Dec. 25: Alerted by a couple of calls from Calcutta soon after he returned home from Delhi yesterday, Laloo Prasad Yadav has taken “serious note” of the molestation bid on female members of a Jammu-based theatre group on the Himgiri Express when it was passing through Bihar.
Four senior police officers, including DIG Ravindra Kumar, were summoned to 1, Anne Marg, Patna, and put on the case, with instructions to crack down on miscreants on trains. Ravindra Kumar admitted that a gang on the Howrah-bound Himgiri Express had started teasing the women two stations before Patna early on Tuesday.
When the male members of Natrang protested, the goons beat them up, knocking director Balwant Thakur unconscious. He was admitted for a day to a nursing home in Salt Lake with a damaged right eye. Braving the assault, Natrang staged Ghumayee at Nandikar’s National Theatre Festival in Calcutta on Wednesday evening.
The goons who got off at Patna station had threatened to intercept the theatre group on its return journey. And despite assurances from authorities in Calcutta, the Natrang members fear the worst. “We have to board the same train (Himgiri Express) tomorrow night. Those people are capable of anything,” said Neeraj Kant, a member of the Jammu group.
Rudraprasad Sengupta of Nandikar sought the help of D.C. Vajpai, director-general of West Bengal Police today. “We also gave them two names of the assailants the Natrang members could recall (Mukesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar) and also their berth numbers,” said Sengupta.
“We will escort the theatre group in our area and we have alerted police in Bihar and Jharkhand to make security arrangements,” said Narayan Chandra Ghosh, inspector-general of police (headquarters).
Thakur, a former secretary with the J&K government, expressed doubts about the Bihar police bringing the culprits to book. And with good reason, too. As a senior railway officer at Danapur told The Telegraph, “In this section, rowdy elements with political connections harass passengers regularly and get away with it.”
