Members of India's minority groups protest the increasing incidents of mob lynching of Muslims and tribal people in eastern Jharkhand state, in the national capital New Delhi on April 15, 2019. (Photo: Bijay Kumar Minj/ UCA News)
Ten men accused of lynching a Muslim man in 2019 were found guilty by a court in a central Indian state and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Tabrez Ansari, a Muslim trader, was beaten on June 18, 2019, by the men who apparently thought he was a thief. They also forced him to chant "Jai Shri Ram" and "Jai Hanuman" slogans hailing Hindu gods. He died days later, in police custody.
A court in Jharkhand’s Seraikela-Kharsawan district pronounced the sentence on July 5 after finding all the 10 attackers guilty of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder,” and also fined each of them Rs 15,000 (US$182).
“We welcome the court’s decision, but I personally feel that the punishment could have been more severe than the jail term of 10 years given the serious nature of the crime,” Ratan Tirkey, a former member of the Jharkhand government's tribal advisory committee, told UCA News.
Tirkey, a Catholic lay leader, said that the lynching of Ansari was part of a systematic hate campaign targeting poor Muslims “by branding them as anti-nationals and beef smugglers.”
“These self-proclaimed guardians of the Hindu religion killed a man just because he was a Muslim,” he added.
Nabore Ekka, president of the Delhi region of the Bharatiya Adivasi Sangamam (Indian Indigenous People’s Forum) told UCA News that “mob lynching has become a trend in society to suppress minority groups.”
Meanwhile, Shaista Parveen, widow of Ansari told media people that she will appeal against the sentence in the state’s High Court and demand life imprisonment for her husband’s killers.
“I respect the district court verdict but am not fully satisfied with it,” she said.
The local police’s role in the case had come under question from the very beginning.
Ansari was taken into custody in an injured state by the police who did not file a case against the people who had attacked him.
Instead, they relied on a post-mortem report, which said Ansari had died of “cardiac arrest.”
After a complaint was filed by Parveen, a fact-finding team sent by a civil rights organization found that the police had denied Ansari proper medical treatment and also threatened his family.
Later, a probe panel appointed by the district administration also found lapses on the police’s part and said that doctors at the first hospital Ansari was taken to were also responsible as their report led to police taking him into custody despite severe head injuries.
Meanwhile, the Jharkhand government admitted that 46 incidents of mob lynching have taken place in the state in the last five years. The government, however, did not disclose the number of people who have died in such incidents.
Minorities groups say that incidents of mob lynching of poor Muslim men had increased since the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India in 2014.
Muslims make up 14.53 percent of Jharkhand’s population of 33 million, of which 4.3 percent are Christians, mostly tribal people.
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