Latest news with #GeorgeFernandes
The Print
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Print
India paid for ignoring warnings in 1965 war. It can't afford to repeat those mistakes today
'There were no concentration of troops on the Pakistani side and no battle indicators of war or even limited skirmishes,' then-XV corps commander Lieutenant-General Kishan Pal told Unified Headquarters in Srinagar on 24 May 1999. The 'situation was local and would be defeated locally.' Even though commanders across the Kargil sector were reporting that troops were being fired on across the Line of Control, from Mashkoh and Dras to Batalik and the gates of the Siachen glacier, their Generals lined up behind the Minister. 'Forty-eight hours,' Defence Minister George Fernandes confidently proclaimed to the nation: 'The intruders will be evicted in 48 hours.' The previous night, on 14 May 1999, Captain Saurabh Kalia and five soldiers—Arjun Ram, Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram, and Naresh Singh—had disappeared on their way up the Kaksar River to Bajrang Post on the Line of Control. Their bodies were returned weeks later, bearing evidence of their torture: cigarette burns, fractures, and amputated genitalia. Last week, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan made the courageous decision to tell a nation in denial that India had lost combat jets on the first night of the 100-hour war with Pakistan: 'Why they were down, what mistakes were made—that are [sic.] important,' he explained. Those errors, General Chauhan went on, were examined during a 48-hour pause in Indian Air Force offensive operations before it resumed long-range strikes. Even if there has been needless coyness in matters of details, the importance of this truth-telling cannot be overstated. The summer of war Last week, six decades ago, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, the largest political party in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, called on citizens to join the army of Razakars, who were preparing a guerrilla campaign to seize Kashmir from India. The government of the so-called Azad Kashmir ordered all men aged between 16 and 45 years to undergo military training. Local clerics called for jihad, new camps were set up to train volunteers, and units of Pakistan's Frontier Corps began to be moved into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir from the border with Afghanistan. Amazingly, no one in India seemed to hear the words being broadcast on loudspeakers across the ceasefire line, now known as the Line of Control. From the end of July, nine columns of irregulars and troops—each made up of several hundred men—made their way into the heart of Kashmir almost unnoticed. Later, Indian intelligence officers would learn that the guerrillas had been ordered to join the annual congregation to mark the death of the saint Sheikh Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani at Khanyar, Srinagar, scheduled for 8 August. Then, they were to march with protestors who were to gather to protest the arrest of Kashmir's former Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. They were to take over the airfield and radio station and proclaim a revolutionary council. This would be the signal for regular Pakistani forces to cross the ceasefire line to help the Kashmiris. There has never been an explanation, India's official war history notes, 'of how such a large number of men had managed to slip across the Indian borders, supposed to be so vigilantly guarded.' 'Even on 2 August 1965,' it notes, 'when a high-level conference was held at Srinagar to review the security arrangements on the Cease Fire Line, there was no inkling of the impending guerrilla invasion within 72 hours.' Earlier that summer, though, the Indian Army had begun to experience an unusual degree of fire from across the ceasefire line. Then, on 16 May, an Indian outpost near Kargil came under direct attack. The Army then discovered that Pakistani forces had occupied positions on Peak 13620—so named for its altitude, in feet—as well as the adjoining Kala Pahar area. For the first time since the 1947-1948 war, the Indian Army responded with offensive operations, seizing Peak 13620 and a series of positions along the ridge over Kargil. The positions were, however, returned to Pakistan on 30 June after an assurance from the United Nations Secretary-General, General U Thant, about the safety of the Kargil-Srinagar highway. The Indian Army's outposts in Tithwal, Uri, Mendhar, Poonch, and Naushera, though, continued to come under attack through coming weeks—likely compelling soldiers to reduce patrolling along the passes across the ceasefire line. Also read: To deal with a 2.5-front war, India must tackle the half-front inside The chaos of war For commanders of the Pakistan Army, India's blindness must have seemed like a gift from God. Then-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leading hawk in Field Marshal Ayub Khan's regime, had drawn up the plans in consultation with Foreign Secretary Aziz Ahmad and the commander of Pakistan Army forces in PoK, Major General Akhtar Husain Malik. The memoirs of the Pakistan Army's then-army chief, General Mohammad Musa, assert he was sceptical of the idea, concerned that it might lead to all-out war. To Musa's surprise, his divisional commander continued execution of an idea he had shot down: 'The policy-makers thwarted professional assessment and advice on a matter having grave military implications because of their miscalculation of the politico-strategic situation and the over-ambitiousness of a few individuals.' Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan has suggested that these political tensions undermined the operation from the outset. 'The Chief [General Musa] and the Chief of General Staff, General Sher Bahadur, had, from its inception, viewed Gibraltar as a bastard child, born of the liaison between the Foreign Minister [Bhutto] and General Malik,' Gul Hasan wrote in his memoirs. Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Air Force from 1957 to 1965, has recorded that he was asked to assign a Kashmiri-speaking officer to run a radio station, which was purported to be operating from Srinagar but was actually located at the Race Course Grounds in Rawalpindi. The Air Marshal was promised a 24-hour heads-up before operations began, but the chaotic organisation of the attack meant he only learned of it after the event. Late on the afternoon of 5 August, Gulmarg-based shepherd Mohammad Din turned up at the local police station to report that he had run into large numbers of armed Pakistanis. Troops were dispatched to surround the infiltrating column. There were further fire contacts in Teetwal, Kupwara, and Mendhar that night. The Salahuddin column, the largest of the groups, succeeded in pushing its way into four Srinagar suburbs and exchanging fire with Indian soldiers dispatched from the Badami Bagh cantonment. The assault, though, soon began to stall because of its lack of local support and the absence of well-structured logistical backup. Major Farooq Ahmed would later recall hiding among flea-infested animal herds as he fled ahead of Indian troops. The starving personnel of the Kargil column mutinied twice, while thousands simply returned home across the ceasefire line. Following its initial failure, the Indian Army began to push back—famously capturing key infiltration routes, like the Haji Pir Pass and, once again, Peak 13620. Also read: India doesn't need a war with Pakistan. We must act like Krishna, not Bhasmasura Failures of command The unravelling of the attempt to seize Kashmir led Pakistan's leadership to dither. At the end of August, military historian Shuja Nawaz has written, Field Marshal Ayub sent a missive to Bhutto, asking him to 'take such action that will defreeze the Kashmir problem, weaken Indian resolve, and bring her to the conference table without provoking a general war.' General Gul Hasan now begged for permission to launch Grand Slam, an offensive aimed at Akhnur and then Chhamb, which would eventually cut off the highway to Srinagar. Even though the Indian Army had repeatedly war-gamed such an attack since at least 1956, Lieutenant-General Harbaksh Singh recorded in his memoirs that the Pakistani offensive caught it completely off-guard. 'The preparations made by Pakistan for this thrust could not be concealed,' the official war history notes, 'and the United Nations observers had warned India of the impending attack. The warnings were probably not taken seriously.' To make things worse, the Indian Air Force—which had never been warned or consulted on the prospect of a war in Kashmir—ended up hitting the Army's armour and gun positions. Flailing Indian commanders, though, were saved by General Musa's inexplicable decision to relieve General Akhtar Malik of his command mid-battle. Following the fall of Chhamb, the onward push to Jourian spluttered and lost momentum. This gave India time to launch its counter-offensive across the border in Punjab. The XI Corps secured initial successes in its push toward Lahore, securing significant victories at the battles of Asal Uttar and Barki. There was a stalemate, however, in other key sectors, like Dera Baba Nanak and Fazilka, while a Pakistani counter-offensive succeeded in capturing Khem Karan. For its part, the I Corps push toward Sialkot soon degenerated into what the official history describes as 'a slogging match.' Large-scale preemptive strikes on Indian airbases on 6 September by the Pakistan Air Force succeeded in destroying several aircraft on the ground in Pathankot and Kalaikunda. These losses forced the Indian Air Force to commit a large part of its resources to combat air patrols to protect its bases, thus degrading its ability to support the Army's push toward Lahore. Two days before India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire, Ayub and Bhutto made a secret visit to Beijing to seek support from then-Premier Chou En-lai. The message from Chou was less than reassuring: 'You must keep fighting even if you have to withdraw to the hills.' A tired and worried Ayub took counsel from Musa and Nur Khan and decided not to prolong the fighting. The failures of 1965 helped India triumph in the Bangladesh war just seven years later—but the absence of an institutional culture of relentless and open questioning meant some mistakes were soon to resurface. In 1988, India proved unable to prevent large-scale infiltration across the Line of Control, opening the way to the long jihad in Kashmir. Failures of Generalship claimed a bitter toll on Indian soldiers' lives in Kargil, just as it had in 1965. And weaknesses in Indian air power exposed in 2019 were hushed up, leading to the reverses General Chauhan has now underlined. Lessons can be learned through close examination of one's own errors or be taught by the successes of enemies. Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
