A MURDER DIVIDES A VILLAGE
Hatred spread by social media videos, an elopement and self-styled guardians of honour. The poisonous mix results in the murder of a man for his religious identity
PAHASU, UTTAR PRADESH
Grieving kin of Ghulam Mohammad (inset), who was found dead in a mango orchard in his village, Sohi
The geographical boundary of Sohi, a nondescript village near Pahasu in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr, starts with a narrow irrigation canal brimming with monsoon water. At the juncture where the village road, punctuated with muddy potholes, meets the canal, is a dense mango orchard. The serenity of the orchard and the road snaking through the village are a deceptive façade for a village that has been simmering with communal tension in the wake of an elopement and a mysterious murder.
On the night of April 26, Yusuf, 25, ran away with Sonia, a 20-yearold Hindu girl from the neighbouring Fazalpur village. According to Hanifa, one of the 35 Muslims living in Sohi, which has a population of 3,000, the next morning, members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), an outfit founded
by UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath, threatened the four Muslim families in the village to “find and hand over Yusuf and Sonia or face death”.
Five days later, around 9.30 am, Yusuf ’s 59-year-old neighbour Ghulam Mohammad was found dead in the mango orchard he used to guard. Ghulam’s son Vakeel Ahmed, a daily wager, alleges one Govendra, along with 10 HYV members beat his father to death. The police have arrested nine persons, including Govendra, and filed a chargesheet. The other accused include local HYV leaders Honey Raghav, Lalit and Pulkit Bharadwaj.
Nagendra Singh Tomar, the HYV chief in western UP, vehemently denies the charges. “Govendra is not our member. The others have been picked up because they had a tiff with the circle officer, Vijay Pal Singh, on May 28 during the Parashuram Jayanti procession, and he had threatened to fix them,” says Tomar, sipping tea at a roadside stall in Banail, a village in Pahasu.
Sunil Singh Raghav, the Pahasu district president of HYV, has vowed not to shave his beard till Govendra and others are proved innocent. Speaking to india today, Lalit’s parents claimed even the victim’s family had told them that their son and his friends were innocent. They even volunteered to take india today to Ghulam’s home.
In a dilapidated home with a broken door at the end of a narrow lane, Ghulam’s widow sobs inconsolably as she recalls his murder. With neighbours expressing their inability to protect his family, Vakeel feels his future in the village is uncertain. But a steely resolve grips him as he meets Lalit’s parents. “Your son killed my father. My brother saw it with his own eyes,” he says, looking straight into Lalit’s mother’s eyes. Unsure of what to say, she looks away.
Yet, there is widespread sympathy for HYV members in the village. Almost everyone in Banail vouches for the innocence of the HYV members and talk of “the need to teach Muslims a lesson”.
Pahasu and neighbouring Khurja had witnessed communal tension after a video made by a local Muslim boy, Rehan, went viral in March during the UP assembly elections. In the video, Rehan is seen abusing Hindu women.
Village elders lament the breakdown in social harmony and rise in religious intolerance. “We used to live like brothers,” says Banail resident Mahendra, 70. He blames the media, particularly social media, for vitiating the atmosphere. “Videos and messages on cellphones are polluting the young minds,” he says.
mentors to take instructions from and even work in shifts,” says one, on condition of anonymity. They also get informed by ex-cow smugglers, whom they have either pardoned or promised reward against a tip-off. “If caught, vigilante justice usually involves some hard slaps, punches and kicks, nothing more.” For the unlucky, like Pehlu Khan, a 55-year-old dairy farmer from Nuh in Haryana, it can cost a life.
BJP-ruled Rajasthan has banned eating, selling, possessing, transporting or exporting of cows, with a 10-year jail term or a fine of up to Rs 10,000. Yet, Rajasthan traditionally holds India’s biggest cattle fair in Jaipur. It was here that Pehlu Khan had bought a milch cow. Although Yadav has been arrested as the prime accused, none of the six gau rakshaks Pehlu Khan named before his death figure in any video obtained so far. One version is that while the six took away the cattle to a cow shelter, the mob took over, with Yadav chasing Khan with predatory single-mindedness. Another view is that Yadav had chanced upon the incident and led the assault “in the heat of the moment”. The “real culprits” were the gau rakshaks, who took away the cattle, instigated others and retreated when the restless crowd turned nasty.
WHATSAPP WOES
Social media, the Internet and Web 2.0 applications have made mobbing and lynching easier. Take the May 2017 Jharkhand lynchings where 10 people died in and around Seraikela Kharsawan, Singhbhum, Shobhapur and Sosomouli villages. To BJP state committee member and tribal leader Ramesh Hansda, who visited the affected areas, the violence was the “curse of social media”. That’s because a WhatsApp message, with pictures of dead children, had been circulating for a month: ‘Suspected child lifters are carrying sedatives, injections, spray, cotton and small towels. They speak Hindi, Bangla and Malayalam. If you happen to see any stranger near your house immediately inform local police as he could be a member of the child lifting gang,’ the message read.
Many had armed themselves with sticks and rods, and even stopped children from going to school. The unverified message was later traced to a series of people who had created and circulated it to a large number of WhatsApp groups on May 11. A day later, two people died in the first lynching at Jadugora. It left behind the indelible image of Mohammed Naeem, blood-soaked and pleading to villagers with folded hands to spare his life, hours before he was beaten to death. He was a good son to his ageing parents and a good father to his children, said his family members, refusing to accept the compensation of Rs 2 lakh offered by the district administration.
LAW AND LYNCHERS
On July 1, when the Jharkhand police picked up Nityanand Mahato, BJP district media-in-charge from Ramgarh’s BJP office, dragging him by the collar into a waiting van, it marked a sharp departure in lynching investigations. Mahato, an influential local leader belonging to the socially-predominant Koyri community, was charged with ‘premeditated murder’ for the lynching of meat trader Asgar Alimuddin, on June 29. Though Mahato denied his involvement, the police team under additional director general of police R.K. Mallik had collected ample evidence—from phone records to mobile tower dumps—to establish that he had instigated a group to drag Asgar out of his van and beat him up, at a place barely 500 metres from his home.
Far too often, however, the accused are booked under milder IPC sections—341 (wrongful confinement), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) or 34 (acts done by several persons with common intention)—and get out on bail, if arrested at all. Sometimes, no action is taken for long, or only after public opinion forces a probe. Despite the nationwide furore in September 2015, when Muslim blacksmith Mohammad Akhlaq was dragged out of his home in Uttar Pradesh’s Bisada village and bludgeoned to death by a lynch mob, over mere suspicion that he had beef in his fridge, the police filed the chargesheet nearly three months later. What’s more, it had no mention of ‘beef’. The reason? The police were still awaiting a forensic report on the type of meat found in his house.
Civil society activists are canvassing for a new law, Maanav Suraksha Kanoon or MaSuKa, to deal specifically with the rash of mob lynchings across the country. “There have been almost no convictions or punishments, even in high-profile cases, and perpetrators seem unconcerned about the consequences of their actions,” says senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, who has
LYNCHINGS IN THE 1980s AND 1990s HAD NO RELIGIOUS OR ETHNIC CORE, THEY WERE MORE POLITICAL OR PROPERTY DISPUTES