A Kashmiri family reportedly from Shopian and Pulwama were stopped from boarding an IndiGo Airlines planes. They were boarding a flight to Srinagar at the Delhi Airport on February 24 and were stopped allegedly due to a mix up in the names on the tickets and their identification documents.
New Delhi: A Kashmiri family reportedly from Shopian and Pulwama were stopped from boarding an IndiGo Airlines planes. They were boarding a flight to Srinagar at the Delhi Airport on February 24 and were stopped allegedly due to a mix up in the names on the tickets and their identification documents.
According to the copies of the tickets and the documents accessed by The Quint, the daughter Mehwish’s middle name was missing in the ticket and the mother’s last name on her Aadhaar card says “Bano” but on the ticket, she has her husband’s last name, “Banday”.
An eyewitness, Mir Saqib, and former JNU student leader Shehla Rashid alleged that the family was harassed for a small discrepancy because they were Kashmiris.
The airline, in a statement, clarified, “As per Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (Avsec Circular 15/2017), the name on the ticket has to match with the name on the Govt. ID card. We do have provisions for name rectification but this was a case of a name change. As per process, the ticket had to be cancelled and a fresh ticket needed to be booked. The option was declined by the passenger. As a gesture, we had still waived the cancellation charges and refunded them in full.”
Saqib, in his Facebook post, claims that when he had tried to argue on behalf of the family, his mother and he were also offloaded from the flight and only after protests by 15 other Kashmiris, a CISF personnel SS Upadhyay intervened to calm down the situation and assured that the Kashmiri family too will be able to board the flight soon.
“We pleaded that we have travelled earlier also on the same documents but the airline staff was so aggressive and they misbehaved with us,” Mehwish, a member of the family said.
She said not only did the airline not refund the tickets but called in security personnel to evict them. “Like we were terrorists,” she said in a report by Greater Kashmir.
The family said they travelled by train and have reached Jammu.
“Are we terrorists? Is that they saw Shopian, Pulwama, on tickets and harassed us?” said Mohammad Shafi, another family member, in the report.