Counted among the most beautiful railway stations in the country, Secunderabad railway station looked no less than a battlefield on Friday.
Upon entry, an unusually empty Platform No. 1 showed workers putting out flames from train bogies with water from side-filling pipelines. Motorcycles filled with sacks, parcels, dustbins, coffee machines, refrigerators and railway linen were scattered on the tracks and platforms, and were partially burnt.
The broken glass, passenger lift, and destroyed audio-video and safety equipment of the East Coast Express (Hyderabad-Shalimar) at Platform No. 2 offered a glimpse of the vandalism and rioting that ended recently. The locomotives up to platform number eight were damaged and smoke was still coming out of the burnt bogies.
“It was around 8.40 in the morning when the train was starting to move. The protesters started the engine, hit the driver with a pipe and stopped the train. Then tens and hundreds of them came from bogies, by breaking glass, or pouring diesel and setting them on fire,” said Rajiv, a platform stall operator.
“It was the screams of children and women that sounded like alarms for about 45 minutes, until all the passengers got down and were pale-mailed in every direction,” he said.
Another loud sound from the platform for Santosh Kumar, sitting on his damaged aluminum dining cart, was the slogans of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, ‘Modi Down Down’ and ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’.
Other stall operators Ravi Rajawat, Sonu and Pratham Tomar told how they left their business and escaped safely. He estimates his loss to be ₹3 lakh. Platform number 2 alone has five food stalls and four mobile vehicles.
According to him, there were about a thousand youth armed with long sticks, who raised steel rods from station railings and fire extinguishers to attack. They terrorized the passengers in the general compartment, broke the glass panes of all AC coaches and burnt linen, and set the luggage and railway mail service on fire.
Out of all the eyewitnesses and the survivors in the 22 coaches, the three employees of the South Eastern Railway on the train have a satisfying story to remember. It was the generator car, located just after a bogie that caught fire from the engine, under the control of Suman Kumar Sharma and his mechanics Ram Pyari and Albert Barla.
“It had about 4,000 liters of fuel. Any attack or damage on it would have caused a disaster and hundreds of people would have died. We disconnected the mains and supplies, locked the car and guarded it, saving the lives of all the passengers,” said Mr Sharma, a material.