By Ananya Sharma 
New Delhi, May 8: TMC’s Mahua Moitra Says She Was Harassed on IndiGo Flight. Here’s What We Know So Far.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about what Mahua Moitra says happened to her on a routine Thursday morning flight from Kolkata to Delhi. Not just politically uncomfortable, though it certainly is that. But uncomfortable in a more basic, human sense. A woman on a plane, travelling for work, allegedly surrounded by a group of men chanting at her and filming her face on their phones before the cabin doors had even opened.
That is what the Trinamool Congress MP from Krishnanagar says took place aboard IndiGo flight 6E 719 on May 7. And by the time the video reached X, it had already become something far larger than a passenger dispute.
A Flight to Delhi, and Then This
Moitra was headed to the capital on official parliamentary business. She was travelling to attend a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence, which is about as routine a piece of legislative work as an MP can be doing. She was seated in 1F, front row, window side.
According to her account, four to six men boarded together as a group, leered at her, and walked to the back of the plane. That much she says she noticed but let go. What she could not let go came later, after the aircraft had already touched down at its destination.
Before the doors opened, the group came back toward the front of the cabin and began shouting slogans while filming her. The chants were specific and pointed. “Chor chor, TMC chor, pishi chor, bhaipo chor.” Thieves, TMC are thieves, the aunt is a thief, the nephew is a thief. References to Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee, barely disguised. They also raised Jai Shri Ram chants inside the aircraft.
The whole thing, captured in a clip running about 30 seconds, was up on social media within hours.
Mahua Moitra Alleges That,”This Is Harassment”
Moitra did not frame this as a political attack, at least not only that. She was unambiguous in calling it a safety issue. “This is not an act of public anger. This is harassment and infringement of my security in a flight. It is simply unacceptable that such poorly behaved people get away with such behavior in the confines of an aircraft,” she wrote on X.
She also said she had initially tried to ignore the men. It was only after videos began circulating online that she decided to formally act. In a follow-up post, she described the episode as reflective of what she called BJP culture. The BJP has not issued any formal response to that characterisation, at least not at the time of writing.
She has since moved both IndiGo and Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu directly, demanding that the airline identify the passengers involved and have them placed on the no-fly list.
That demand carries more weight than it might seem at first glance.
The No-Fly List Question
India has had a formal no-fly list framework since 2017. In practice, it gets invoked for passengers who are physically violent or dangerously drunk, the kinds of incidents where there is little ambiguity about what happened and who did it. Verbal harassment, filming a co-passenger without consent, political sloganeering inside a pressurised cabin, these are murkier categories, and the DGCA has never had to draw a hard line on them in quite this way before.
Moitra’s complaint, if pursued formally, could force exactly that reckoning. The question the regulator now has to answer is whether what allegedly happened on 6E 719 meets the threshold for a flying ban, or whether the existing framework simply has no teeth when the disruption is political rather than physical.
As per available information, neither IndiGo nor the DGCA had issued any official statement by the time of publication. The airline, as is standard, can only take formal action once a written complaint is registered. Whether Moitra has done that yet, beyond her public social media posts, was not confirmed.
Bengal Is Burning, and It Followed Her Onto the Plane
It would be naive to read this incident without looking at what is happening in West Bengal right now. The BJP has just secured a decisive majority in the state Assembly, winning 207 of 293 seats. Mamata Banerjee reportedly refused to resign, the Governor dissolved the Assembly, and BJP swearing-in preparations are already underway at Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata.
That is not background noise. That is the precise political storm in which Moitra exists as one of the loudest TMC voices in Parliament. The slogans chanted at her were not vague or generic. They were targeted, rehearsed-sounding, and clearly aimed at the party’s top two names. Whether the group on the flight was coordinated or simply emboldened by the political moment, nobody has yet established. But the specificity of those chants is hard to ignore.
This is what makes the incident feel like more than a bad-faith provocation by a few rowdy passengers. It sits inside a much larger story about what political polarisation in India looks like when it leaves the TV studios and the Twitter feeds and walks onto a commercial aircraft.
An MP, A Parliamentary Duty, and A Cabin That Couldn’t Protect Her
There is a legal and constitutional dimension here that deserves more attention than it has received so far. Moitra was not on a leisure trip. She was in transit to perform her duties as an elected Member of Parliament. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence is not a ceremonial body. It is one of the more serious oversight committees in the Lok Sabha system.
The allegation, taken at face value, is that she was subjected to organised intimidation while travelling on official legislative duty. That is a different order of complaint than a celebrity being heckled or a regular passenger being filmed. Whether Indian law provides any special protection for parliamentarians in such circumstances is unclear, and frankly, it probably should not need to. The existing aviation safety framework should be sufficient. The problem is that it may not be.
For now, the case is sitting in an awkward in-between space. Politically it has already exploded. Regulatorily, the machinery has barely stirred. IndiGo will presumably cooperate with any formal inquiry once one is initiated. The DGCA will presumably respond once the minister’s office signals that it should. Whether any of that happens at speed, or gets quietly buried under the avalanche of other headlines coming out of Bengal this week, is the real question.
What cannot be buried, or at least should not be, is the image of a sitting MP being surrounded and filmed and chanted at inside the front cabin of a domestic commercial flight. Whatever one thinks of Mahua Moitra or the Trinamool Congress, that image should be troubling to anyone who believes that air travel is, above all else, a space where basic civil order must hold.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
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