This incident happened when I was in my second year of college. Dad was posted in Jamnagar and I was studying in Hyderabad. So during holidays I went to Jamnagar and this happened on the return trip.
I was in a reserved compartment and we were all about to go to sleep when the train stopped at a station. I don’t remember the name of that station, but all of a sudden, we had hundreds of Shiv Sena workers who got into the compartment. No one understood what had happened for a few minutes. Then we saw the TTE being lifted and passed over to another compartment and he was fully drunk, not in his senses. The train started and soon these Shiv Sainiks started to sit down, asked people to pull down the middle berth and sit rather than go to sleep.
When they came to the seat I was sitting on, I refused to get up and I told the person who was in the middle seat not to pull down his berth. I argued and fought and just loudly told them not to disturb me, that it was a reserved compartment and they had no business to be in there. I slept through the night and in the early hours, all of them got off at a station near Nashik where there was a big gathering taking place. Many of them came and told me “Jhansi Ki rani, namaste, hum jaa rahe hain” and I told them if I was really Jhansi Ki rani, they would have been dead not alive 🙂
Ofcourse as soon as they all got off, and normalcy was restored, a lot of the older folks told me I was foolish and that I should not have argued. I was naive and told them that at worst they could have raped me and that I wasn’t scared. I really wasn’t scared. And while these Shiv Sainiks broke every rule, they didn’t steal a thing, they never hurt anyone, they didn’t even try to harm me… Just wanted a free ride to the gathering in Nashik… Very interesting and maybe because of that I didn’t feel scared.
Cut to yesterday and AAP in Mumbai or their behaviour last week… How different was it from this incident that happened 26 years ago in 1988 ? An AAP member was offended yesterday that the Mumbai incident was called a rampage, and that it was just inconvenience. That train ride in 1988 for most people was scary – even when the Shiv Sainiks didn’t do anything except break the rule and sit in a reserved compartment. It was a rampage and a mob and people got more than inconvenienced.
How different is AAP ? Just saying you are different and being insistent doesn’t make you different. Grow up.