Railway Protection Force (RPF) officials examining ABVP activists who were travelling in the Indore- Kochuveli... Read More

Kozhikode/Kochi: Their aim was apparently to undo the damage done by their senior party colleagues, but they found themselves in trouble after creating a ruckus aboard the train taking them to the state capital.

The railway protection force (RPF) in Kozhikode on Thursday booked 18 Akhila Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad ( ABVP ) workers from Madhya Pradesh for locking the door of the general compartment, ticketless travel and also for stopping the train by pulling the emergency chain.

The workers had boarded the Kochuveli Express from Indore to attend ABVP’s valedictory function of the ‘ Chalo Kerala ’ campaign—raising the slogan, “Kerala is (our) pride, Marxism is horrid and anti-national”— that has been scheduled for Saturday in Thiruvananthapuram.

The RPF said the ABVP workers had been creating nuisance to co-passengers from Indore itself. They locked the door of the compartment from inside to prevent other passengers from boarding at various railway stations.

After a group of passengers in Kannur complained to the RPF that they were prevented from entering the general compartment, the RPF intervened and found that at least 15 of the ABVP workers were travelling without tickets.

“Two men, Sham Kushwaha and Ramdas Sharma, were booked when the train reached Kozhikode,” an RPF officer said. “When the train started from Kozhikode, another man, Sardeep Singh Chauhan, pulled the chain and stopped the train. He, too, was booked.”

Later, the railways collected Rs 11,250 as fine from the ticketless ABVP workers.

“There were only 10-12 Malayalis in the coach. The ABVP activists were shouting Vande Mataram and blaming Kerala. They also shouted that they wanted to take revenge for killing their people in Kashmir,” Vijaya Maria, who alighted at Angamaly, said.

“The berth below mine was occupied by a couple of activists. They were talking loudly until 2.30am-3am, creating a nuisance for the rest of the passengers,”Sherly Cherian, a housewife from Kochi, who arrived by the same train, said.

ABVP leaders said in Thiruvananthapuram that the ‘Chalo Kerala’ campaign was conceived even before the conclusion of BJP’s Janaraksha Yatra. “The open attack against the CPM was often mistaken as a tirade against Kerala as a whole. We want to reiterate that we are proud of Kerala and the criticism is only against the Marxist party,” an ABVP leader said.

ABVP national general secretary Vinay Bidre said over 40,000 workers from across India would attend the valedictory function. (With inputs from T`puram bureau)

