The sight of a strapping man charging at airline staff brandishing a queue signpost in hand is scary. But more so if he happens to be a military officer. Immediately images of commandos trained in deadly hand-to-hand combat come to mind. Of course, all military personnel are not commandos, and all airline staff are not exactly empathetic when dealing with stressed out passengers. The result is what happened late a week ago at Srinagar Airport, which inevitably went viral.

On the face of it, the issue is of an enraged Army officer hitting and badly injuring four ground staff of an airline, that too at the very high security Srinagar Airport where security personnel are always on maximum alert, for obvious reasons. The reports emanating from both parties—supporters of the officer and of the staffers—are diametrically opposite, predictably. And unfortunately, given the way such cases play out, what actually happened may never really come out.

There are many cases when videos posted on social media have turned out to be doctored or edited to convey a sequence of events that may not be accurate. Even in this case, the public only sees excerpts of the incident at Srinagar Airport, and the verbal exchanges between the army officer and the airline staffers are not audible. So there is no way to figure out what triggered the outburst, or indeed who provoked the violence, except from the versions from both sides.

The Army officer’s supporters say he was travelling with no check-in luggage and only one carry-on bag—two according to some accounts—which was just over the allowed limit. He was........

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