Pune News: An incident of road rage emerged in Maharashtra's Pune on Saturday, where a woman travelling on a scooter with her two children was allegedly punched in the face by an elderly motorist elderly who was attempting to overtake her. The incident occurred on the Pashan-Baner Link Road, where the elderly man in a car-- who was apparently angry because he wasn't given space to overtake, pulled the victim's hair and punched her twice with such force that her nose began bleeding extensively.
The woman is identified as Jerlyn D'Silva, a digital content creator. D'Silva posted a video, narrating her ordeal, on social media. In the now-viral video, she claimed that the elderly motorist was speeding behind her for almost 2 km, desperately trying to overtake her.
“This man kept speeding behind for almost 2 km and I was riding on the left to give him the way when he suddenly sped in the front, took a left, and blocked my two-wheeler. He got out of his car furiously and punched me twice, hard enough that I immediately started bleeding, and pulled my hair,” she said in the video, with blood around her nose and mouth.
Raising questions on the law and order situation in the city, D'Silva said, "I had two kids, he didn't care about them. How safe is this city? Why are people behaving like maniacs? I had two kids with me, kuch bhi ho sakta tha (anything could have happened)... A woman helped me."
She also demanded justice and called for a strict punishment for the accused. “I don’t know where we are going,” she said.
Pune police have, meanwhile, registered a case against the man, who has been identified as Swapnil Kekr.
An official of the Chaturshringi Police Station told news agency IANS that the victim was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment while the motorist was detained pending the formal complaint formalities.
The incident sparked a furore on social media, coming exactly two months after a 17-year-old minor boy was involved in an alleged drunken hit-and-run accident in his Porsche car which left two persons dead.
Last Tuesday, the city was again rocked by another drunken driving incident when a politician's son, Saurabh Bandu Gaikwad, rammed his SUV into a poultry truck on the Mundhwa-Manjari Road, leaving the driver and his assistant grievously injured.
In another case, the son of a former Nationalist Congress Party (SP) municipal corporator, Bandu Gaikwad, Saurabh had fled from the spot in his Tata Harrier SUV but was later traced and booked by the police.