Madhya Pradesh police book murdered man for cow slaughter before filing case against his attackers

Alleged cow slaughter

His friend who survived Sunday’s beating may be arrested once doctors say he is fit. Four people have been arrested for the assault. 

Tuesday, May 21st 2018 · 10:54 am

Abhishek Dey

A 45-year-old Muslim man died and his friend was severely injured after they were assaulted by a group of men who accused them of cow slaughter, in Madhya Pradesh’s Satna district on Sunday. The police have registered two cases in connection with the incident. The first case was filed against the victims, charging them with cow slaughter. Later, a case of murder and attempt to murder was filed against the alleged assaulters.

The attack occurred early on Sunday when Shiraj Khan (wrongly identified as Riyaz Khan in police records and news reports) and his friend Shakeel, 38, were walking back to their homes in Maihar town of Satna district from a neighbouring village. They were stopped by a group of men in Amgar village – around 15 km away from Maihar – who accused them of killing a cow. The men beat Khan and Shakeel with sticks and wooden planks, the police said.

Khan was a tailor, while Shakeel works in a bicycle repair shop in Maihar. Their families said that the two men had gone to a neighbouring village to recover money that one of Khan’s clients owed him. After the assault, some residents of Amgar village spotted the two injured men and called the police. They were both taken to hospital, where Khan succumbed to his injuries. Shakeel is recuperating in a hospital in Jabalpur. Khan’s is survived by his wife and four children – three daughters and a son, all aged between four and 14 years.

Shakeel will be taken into custody once he is declared fit by doctors, a senior police officer said.

Superintendent of Police (Satna) Rajesh Hingankar said that the police had recovered the carcass of a bull and two packages of meat at the scene of the crime.

Shiraj Khan’s younger brother Imran Khan, however, questioned this claim. For one, he asked how the police were certain, without a forensic test, that the meat was that of a bull. Besides, he demanded to know how the authorities had concluded that Shiraj Khan and Shakeel had killed the bull. He said that it was possible that his brother and Shakeel were passing by and were attacked by the accused who were looking out for Muslim men to target.

Superintendent of Police Hingankar said that a preliminary investigation suggested that Shiraj Khan and Shakeel had slaughtered the bull for meat, and that the police had eyewitness testimony to this effect.

Recent tensions

Maihar, the home town of legendary sarod player Allauddin Khan, is considered a holy place by Hindus because of the presence of the ancient Sharda Devi temple.

The town has a Muslim population of around 14,000, which is less than 10% of the total population, said Nafees Khan, a social worker in Maihar. “The town had no recent history of communal tensions until December 2017,” he said.

On December 8, a group of men who claimed allegiance to Hindutva groups disrupted a celebration in a Muslim colony on Milad-ul-Nabi, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad. Hindutva groups had organised a march in Maihar that day, during which a Bajrang Dal leader was beaten up by some Muslim men. Ten people from both communities were arrested in connection with the violence.

Nafees Khan said that after that incident, Hindutva groups had made it a point to spread messages through WhatsApp groups and at public meetings claiming that Muslims in Satna were illegally slaughtering cows. The Bajrang Dal leader who was beaten up had headed several such meetings, he said.

Four arrested

Shiraj Khan and Shakeel were booked under provisions of the Madhya Pradesh Cow Slaughter Ban Act, 2004, and the Madhya Pradesh Agriculture Cattle Preservation Act, 1959, the police said. In 2012, Madhya Pradesh amended its rules against cow slaughter and raised the maximum punishment from three years imprisonment to seven years imprisonment, with a fine of Rs 5,000.

Four people – Pawan Singh Gond, Vijay Singh Gond, Phool Singh Gond and Narayan Singh Gond – who were identified by Shakeel, were booked for murder and attempt to murder. They have been arrested, the police said.

The case against Shiraj Khan and Shakeel was registered on the basis of a complaint by Pawan Singh Gond, who told the police that some other villagers had attacked the two men after finding them in the act of slaughtering a bull. They then informed Gond and the other accused.

Security strengthened

The cases were registered at Badera Police Station. Officials at this police station, who did not wish to be identified, first told Scroll.in about the sequence in which the cases were registered. Sub-Divisional Officer of Police (Maihar) Arvind Tiwari confirmed that the case related to cow slaughter was registered first, and the other case relating to murder and attempt to murder was registered later.

Security was strengthened in and around Maihar after the incident. Tiwari said that the peace-keeping committee in the region had helped keep the peace. “Both parties belong to different places,” he said. “There is no probability of personal enmity as they did not know each other.

The police said that they are yet to establish whether the arrested men are linked to Hindutva groups.

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The Daily Fix: Dalit lynched for refusing to clear trash is a reminder of Gujarat’s caste apartheid

Everything you need to know for the day (and a little more).