Time of India
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Revisit Lohia, JP for socialist values, Pathak hits back at SP over comments on him
Lucknow: Hitting back at the Samajwadi Party social media team for using objectionable comments against him, deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak on Sunday urged party chief Akhilesh Yadav to teach them the values laid down by socialist leaders like George Fernandes and Janeshwar Mishra to improve their conduct. Taking a jibe at the uncouth language used against him, Pathak said he could provide books and literature to the party cadre to align them with the socialist ideology. On Friday, a heated political drama unfolded in the state when the SP media cell made controversial remarks about Pathak's DNA. The comment sparked a fierce war of words, with Pathak launching a scathing counterattack. Pathak, visibly disturbed by the comments, seized the opportunity to highlight what he saw as deterioration of SP's socialist values. Drawing from the rich political heritage, the DyCM invoked the values fostered by Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). Pathak asked Akhilesh to make the SP members read Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan and make them listen to Pt Janeshwarji's speeches so that socialism is reflected in their behaviour and speech. He painted a stark contrast between their noble ideologies and what he perceived as "SP's current degraded state". "George Fernandes once emphasised the importance of learning and understanding. But the self-proclaimed socialists have lost their way," Pathak remarked. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch vàng CFDs với mức chênh lệch giá thấp nhất IC Markets Đăng ký Undo Pathak offered to provide Lohia's books to SP members, urging them to revisit their ideological roots. "They do not know what socialism is. They have turned socialism into a laboratory of abuse, arrogance and low-grade comments. If this is their form while in Opposition, one can easily guess what they would have done while in power. It is also surprising that these 'Shishupals' (cousin of Krishna) of the culture of arrogance, obscenity and anarchy even dare to take the name of Yogeshwar Krishna in their defence," he said. "O Yogeshwar Krishna, keep treating these Shishupals in the same way as the people of UP have been doing for the last 10 years. This will be their fate," Pathak posted. Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya also said, "Dynastic socialism has now completely turned into a stick-wielding one." President of BJP's Lucknow Mahanagar (city) unit Anand Dwivedi, on whose complaint the FIR was lodged, alleged that the X post contained "extremely objectionable things against the deceased mother of the deputy CM, which shows SP's anti-women mentality".
Mint
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Who was Leila Kabir? Social worker and wife of late socialist leader George Fernandes passes away at 88
Leila Kabir, 88, renowned social worker and wife of the late socialist leader George Fernandes, passed away on Thursday evening at her residence in Delhi after a long battle with cancer. She was born into a prominent family—her father, Humayun Kabir, was a respected educationist and former Union Minister. Kabir was an active social worker and held the position of assistant director at the Indian Red Cross. According to reports, she first met socialist leader and politician George Fernandes on a flight from Calcutta to Delhi, marking the beginning of their relationship and the two later married on July 22, 1971. In the 1970s, she played an active role in humanitarian efforts, particularly during the Bangladesh Liberation War, where she served with the Red Cross. The couple had a son, Sean Fernandes. Although Leila and George separated in the mid-1980s, they never divorced. She returned to care for him in 2010 when he was battling Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, managing his medical treatment and staying by his side until his death in January 2019. The Print reported citing Journalist and former politician Santosh Bhartiya, 'At such a time, Leila ji stood beside him and took care of him like he was a toddler…Leila ji and George Sahab's relationship during his final days, she was helping him through everything, teaching him how to live again. And George Sahab would listen to her too.' Leila Kabir would be remembered for her politically active role during critical moments like the emergency period, which marked a glorious episode in Fernandes' six-decade-long public life. According to a report by Indian Express, former Janata Dal (United) leader Aneel Prasad Hegde, who attended Leila Kabir's cremation on behalf of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, recalled that Leila and George Fernandes were in Odisha when the Emergency was declared in 1975. At the time, Fernandes, serving as the president of the Socialist Party, George Fernandes went underground due to his leadership role in the Socialist Party to evade arrest. At such a time, Leila ji stood beside him and took care of him like he was a toddler. Meanwhile, Leila, with their newborn son, travelled to the United States and other countries, leading a campaign against the Emergency imposed in India. She returned to India 22 months later, after it was lifted, according to the report. (With inputs from Indian Express, The Print)
