Ancient mariners of the Indian Railways are wont to say that train journeys aren’t what they used to be, particularly along the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh. There’s of course the air-conditioning to blame, the sealed windows denying the traveller the romance of watching an interesting landscape roll by. Then there’s the phenomenon of fellow travellers offering you sedative-laced food, thus robbing you, in a manner of speaking, of the pleasure of intimate conversations with total strangers.
But most menacingly, there’s the danger of train robbers who have given the railway lines south from Vijayawada to Nellore a bad reputation, turning these parts into something like the badlands of the Chambal ravines, which were the subject of many Bollywood dacoit movies in the 1970s.
Railway police officers in Krishna, Guntur, Prakasam and Nellore districts have no feeling for railway romance. No ancient bridges excite them, no platform yodellers appeal to them. They just want you to shut the door and go to sleep.
Romance aside, that’s good advice. Police officers tell you that most of the robberies that have occurred on night trains passing through these districts have happened because some unwary passenger, or a recalcitrant romantic, kept the compartment door ajar, allowing the robbers in in the dead of night.
Of course, travellers are likely to say it’s the duty of policemen to keep them safe. For what else are they? If security personnel are to be obeyed, passengers would have to be not less clever than Sherlock Holmes to survive the journey from Guntur through Gudur. They have to look out for what in police parlance are called ‘suspicious characters’, not easy to spot on the Indian Railways. Surely, the uncle sitting next to you can’t be a purveyor of dodgy biscuits?
Then you have to not go to the door and look out into the night beyond and listen to the percussion of wagon wheels. What if the train stopped at a wayside signal and a reformed-but-relapsed crook hopped aboard?
It’s not hard to guess why policemen bristle when asked about train security. They just don’t have the manpower to make journeys secure for everyone. The much-touted posting of armed guards on trains – three for a train of 24 coaches – is a gesture rather than a measure. Plus, it’s not certain that the arms they carry are of any real use when a crook who has snatched an unwary woman’s necklace stops the train, gets down and saunters off into the night even as the armed guard rubs his sleepy eyes and walks up to the stricken compartment from the other end of the train. Not an equal battle.
Moreover, rail travellers are innocents abroad. Once robbed, it’s not until the next station that they can tell a policeman they’ve been done in, by which time the bad guys have retired for the night.
The truth is, the Great Indian Railways are, and have always been, about trust rather than security. When the ancient mariner ventured out into the great beyond, he did so in the belief that strangers on a train are friends for the time being rather than con men and attention diversionists. If the Indian Railways was a microcosm of our society, it was one imbued in trust. That trust is a bit frayed at the edges today, in trains as in society.
