The former army officer had left Army ten years back.
The unexplained murder of a former Army officer on Friday has brought to the fore the series of misfortunes he had over the years, which forced him to live on footpath.
The 65-year-old Ravindra Bali, a former officer of the Corps of Electronic and Mechanical Engineers (EME), was murdered by two unidentified men outside the main gate of the Southern Command Officers’ mess on Koyaji Road in Pune camp, his home for about five years, in the early hours of Friday.
As of now, the police have little clue about the murder. “We are working on a number of angles and have not yet been able to zero down on one motive. Attempts are on to identify the assailants. We are probing if there was any past rivalry or any recent dispute, which could have led to the murder. There is also a possibility of it being a spur-of-the-moment incident,” Police Inspector S K Yadav of Lashkar police station, who is probing the case, said on Saturday.
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According to army sources, Bali, a graduate of the National Defence Academy, had faced a court martial and was dismissed from service in 1989 over allegations of “moral turpitude”. Details of the case were not immediately available.
“Bali joined the National Defence Academy in 1970 and also did training at the College of Military Engineering in Pune. He was commissioned in Corps of EME around 1975. He faced a court martial over moral turpitude and was cashiered around 1989, after 14 years of service,” an army official, who did not to be identified, told The Indian Express.
“His first wife is known to have committed suicide. His second wife left him after staying with him for a brief period. For some time, he was in Gujarat and later, he is also known to have been involved in a dispute over an ancestral property. We know that the last job he did was in a BPO. After that, he started living on the footpath. The Army had made several attempts to help him but he always refused help and preferred to live on footpath,” the officer said.
He added: “However, someone from the Army mess used to give him food for at least once a day. It is sad that he met with his end like this.” Bali, said to be the son of a police officer, was a familiar sight on the footpath outside the main gate of the Southern Command Officers’ mess but did not interact much with people. He was often seen reading newspapers though. Sometimes, he also used to disappear for days.
Last year, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, himself an NDA alumni, had tried to get in touch with him to offer help after he was informed about Bali’s condition. But Bali could not be found at the spot he used to be seen at.