Indian Express
16-05-2025
- Health
- Indian Express
Leila Kabir, wife of late socialist leader George Fernandes, passes away at 88
Social worker Leila Kabir, who was the wife of late socialist leader George Fernandes, died Thursday evening at her Delhi residence after battling cancer. She was 88. Her body was cremated in Green Park on Friday. Daughter of former Union minister Humayun Kabir, Leila was diagnosed with intestinal cancer nearly two years ago and had recovered, but her health deteriorated recently. In her final days, Leila said she did not wish to be taken to a hospital. Her son Sean reached Delhi from the US on Thursday. Leila married George Fernandes on July 22, 1971, when she was working as an assistant director in the Indian Red Cross. Fernandes died in January 2019. Former Janata Dal (United) Aneel Prasad Hegde, who attended the cremation on behalf of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, recalled that Leila and George Fernandes were together in Odisha when the Emergency was imposed in 1975. While Fernandes, who was then the president of the Socialist Party, had gone underground, Leila travelled to the US and other countries with her newborn son and ran a campaign against the Emergency imposed in India. She returned 22 months later when the Emergency was lifted. Dr Sunilam of the Kisan Sangharsh Samiti also attended the cremation and paid tributes to Leila. In a condolence message, he said she was a dedicated social worker who remained actively involved in social work until her final days. 'I first met her when I came to Delhi for my PhD, and she was residing at 26, Tughlak Crescent. As the wife of George Fernandes, I had the opportunity to meet her from time to time. When George Sahab fell seriously ill, Laila-ji served him tirelessly for many years,' he said.
Scroll.in
12-05-2025
- Scroll.in
A new book examines the repercussions of shutting the Indian Railways network during Covid-19
Train number 02198, a weekly special from Jabalpur Junction to Coimbatore, and its reverse direction service 02197 from Coimbatore to Jabalpur, may hardly be central to the working of trains in India, but in the railway history, these were the first trains that were cancelled for two weeks on 21 March and 28 March 2020 and on 23 March and 30 March, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The announcement of the cancellation came on 18 March, by when the Indian Railways had already started issuing advisories for meeting any eventuality arising out of COVID-19, including creating quarantine facilities within its premises. Clearly, no one at the Railway Board, the apex body that runs the railway network through zonal wings, knew the magnitude of what was to come just five days later, though four more trains were cancelled on 19 March through another order.10 How the running of these trains was adding to the spread of COVID-19 no one could tell, but the reason behind their cancellation was commercial. There were low bookings for the trains. People were not willing to travel and even before the government shut the transport lines, many had cut back on their travel plans. At the same time, railway authorities asked passengers to avoid non-essential train journeys and ensure that they did not have fever at the time of commencement of journey. At any point during a journey, if a passenger felt that they had a fever, they were to contact the railway staff for medical attention and further assistance. As daily advisories from most Union and state government departments started to pour in, the railways was doing their bit to restrict travel. Besides cancelling trains, it decided to withdraw travel concessions as well. It reduced the categories of travellers who were entitled to avail of concessions. Of 55 of them, 23 sub-categories under patients, students and divyangjans (differently abled) were allowed the concessions for both unreserved and reserved segments from 20 March. Those who had already booked tickets availing of the concessions were, however, also allowed the discounted fare. Among those for whom travel concessions were withdrawn were senior citizens, since they were the most vulnerable category of the population. What came on 22 March 2020, nonetheless, was a complete shocker: the Indian Railways stopped all passenger trains, something it had never done before on its own. A little over 46 years ago was the only time that the railway services had halted countrywide, though the Indira Gandhi government had roped in the territorial army to run train services. It was on 8 May 1974 that the All India Railwaymen's Federation (AIRF) decided to implement a national rail strike after 44‐year‐old socialist leader and organiser of the strike, George Fernandes, and more than 1,000 other union leaders were arrested. Just a few days earlier, S Dhasarathy, a young railway engineer, was asked to move to Erode as divisional mechanical engineer in charge of the railway diesel shed there. It was the evening of 1 May, and his sister's marriage celebrations were going on in his house in Chennai when Dhasarathy received the posting order. With his eight-month pregnant wife, he left the same day for a 400 km journey in a taxi. 