The police in Rajasthan on Saturday arrested two people for allegedly lynching a man in Alwar district the day before on suspicion of cow smuggling, ANI quoted Alwar Inspector General Hemant Priyadarshi as saying.
Villagers in Ramgarh area of the district allegedly attacked 28-year-old Rakbar Khan alias Akbar Khan and another man while they were transporting cattle to Haryana.
“Akbar Khan, a resident of Kolgaon in Haryana, and another man were taking two cows to their village through a forest area near Lalawandi village in Alwar last night, when a group of people beat Khan,” NDTV quoted police officer Subhash Sharma as saying.
“We want justice,” Khan’s father Suleiman told ANI. “The culprits should be arrested soon.”
Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje took to Twitter to condemn the incident. “The strictest possible action shall be taken against the perpetrators,” Raje said.
Congress leader Sachin Pilot accused the government of not being determined about delivering justice. “They are doing lip service,” he told News18. “There is a silent approval which is giving credence to such elements. No government or BJP leader is so big that a single person’s life is worth their image getting tarnished. We must think of this as a human issue rather than the BJP or the Congress.”
Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Dev Ahuja said the cow smuggler died on his way to the hospital. “I demand a judicial inquiry to ascertain whether he was lynched by the mob or beaten to death by police,” he added.
The incident comes just four days after the Supreme Court asked the Parliament to consider creating a new penal provision to deal with incidents of vigilantism, saying that mobocracy cannot be allowed in society. “No citizen can take law into his hands nor become law unto himself,” the bench had said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi too condemned mob violence, terming it an act against humanity. He urged states to take stringent action in such cases during the debate ahead of the no-confidence motion vote.
In April 2017, a 55-year-old man, Pehlu Khan, died of injuries he sustained during an attack by a group of cow vigilantes in Alwar. In November, cow vigilantes allegedly shot dead a 35-year-old Muslim man in the district. The man transporting cows from Alwar to Bharatpur when he was reported to have been attacked.
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