Railway minister reverses bihar train halts cancellation order.
Thousands of villagers in Bihar, angry over the railway ministry’s withdrawal of remote train stoppages, torched three trains and a station, and uprooted tracks about 30 km from Patna on Monday. There were conflicting reports about injuries, with one news agency putting the figure at 30.
Railway officials said that the protesters first ransacked and torched the Khusrupur station, then set fire to the Danapur-Jainagar Intercity Express and uprooted tracks. The mob then attacked the Rajgir-Danapur passenger train at the nearby Baikatpur village, setting a few bogies ablaze. Later in the day, a crowd torched an air-conditioned coach of the Danapur-Darbhanga Intercity Express at Fathua station near Patna.
The incidents coincided with Mamata Banerjee’s first day at work as the new railway minister. The provocation for the villagers was the ministry’s abrupt cancellation of a scheduled halt of the Shramjeevi Express at Khusrupur, which falls under the Danapur division of East Central Railway.
Banerjee was quick to reverse an order of the Railway Board to cancel 33 scheduled halts of express trains in Bihar and order a departmental enquiry since the anger was directed against her. The villagers assumed that it was she who “must have ordered the halts cancelled, since she is from Bengal, unlike the previous minister, Lalu Prasad, who was from Bihar.”
“As railway minister I am not in favour of withdrawing any facility and it (cancellation of the halts) has been done locally without the consent of my ministry,” Banerjee said. She said she had spoken to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and clarified that neither she nor her ministry had issued any instruction for the withdrawal of the halts.
Absolving Banerjee, Prasad said: “She probably did not even know that this had been done. Whatever the case, this type of violent protest is not correct.”
Mamata smells conspiracy
Railway minister Mamata Banerjee said there could be a conspiracy behind the Bihar violence and ordered a departmental inquiry into the incident. Asserting that the train stoppages will continue as per the existing schedule at Bihar’s Khusrupur station, she said she had done nothing that could provoke such violence. “Just because I am from Bengal, it doesn’t mean I will remove facilities from other states. I don’t like it. I have never done it. But what people have done to malign us is not right.”
What sparked the incident
With Lalu Prasad out of the railway ministry, the Railway Board had planned to put nearly all the 250 halts, including 100 unauthorised ones, created during his ministerial stint under the scanner. The board had asked the East Central Railway (Hajipur) to examine the economic viability of these halts and if found commercially unviable, to initiate steps to close them down. The halts were creating hurdles in the smooth running of the trains, said ECR’s general manager Girish Bhatnagar.
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