'There weren't any trains running so I had to hire a car. It took about nine hours,' he says. The Indian Railways never reimbursed the fare, he rues, adding that it was quite a large amount for those days. On reaching Erode, the task was clear. He had to see that a goods train coming from Punjab found its way to Palakkad in Kerala. 'Two drivers and I, we went and managed to run a goods train around 2 am. By the time others woke up and could stop the train, it had gone past.' Dhasarathy, who had served in the Territorial Army for five years after being enlisted during the 1965 war with Pakistan, when he was barely a month into the Indian Railway service, was against the strike. 'How can a government agency strike for bonus? Bonus is for everybody and not based on actual performance. It can be given to everybody; it is government money, not your money,' he says. The priority was to run goods trains even then, just as in the summer of 2020, since a large number of essentials, such as foodgrain, coal and fertiliser, move by rail. 'Kerala would have starved if we had waited for eight or ten more days. We started running passenger trains within five-six days after that (after running the goods trains).' For him, it was also crucial to keep the diesel shed operational. 'They told us not to attend to locomotives at the shed. It was not that we were against each other. There were 3,000 people in Erode under my administrative control. I was not a very senior person because I had done just eight or nine years of service (five years in the army and three years in the railways), but railway men generally listen to their boss if they know he is honest and does not mean them ill.' On whether he felt threatened by the supporters of the strike, he said, 'We got an FIR [first information report filed with police] against those four-five people. The Indian Railways also started giving jobs to sons of those employees who did not support the strike.' It is not, however, entirely true that the railway staff was not largely supportive of the strike. The build-up to the 1974 historic strike, in fact, was disruptive for the Indian Railways. Before the strike, Lalit Narayan Mishra, the then railway minister, lamented frequent disruption of work. 'So far as staff discipline is concerned, this has been a particularly bad year for the Indian Railways. From the very beginning, we have been hit by go-slow, work-to-rule and work-to-designation agitations, mass absenteeism, wildcat strikes, bandhs, squatting on track, etc. While the agitations unconnected with railway operation impeded our working, the effect of employee agitations has been particularly crippling. Among such agitations are the lightning strike of station masters and assistant station masters during April on Western Railway, the successive strikes and agitations by loco running staff in May, July, August and December which affected most of the Zonal Railways and the agitation by staff of Sholapur division on the South Central Railway during August and September,' he noted in his speech of 27 February 1974, more than two months before the strike, while presenting the railway budget for 1974–75.16 Mishra was killed on 2 January 1975 in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway station in Bihar, for which four, including three Ananda Margas (members of the Ananda Marga organization), were sentenced to death much later, in 2014. A month and a half after Mishra's killing, when Kamalapati Tripathi presented the Railway Budget for 1975–76 on 20 February 1975, he assessed the damage caused by the strike. He noted: Shortly after the strike was called off, a rapid re-appraisal revealed that in the three months of April to June (1974), 11.8 million tonne of freight traffic had been lost. It was realized that the originating traffic during the year would not exceed 197 million tonne, made up of 173 million tonne of revenue earning traffic and 23.8 million tonne of departmental traffic. Passenger traffic had also declined as the number of passengers carried was nearly 150 million less than in the corresponding period of the previous year. Other coaching earnings had also suffered. Consequently, in the first quarter, railway earnings dropped by Rs 92.45 crore [924.5 million] as compared with the Budget proportion Fares and freight rates had to be raised 'to recoup the anticipated deficiency of Rs 140 crore [1,400 million] in earnings.' If the strike had halted railway operations while it was on, it was the shortage of locomotive coal that led to the curtailment of certain passenger trains afterwards. 