Bengaluru: Students chased, assaulted for sipping tea on footpath!

Bengaluru: Three students were allegedly assaulted by local residents only because they were outsiders. Two girls sitting with their male classmate on a footpath and drinking tea reportedly angered the residents, who chased them and allegedly assaulted them.

Angela Antony along with her friends Sherin and Nikhil, students of a private college in the city, were sitting on the pavement and were sipping tea at 6.30 pm on Saturday. This is all that put them in trouble, as a woman from the neighbourhood questioned them as to why were they sitting there at an ‘odd’ hour. When Nikhil asked the woman what was wrong in sitting at that spot, the woman reportedly picked up a quarrel.

Angela told Deccan Chronicle, “Very soon, a crowd gathered and the woman, her husband and her well-built son started threatening us in Kannada. They said the land wasn’t ours, we were foreigners and we could drink tea only within our college premises. The woman also told us that it was late and it was not the appropriate time to sit there and drink tea. The situation went out of control when she slapped Sherin hard on the shoulder. Two friends from our college dragged us out of the mess and asked us to leave.”

But it did not stop there as the woman’s son followed Angela till her hostel. “He stopped us and pulled Nikhil’s collar and pushed him to the ground. Nikhil landed on the road with a thud and the goon pounded Nikhil’s face to the floor.

Next, he punched Sherin’s ribs and twisted my hands and assaulted me. Some women there pulled me from his hands and advised me that I should behave myself. Some of the men told those women that we had been smoking and it turned the crowd’s opinion against us,” she said.

It was their friend Niranjan who intervened and saved them. “Sherin’s limbs were swollen and Nikhil had a broken jaw and a sprained knee,” she said, adding that they hailed from Kerala and the incident had left them shocked.