Police arrest ‘plotters’ of Hindu tailor’s murder in Rajasthan
KILLING OVER ISLAMOPHOBIC REMARKS LEADS TO MAJOR PROTESTS AND CURFEW IN STATE
POLICE in India made fresh arrests last Saturday (2) over the murder of a Hindu tailor in Rajasthan, which sparked communal tensions and a clampdown on protests and the internet to prevent them from escalating.
Two Muslim men already under arrest for the murder, who filmed the act and posted it online, said it had been a response to the tailor’s support for a politician’s derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammad. Kanhaiya Lal Teli had allegedly made a social media post supporting Nupur Sharma, a former spokesperson for prime minister Narendra Modi’s party, who made anti-Islam comments in May.
Three senior police officials said last Saturday that two more Muslim men based in Rajasthan were being held for planning Teli’s murder in his shop in Udaipur, a popular tourist destination.
“We have now arrested the two masterminds, and previously we had arrested two men who committed the heinous crime,” said Prafulla Kumar, a senior police official based in Udaipur.
Kumar said internet services were being gradually restored and security forces continued to be on alert.
An angry mob including some lawyers slapped and shoved the four accused in the murder case when they were presented before a trial court on Saturday.
A demonstration in Udaipur last Thursday (30) organised by Hindu groups saw several people throw stones, chant slogans and call for the two accused to be executed, a reporter at the scene said. Hundreds of extra police were deployed.
“It was only because of the case of Nupur Sharma my father was killed. It wasn’t such a big deal,” Lal’s son Yash Telli said last Wednesday (29).
“Does it make sense that they killed my father over this small issue?” he said, calling for the two accused to be hanged or killed by police.
A day after his murder, Lal’s name had been mentioned more than 200,000 times on Twitter, along with a grab bag of hashtags condemning the attack.
The hashtag “Hindu lives matter” was being posted more than 2,000 times an hour last Thursday.
There were angry reactions on social media platforms, with some users demanding violent retribution against both the accused murderers and other Muslims.
Members of public Telegram groups dedicated to promoting and defending Hinduism called on each other to pick up weapons and attack Muslims, or discussed the virtues of storming a police station to attack the two accused men.
The far-right Hindu group Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) used social media to issue a nationwide protest call against Islamist terrorism and complain that Muslims had routinely upset the religious sentiments of India’s majority religion. “You should be afraid of the day when Hindus too start giving reply to the insult,” senior VHP figure Surendra Kumar Jain said in a video posted online, and watched nearly 75,000 times across Twitter and Facebook.
Though many prominent voices said the killing was an indictment of Islam, many of the loudest voices condemning the attack came from Muslim religious groups.
“There is no room for justification of violence in Islam,” wrote the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, one of at least half a dozen prominent India-based Muslim groups to condemn the attack while also calling for calm. “Peace should not be disturbed. Nobody should try to take advantage of this ugly crime.”
Local media reported a separate incident on June 21 in which a chemist was stabbed to death in Maharashtra state for allegedly supporting the remarks made by Sharma on social media.
“Five persons were arrested in connection with the murder of the chemist, and a search is on to trace the prime accused,” Aarti Singh, a chief regional police official, was quoted by local press as saying.
At least two demonstrators were shot and killed by police in India during protests against Sharma’s comments.
In Afghanistan, the militant group Islamic State last month claimed an attack on a Sikh temple that killed at least two people and injured seven was in response to insults levelled at the Prophet Mohammad in India. The National Investigative Agency (NIA) – India’s top anti-terrorism agency – said that it is carrying out a probe into Teli’s killing.
A senior NIA official in New Delhi said agents were questioning Muslims linked with the four accused in Udaipur to identify whether they had links with militant networks. Muslims living about three kilometres from the tailor’s shop said they felt nervous and feared a social and economic boycott by powerful Hindus residing in Udaipur.
“I know what has been done is barbaric, but the community should not be held responsible for the deed of two people,” said Mohammad Farukh, a medical representative living in a Muslim-dominated area of the city.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board called the incident “highly condemnable”, adding that it was against both Indian law and Islamic strictures.