'The fall in non-suburban passenger traffic beyond the strike-affected period is mainly due to the cancellation of trains. The Hon'ble Members know that faced with the shortage of loco coal, the railway administration had to curtail some of their branch line passenger train services. Now that the production of coal has begun to gather momentum, it should be possible for us to build up our stocks. Subject to this contingency, restoration of cancelled trains will be commenced from the first of March, and progressively increased in the next few months,' said Tripathi in his railway budget speech. The summer of 2020 was, however, different. Operating trains did not pose a security risk, but a health risk. Besides, it was the government that pulled the chain on passenger trains, even as the Indian Railways kept the freight trains rolling. But the scale of operations is much larger now than at the time of the strike in 1974. The Indian Railways could carry only around 200 million tonnes of freight in 1975, compared to 1.21 billion tonnes annually in 2019–20. It carried 2.7 billion passengers then and 8.4 billion passengers before COVID-19 struck. During the twelve months leading up to March 2021, however, which included two months of national lockdown, it carried a marginally higher freight volume of 1.23 billion tonnes, though passenger traffic fell by about 90 per cent over the normal times. This time, the Indian Railways first issued instructions to its zones on 21 March that no passenger trains would originate from any railway station in the country from 7 am to 10 pm on 22 March because of the janata curfew announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.21 A press release was issued at 8.14 pm for the same, but it didn't take even twenty-four hours for the Indian Railways to make another announcement, at 1.48 pm on 22 March, that all trains would be stopped till 31 March 2020. Domestic commercial flights stopped three days later, from 25 March 2020 onwards. This was announced on the evening of 23 March, which meant that unlike in the case of the railways, there was more than a day's notice for air travellers, though it was not much help for those caught away from home, since airlines started bunching flights together and changing schedules at short notice. A three-line statement from the MoCA issued to the media said, 'Airlines have to plan operations so as to land at their destination before 23.59 hours on 24 March 2020.' There was no clear reason why trains were stopped before domestic air journeys, or why the Union government decided to first pin down the Delhi government by asserting its federal right on aviation matters, overruling the state's decision to shut the Delhi airport on 22 March, and then doing precisely this from 25 March. This, despite the fact that those travelling by air after a foreign journey or touching down at airports were probably more likely to transmit the infection (because they were coming from outside the country) than those travelling by train. It is true, though, that the number of train travellers and the difficulty of screening passengers at railway stations or in trains was more daunting than at airports. Opposition leaders claimed that the government wanted to keep running Parliament to make the point that the Madhya Pradesh state assembly could also meet and vote on a no-confidence motion against the Kamal Nath-led Congress government, and that COVID-19 could not come in the way of legislative work. 'It is obvious, Parliament was run only to ensure that the Madhya Pradesh Assembly could run and the Congress government be toppled,' the embittered Nath told media persons later.23 He said the nationwide lockdown was announced a day after the Shivraj Singh Chauhan-led BJP government was installed in Madhya Pradesh. Airlines needed to operate to ferry politicians and legislators. On 31 March, a Business Standard news analysis said, 'The initial approach followed by the Indian Railways and airlines was to cancel services on those routes where the occupancy was low. For commercial airlines, it did not make sense to fly to, say, China, Italy and Iran, which reported initial COVID-19 casualties, because business travellers had stopped going to these countries anyway. Besides, their staff was risking exposure to the virus by travelling to those destinations.' The railways, too, had started cancelling low-occupancy trains because of the pandemic. This approach ran contrary to the messages of social distancing, the first rule of which was to avoid crowding. It should not have followed the same approach as the airlines, for two reasons. One, it is the crucial lifeline for long-distance travellers, especially for those who do not have airports in their city or cannot afford flights. Second, it should have ensured that trains were not crowded during the peak period; instead, it could run more trains, just as it does for Holi and Diwali. 'Running two-three trains for four-five days would have saved harassment. It was an unplanned situation,' says Shanti Narain, former member (traffic), Railway Board. Even the normally efficient DMRC took decisions that dangerously contradicted social distancing norms. On 19 March, it curtailed its services, even though its occupancy was already down by then, since many offices in the NCR had instituted work-from-home protocols. 'This meant that even the smaller numbers of passengers were accommodated in fewer trains. Delhi Metro's average daily ridership is over 5 million,' says the article. The Mumbai suburban train services, which the Indian Railways runs, took a more cautious and gradual approach, perhaps because of the directions from the state government. It first shut air-conditioned services on 20 March, since the COVID-19 infection was more likely to spread in closed spaces. The total number of trains remained the same. Excerpted with permission from The Great Shutdown: The Story of Two Indian Summers, Jyoti Mukul, HarperCollins India.
