Civil society protests clean chit to accused

Several civil society organisations in Rajasthan reacted strongly to the clean chit given to the six people who had been named by Haryana dairy farmer Pehlu Khan before he died of injuries sustained in an attack by cow vigilantes in Alwar.

The organisations, in an open letter to chief minister Vasundhara Raje on Friday, protested the police’s move to absolve the six of criminal charges, which showed the state government and the police patronised violence by the gau rakshaks.

The CID-CB of Rajasthan police in its investigation into the lynching case found that the six people named in Khan’s dying statement were not involved in the attack.

Police closed cases against these men on the basis of their call detail records and testimonies of workers of a cow shelter, HT had reported on Thursday.

Khan, 55, was lynched by the cow vigilantes on April 1 at Behror on Jaipur-Delhi national highway when he and five others were transporting cattle bought from a market in Jaipur to their village in Nuh, Haryana. Khan died in the hospital on April 3.

“It is now clear the investigation was transferred from district police to the CID-CB only to save these men,” the letter said. Noted activist Harsh Mander on Friday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the authority to control the mob violence if he was “really convinced” that it was wrong, but making general statements every few months does not carry any conviction.

He was in Jaipur to mark the arrival of ‘Karwan-e-Mohabbat’ of human rights activists .

“We can accuse our prime minister of many things but we can’t accuse him of weakness. If he really is convinced that this mob violence is wrong, he has the authority and the competence to control it. Just making a general statement once in six months while all your colleagues continue to justify and support it and police continue to act in partisan way, it carries no conviction that the government actually is opposed to this violence,” he said.