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ShareWhen a couple of drunkards trash a car park because they cannot find a privileged spot, they can be characterised as small-minded, and thankfully small-numbered, arriviste boors.
When 40 men slap women around in pubs to champion Indian values, we can reassuringly dismiss them as members of a minority called cave-people. But when 50,000 citizens of a large suburb obstruct commuter trains for hours, thereby disrupting a service on which their livelihoods depend, you will have to call them victims of an endemic desperation.
So, the government railway police's decision to register a case against 32 of the 50,000 Borivili protestors seems to me to be churlish and colossally ineffectual. It is like a hospital ordering a nurse to whip a patient for audaciously contracting pneumonia.
The arrested people were produced in court and were later released on bail bonds. But, curiously, they were booked for 'rioting' and 'creating mischief'.
Many of us would be deeply grateful to the government for showing spine in the face of rioters; it has never happened before, has it?
I do not know if those who smash taxis and raid schools are mischief-makers. They probably are not because, unlike the Borivili 'rioters', the taxi-wreckers and school-stormers are never lathi-charged at the site of the troubles.
To be fair, the police got enough time to be ready for the mischief that clogged the tracks of Borivili station. After all, folks in Borivili have been pleading for more trains to Churchgate for more than two decades! And for some 16 years, a six-track corridor has been festering in the proverbial pipeline. But wait, the authorities have not been all that apathetic. They did increase the number of trains last year, but it was between Churchgate and Virar!
And we all know that the fastidious people of Virar do not like Borivili riff-raff on their trains. In fact, Virar natives want their trains to be clear of riff-raff from any location on the western line.
But what is the explanation for the government's partiality? It probably has to do with the demographics of Virar. The largely lower-middle-class precinct is obviously not as affluent as the middle-class Borivili. Therefore, the government perhaps wants to ameliorate its hard life with some mass-transit indulgence.
And the good people of Virar are model citizens; records show that they vote in larger numbers than the middle-class office-goers and entrepreneurs of Borivili, who pretend to be too busy to vote. Is it a shock then that the railway lines lead to the heart of committed citizenship? The crystal-goblet class of south Mumbai does not need trains.
And it does not really need to suffer the indignity of queuing up at polling stations either. The messages between the rich and the rulers are exchanged over the clink of the correct glasses that dispense whiskeys which sound like Glenn McGrath. Borivili, start voting to get more trains.
