A student from Jadavpur University had booked an app-cab at JD block in Salt Lake at around 10pm on Monday and she had to kick the Uber cabbie’s teeth to make him behave!
“It was okay till my friend got down near Aranya Bhavan. Suddenly, the driver started speeding up and took a left where he didn’t need to,” she told the Times of India.
He took another off-the-route left lane at Bijan Bhavan and she protested:
“The lanes were deserted so I insisted on taking the main road. He agreed and continued to drive till FD block, where he again tried to enter a lane on the left,” the woman said.
While she argued with the cabbie about the wrong route he had been taking, the latter countered her saying that his route he took would save time.
However when the driver drove past the designated drop-off point she could not wait anymore to swing into action.
“This alarmed me and I asked him to stop. Suddenly , he flew into a rage,” she recalled. The driver threatened to rape her if she uttered another word, she says.
And guess what she did? (And when this could be petrifying to other women)
She jumped out of the moving cab.
“I had taken self-defence lessons in school around 15 years ago and all that training suddenly came in handy. I remembered that I had to hit him hard on his shin bone to stop him and kick the back of his knees to make him fall,” she told the newspaper.
“I mustered all my strength and targeted his shin bone and the back of his knees.”
The driver was arrested soon after she made her police complaint. He was also driving rashly, and the woman alleged he threatened to dump her body after raping her, something he’d done to many other women.
Uber had an odd response when she informed them of the incident – they said the cab driver was “suspended”.
When she asked why he was not fired, the company official said that his cab not show up on her app.
The woman’s lawyer Saumyajit Raha said that the cab driver named Parmanik has been charged under IPC 341 (wrongful restraint), 354 (assault or criminal force on a woman to outrage her modesty), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 506 (criminal intimidation).
