Last Updated on 7 months by Christopher G Mendla
What do you do when you are outnumbered 40 to 1 and thugs are going to gang rape an 18 year old girl in front of her parents?
Bishnu Shrestha is a Gurkha had retired from the Indian army and was on his way home by train. At some point in the trip he awakened to a commotion. Thugs had boarded the train and were robbing everything in sight. When he identified himself as an infantryman, they backed off from him and turned their attention elsewhere.
The thugs decided that they wanted to gang rape an 18 year old girl in front of her parents. At that point, Bishnu had enough. He drew his Khukri which is a vicious curved fighting knife. He used the guy who was attacking the girl as a human shield and killed the other two thugs in the compartment. After that, he slit the throat of his shield.
He then went beserker on the other attackers, wounding at least 8 of them. Depending on which stories you read, he either succeeded in driving off the attackers or they subdued him and continued robbing the train. I’m leaning toward the former. If the thugs had gotten the best of him, they would have killed him. He suffered a serious wound to the arm but not what you would expect had he lost the engagement. The police boarded at the next station and arrested the remaining thugs and recovered the valuables stolen.
When interviewed about the incident, he said, ‘Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier. Taking on the thugs on the train was my duty as a human being.’
He was called back to active duty after he recovered in order to receive Sena medal from the Indian Government. The medal is awarded for “for such individual acts of exceptional devotion to duty or courage as have special significance for the Army.“. There is no argument that taking on a trainload of thugs to save a young girl exemplifies courage.
- An article in the Indian Times about Bishnu Shrestha