While the nation’s chief executive and his external affairs minister mumble and fumble over the insult Rome has handed to India’s supreme court by refusing to return the two Italian marines accused of murdering Indian fishermen, here’s what Chintan, a determined civil society group, did to save the honour of a simple ragpicker against Alitalia, an arrogant Italian globocorp.

The face off, now remembered only by a handful, occurred in 2006. Remember, this was before twitter and facebook. In those times, “viral” was still a flu you’d want to wish away. But sheer honesty of purpose made Chintan vs. Alitalia, India’s equivalent of the more aggressively marketed Dave Carroll vs. United Airlines.

Also reda: Rome has tricked chief justice of India, own envoy

The David versus Goliath story is beyond the three instances of Italian misbehaviour cited by BJP leader Arun Jaitley in his, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action," quote from the Bond novel Goldfinger.

I expect this fourth episode to be dug up as it conveys what some Italian entities think they are.

In this story, here’s this Alitalia manager at New Delhi airport, Mr Sood, so eager to please the goras, that he stops a paying passenger, the rag picker, Santraj Maurya, from boarding a Belo Horizonte-bound flight.

Mr Sood isn’t satisfied that Mr Maurya can complete the complicated tourney all by himself. So, all he does is to bump off Mr Maurya and offer him a refund!

Alitalia later justified its action as "judicious discrimination." It insisted that it had the authority to turn away a paying passenger, as rights of admission are reserved!

For those tuning in today, Maurya was to attend a waste pickers' fest in the Brazilian city. But as “Down To Earth” reported at that time, the J-class ticket his sponsors gave him wasn't considered sufficient for a "passenger profile" worthy of Alitalia.

“Angry reactions from Chintan, the NGO Maurya is affiliated with, did pressurise the airline into issuing an apology. But that's small consolation. Maurya lost a chance of meeting fellow waste pickers from Latin America and Egypt and sharing experiences with them.”

Bharati Chaturvedi, the Chintan founder who anchored the charge against Alitalia, has a powerful message on why a Euro 3.4 billion (today’s figures) had to give Maurya, a business class ticket -- valid for three years -- to fly anywhere where the airline operates and the option to swap the business class ticket for three economy class tickets.

It’s conviction against injustice!

"We hope the Government of India, and the Ministry of External Affairs is inspired by the leadership of waste pickers in fighting against injustice," she says in an email.

“At Chintan, we saw ourselves as working in the public interest to ensure an equitable and sustainable India for everyone. We are a small NGO but we are committed to standing up and fighting for what is right. Despite being short staffed, fund starved and without much access to the media, and having to handle Alitalia's stubborn, aggressive bull-dog lawyer (we did not have a lawyer and still cannot afford one), we invested our time in building a constituency of global support through smart communications and persistence. The truth prevailed because we fought for it to prevail using our minds-the only resource we had unlimited access to. Alitalia bowed down. It was a David versus Goliath moment for the waste pickers of the country.”

"The incident reminded us, once again, that waste pickers lie at the bottom of the heap. Unless we can get a policy that acknowledges their work, waste pickers will be treated shabbily," Chaturvedi, had said in an earlier interview in Down To Earth.

Alitalia’s subsequent correspondence with DGCA, the air safety regulator, showed that the Indian ground staff "denied boarding (to Maurya) because of his 'inability to manage such a complicated trip,’ and ‘in the best interest and safety of Mr Maurya and other passengers.’”

Ha!

Await the explanation our PM and his Roman compatriots will now have for grounding the chief justice’s order!