Headlines December 24, 2019
BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur slammed for flight delay

Two days after BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur accused airline SpiceJet of not giving her the seat she had booked, a video surfaced that showed the Bhopal MP being confronted by the passengers.
In the video, people can be seen confronting the Thakur and reminding her that she is people’s representative. They said her job is not to “trouble them”. “You are people’s representative. Your job is not to trouble us. You should come by the next flight,” a man is heard on the video.
Thakur argues that why would she be going when there is “no first class, no facilities”. The person responded saying “first class is not her right”.
The BJP MP was slammed online too. #PragyaSinghThakur trended with 3,379 tweets, with many users slamming her for her behaviour. Thakur had booked a seat in SpiceJet flight SG2489 from Delhi to Bhopal and had come to the airport in her own wheelchair.
She alleged that the airline did not let her sit at the pre-booked seat in the emergency row citing rules. “They did not give me the booked seat. I asked them to show the rules. I called the director and lodged a complaint with him,” she said.
There were reports that the flight got delayed by approximately 45 minutes due to this matter.
The Delhi-Bhopal flight is operated by Bombardier Q400 aircraft (78 seater). On this aircraft, the first row is the emergency row seat and is not allocated to passengers on wheelchairs. As the BJP MP had come with her own wheelchair and had not booked through the airline, the staff wasn’t aware of this fact that she was a wheelchair passenger. She was requested by the crew to shift to 2 A/B (non-emergency row) due to safety reasons but she refused. The duty manager and other staff also requested her to move to another seat. – Spicejet statement
Some passengers requested Thakur to change her seat from the emergency row, which is not given to passengers on wheelchairs, to a non-emergency row. Others requested the crew to offload her as she was refusing to change the seat.
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