21 hours ago

Shoaib Daniyal

The Big Story: Gujarat model?

In the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, of Gujarat was touted as an ideal state by its then chief minister Narendra Modi. Yet, as a number of commenters pointed out, Gujarat’s economic prosperity did little to help its people – the state’s social indicators ranged from middling to poor. This is hardly surprising given the vicious anti-Dalit prejudice present in the state.

On Sunday, this casteism was on naked display as a 40-year-old Dalit man, Mukesh Vaniya, was allegedly murdered in Rajkot district. Vaniya’s wife said that employees from a local factory asked them their caste and then when it was confirmed they were Dalits, wanted the couple to pick up garbage. When Vaniya and his wife refused, they were beaten. Vaniya was picked up, tied to a pole and assaulted brutally with metal rods for more than an hour. A video of the incident was also recorded. Vaniya died as a result of the assault.

The incident is a clear throwback to Una in 2016, where cow vigilantes had assaulted four Dalit men for skinning a cow. There too, Dalits complained that caste conventions dictated that they were often forced to pick up dead cows just like Rajkot saw the Dalit couple being forced to pick up garbage.

These are not isolated incidents. In 2010, Navsarjan, a nongovernmental organisation that has done extensive work amongst Gujarat’s Dalits, published a study noting that untouchability was widely practiced in Gujarat. Amongst 98.4% of the village surveyed, inter-caste marriages were barred. In 97.6% of villages, a Dalit touching a caste Hindu’s utensils or water pot was seen as a form of pollution. In 98% of villages, tea was either not served to Dalits or served in cups reserved specially for Dalits. Religious segregation was near-complete too: in 97% of the villages, Dalits were barred from touching articles used in religious rituals. Segregation is near total, from schools, wells to temples, as is violence against Dalits. It is clear that Article 17 of the Indian Constitution, outlawing untouchability, is a dead letter in the state of Gujarat.

This dire situation has been, for the large part, encouraged by the state’s political leadership. The government, for example, has been dragging its feet in implementing land reforms – carried out decades earlier by most other states in India. In February earlier this year, a Dalit activist, Bhanubhai Vankar set himself on fire to protest the state government’s apathy on the matter. In fact, far from implementing land reforms, the state’s BJP government has made it easier for rich farmers and industry to dispossess small holding farmers by relaxing earlier safeguards under the land revenue code.

Simultaneously, the Gujarat government has made efforts to shoot the messenger, stifling voices that speak on behalf of Dalits. Navsarjan, the state’s most credible body on Dalit issues was accused of trying to “malign Gujarat’s image” by a state minister. Even more seriously, in 2017, the Modi government cancelled the NGO’s foreign funding, forcing it to let go nearly its entire staff and putting in peril its activities in more than 3,000 villages across Gujarat.

Unlike states like Uttar Pradesh, Dalit have little political clout in Gujarat. Combine this with an actively hostile stance from the state government results in Gujarat’s Dalits leading a precarious existence, subject to apartheid and brutal violence on a regular basis.

 

The Big Scroll

• In Gujarat, it took a tragedy for two Dalits to get their land titles. Many more are still waiting, reports Aarefa Johari.

• “He will bring us justice”: Dalits in Gujarat pin their hopes on Jignesh Mevani’s big win.

• With its foreign funding cancelled, can Gujarat’s oldest Dalit NGO, Navsarjan,survive?

• “Your mother, you take care of it”: Shoaib Daniyal on the Dalits behind Gujarat’s stirring cow carcass protests

Punditry

• Activism in its true sense:  In Bloomberg-Quint, Alok Prasanna Kumar writes about Justice Chelameswar’s Legacy.

• What’s beyond Bengaluru: In the Economic Times, Narendra Pani outlines the reason behind Siddaramaih’s failure in Karnataka

• In Mint, Kunal Singh writes on the strategic stalemate in South Asia: while Pakistan hasn’t been able to fulfil its grand strategy objectives with the help of its nuclear weapons, India hasn’t found an adequate answer to Pakistan’s skilful use of sub-conventional assets

 

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Don’t Miss

Ipsita Chakravarty reports on how Kashmiri women see themselves in a separatist movement dominated by men:

Women’s protests are not new in Kashmir. “People have forgotten the 1990s,” said Hameeda Nayeem, who teaches English at Kashmir University and is married to separatist leader Nayeem Khan. She recalled how men and women marched in large numbers to the United Nations building to demand a plebiscite, for instance. 

But many agree that women have now become more confrontational with the state. Recent images of college girls pelting stones on security forces and being detained for taking part in protests raise some old questions again. Where do women see themselves in a separatist movement whose protagonists have always been men, which has largely been defined by men? Where do women’s individual freedoms figure in the idea of azadi?

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