taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (08/28/86)
This article is from the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff@csl.sri.com> and was received on Tue Aug 26 17:28:38 1986 [stolen from another mailing list] Telephone Torture Sends Politican on Rampage, Operators on Strike By VICTORIA GRAHAM NEW DELHI, India (AP) - This is a true story about modern India. The villain is the telephone, taken for granted in much of the world, but in India regarded as an instrument of torture. The leading man is a former Cabinet minister, once a powerful politician who defied Sikh death threats, but a man humbled by the telephone and a call that wouldn't come through, even at gunpoint. Twenty-six hours and 20 minutes after booking, he got the call. The leading lady is played by hundreds of low-paid, sari-clad, shrieking operators, described by the politician as ''fat, lazy gossips, drinking tea in a lousy telephone system, the worst in the world.'' Comparing themselves to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, the operators went on a three-day wildcat strike, smashing switchboards, crippling service and demanding that the politician, former Home Minister Prakash Chand Sethi, be jailed or held as insane. Some call the telephone melodrama farce, or soap opera, or morality play. The drama has not been played out, but this is how it began: Last Friday at 12:50 a.m., Sethi, a member of Parliament, decided enough was enough. He had waited four hours and 20 minutes and made five pleas to an operator to get a top priority ''lightning'' call to Bombay from his home. He warned the operator he was on his way to her office and set off with his son-in-law and three armed bodyguards, assigned to him because his life had been threatened. He was in charge of domestic security when the army attacked the Sikhs' Golden Temple in June 1984. Sethi took his Czechoslovak-made, licensed revolver, explaining later that security rules ''require me to hold onto my gun.'' Brushing past guards at the downtown exchange, the capital's telephone nerve center, the midnight raiders stormed to the ninth floor and demanded to see the offending operator, Miss Kiran. ''I am a public man with a grouse,'' he later said. ''This place should be thrown open to citizens so they can see what a mess the telephone system is.'' Then accounts differ. Miss Kiran said she peeked from the ladies room and saw a man in a white pajama suit - drunk, staggering, swaggering and abusive - advancing with three guards toward the switchboard. She said she came out and he grabbed her arms, waving his revolver and blowing cigar smoke into her face. ''Do you know who I am? Do you want to live in this world?'' witnesses quoted Sethi as saying. ''I can buy girls like you for five rupees (40 cents).'' They said a male shop steward interceded, but the 65-year-old Sethi roughed him up and tore his clothes, then collapsed on the floor for 30 minutes. Miss Kiran bolted the exit to keep him there until police arrived. ''I'll jump from the ninth floor and die but I will have justice,'' she told reporters. Police charged Sethi with trespassing, disturbing the peace, using filthy and abusive language and assaulting a public servant on duty. He was not arrested. Sethi says he was petrified when operators surrounded him and wouldn't let him go. Then, he says, the shop steward knocked him out. He got home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday and says a doctor certified he was not drunk. But about 4,000 operators and staff disputed Sethi's account. By dawn they launched a strike, demanding his arrest. Domestic and overseas bookings weere paralyzed. Some emergency police numbers were dead. Other services were crippled. Women sat atop switchboards, twisted their headsets apart and shouted, ''Death to Sethi!'' Still, Sethi's fury struck a responsive chord. India's telephone system is notorious for inefficiency, rude operators, equipment that smacks of bullock-cart technology, and thousands of dead phones. Frustrated subscribers have been known to smash telephones. ''The level of inefficiency, callousness and simple insolence in the telephone exchanges would drive anyone mad,'' the Hindustan Times editorialized Monday. But the strike was an embarrassment. Over the weekend, police and soldiers got involved. Signal corps engineers worked without pause to repair equipment. Outside, husbands and boyfriends waited for their women. The women dropped notes complaining they were locked on the top floor, unable to eat or go to the bathroom, because they refused to work. After 2 1/2 days, on Sunday night the government announced the strike was over and Sethi had apologized, but many strikers denied it and so did Sethi. Sethi claimed the goverment fabricated a letter over his signature. The protest subsided Monday, but the telephone saga went on. Sethi, waving a cordless Japanese telephone, said, ''In India, you just cannot get a call through.''