohite's Death

Lady Singham Dipali Chavan death case: Harisal Range Forest Officer (RFO) Dipali Chavan-Mohite, who died by suicide on Thursday evening, had accused Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer, Vinod Shivkumar of harassing her. The 28-year-old officer wrote a four-page suicide note addressed to MS Reddy, former Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Field Director of Melghat Tiger Reserve (MTR). In her plea, she requested strict action should be taken against Shivkumar so that nobody else should suffer what she had suffered.

Here are ten things to know about the 'Lady Singham' Dipali Chavan-Mohite's death case:

1. Chavan-Mohite ended life by shooting herself with her service revolver on Thursday last week, accusing Shivkumar, who was her supervising officer, of sexual harassment and torture. She was posted as a Range Forest Officer in the Melghat Tiger Reserve (MRT) in Amravati and had approached Reddy about the issue.

2. Shivkumar is currently in police custody. “The arrest was made on the basis of the suicide note Chavan had left behind in which she had accused Shivkumar of harassing her in the matter of her day-to-day work and had clearly mentioned that he was responsible for her taking the extreme step. Chavan’s husband Rajesh Mohite has filed a police complaint regarding this,” Superintendent of Police Hari Balaji said.

3. The forest officer took this extreme step on Thursday evening after Chavan's mother, who was staying with her, had left for their hometown in Satara and her husband Rajesh, who is working as Treasury Officer at Chikhaldara, went to work.

4. In her purported suicide note, the deceased RFO has mentioned how Shivkumar abused his position and sexually harassed her. She claimed that he had been repeatedly inflicting mental trauma on her for the past few months. As a result, she had reportedly suffered a miscarriage last month.

5. As per reports, Chavan had officially lodged “harassment” complaints against Shivkumar on several occasions in the past. She also pointed out Shivkumar’s alcoholism, his use of abusive and foul language for her in private and public, sexual advances and oblique hints at getting physical in her alleged suicide note.

6. She claimed to have been put on difficult assignments as well. In the note, she mentioned that Shivkumar gave her punishing work schedules and once even held back her salary for a month. “Initially, Shivkumar was being very nice to me but had later started issuing notices to me by believing some local staffers who would mislead him about me. He would frequently threaten to suspend and chargesheet me. When I was doing rehabilitation work in 2-3 villages, Shivkumar would come to the villages and abuse me in front of everyone using foul words. He would never try to understand my position and would force me to do things which were not in conformity with the rules,” Chavan wrote in her suicide note.

7. She has also accused Shivkumar of not allowing her to visit Amravati to be with her family even once during the month. “He asks me to meet him at late hours in the night and speaks to me in obscene language. Many times he called me to the tourist complex and even at the Akot diversion and tried to take undue advantage of my being alone with him. He is punishing me for not submitting to his whims,” she added.

8. As per one of the colleagues, in February 2020, Shivkumar had forced Chavan, who was then pregnant, to accompany him on a gruelling three-day forest patrol and made her walk and drive hundreds of kilometers ignoring her condition.

9. Asked about the accusations in the suicide note, Reddy said, “Chavan and her husband had come to me in September and had orally told me about the alleged harassment by Shivkumar and had sought my intervention. But she didn’t give anything to me in writing. So, I had orally admonished Shivkumar asking him to behave.”

10. Shivkumar was detained at the Nagpur railway station when he was waiting to board a train to Bengaluru.