How a young IPS officer stopped a riot

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Chand and Sridevi were married in March 1978, and the very next day, she had to go back to finish her training in Hyderabad. She was pregnant by the time she wrote her final exams. They were the first couple in India where the wife was an IPS officer and the husband was an IAS officer and this made their seniors proud of them. If two people from the academy married each other, the administration placed them in the same State so they could raise a family together. Since he was from the north and she was from the south, they decided to start their new life in the middle, i.e. Maharashtra. As expected, the first few years of marriage and parenthood were tumultuous and there were many differences and miscommunications between the newly married couple. But their love and respect for each other saw them through.

After delivery, they left their newborn daughter Lakshmi with Chand’s mother in Mathura for the first year. Sridevi underwent Maharashtra State training that year and then they carried on to their first posting in Dahanu in 1982. When Lakshmi turned one, they brought her with them to Dahanu and Sridevi jokes that her first-born practically grew up in the police jeep. She would get calls at all hours of the day and night and have to leave at a moment’s notice. Chand would often drive her with their toddler sleeping on the lap of her uniformed mother sitting in the passenger seat.

Dahanu was her first posting so everything that happened there felt dramatic and left an impact on her memory, such as the head constable’s murder. Another time, she prevented a riot from breaking out. There was an agitation of 5,000 people on the railway tracks and Sridevi was just a young female officer of twenty-six. The locals from Dahanu travelled daily to Mumbai for work on a train called the Flying Rani and rushed to their jobs as soon as the train pulled into Mumbai Central Station. However, this train was held up occasionally to let the Rajdhani train pass first. Since the Rajdhani was a long-distance, fast train that did not stop at Dahanu road station, it got precedence and this resulted in irksome delays for those aboard the Flying Rani.

On the day of the incident, the Rajdhani was delayed because of some derailment on its route and it was to arrive at Dahanu station on the Western Railways track, which clashed with the regular time of the local train. The Flying Rani passengers were fed up of the delay and came out onto the tracks to block the Rajdhani from passing through. Meanwhile, the Rajdhani passengers had been travelling for over twenty-four hours and didn’t even have food or water to feed their children, so they also came out onto the tracks. Another set of Dahanu locals who had been demanding that the government build a foot over bridge at the same station showed up with their own axe to grind at this inopportune moment. The crowd grew from 500 to 1,000 to 5,000 people in the span of four hours. Everyone was angry.