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The Story of ‘Two Temples’ and Mid-day Meal

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At one place, they demolished a mosque and are trying to build the Ram Mandir in its place.

At one place, they demolished a mosque and are trying to build the Ram Mandir in its place. At another place, they demolished the centuries-old Ravidas temple, which contradicts their overwhelming love for temples. And these same people are serving salt-roti as mid-day meal to children in schools. An FIR was lodged against the journalist who exposed them. Senior journalist Urmilesh talks about this political hypocrisy.

Courtesy: News Click

RTI info on Electronic Voting Machines would ‘endanger’ life of engineers: BEL

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In a surprise move, one of India’s top electronics public sector undertakings, Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), has refused to disclose details under the Right to Information (RTI) Act about Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verified Paper Trail (VVPAT), used by the Election Commission of India (ECI) for voting across India, stating that such a disclosure “would endanger the life of its engineers.”

Ironically, in June this year, the ECI took an identical view while refusing to disclose under the RTI Act details of the dissent notes of its Commissioner Ashok Lavasa on decisions pertaining to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches, which were alleged to have violated model code, saying it may “endanger the life or physical safety” of an individual.

Top RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak, who is with the advocacy group Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), had sought information on EVM and VVPAT following “scanty information” about the manner in which polls were conducted across India in April-May 2019 general elections, which returned the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to power with a thumping majority.

Dissatisfied, says Nayak in an email alert to Counterview, several private citizens and mediapersons used RTI to seek information about voter turnout data mismatch, complaints about EVMs malfunctioning, complaints about mismatch of EVMs and VVPAT printouts, movement of EVMs and VVPATs to the electoral constituencies from the manufacturing companies, and details of action taken on complaints received against high profile politicians for violating the Model Code of Conduct.

After many of these requests were turned down by relevant public authorities, Nayak asserts, on June 17, 2019, he decided to file two identical RTI applications seeking information from BEL, as also the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), the two manufacturers of the voting machines.

ECIL, says Nayak, “Uploaded some of this information on the RTI Online Facility but rejected access to some crucial bits of information sought in my RTI application”, but has not received “a formal reply from ECIL.”

As for BEL, Nayak says, initially, the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of BEL “sent a fee intimation letter for Rs 1,434 for a total of 717 pages after almost a month”, agreeing to “supply most of the information”, even though denying “access to the VVPAT patent application filed with the Office of the Controller General of Patents by citing Section 8(1)(d) of the RTI Act.”
 

How could BEL say it did not have necessary information on EVMs, VVATs? Which papers did they count before sending the reply that information was contained in 717 pages?

After sending a draft of Rs 1,434 and waiting for 40 days, when Nayak did not hear from the BEL CPIO, on August 28, 2019, he filed an appeal under the RTI Act challenging the non-supply of information, to which, the CPIO, who immediately sent in a reply, returning the bank draft and “claimed that BEL did not have most of the information sought which he had agreed to supply in his first reply”.

The reply particularly said that the disclosure of information would “endanger the life or physical safety of engineers who carried out the assignment related to preparation of EVMs and VVPATs”, hence it was being “denied under section (8(1)(g) of the RTI Act, 2005.” 

Wondering how could CPIO say that he did not have necessary information, asks Nayak, “Which papers did he count before sending the first reply?”, suspecting, the latest reply is “an afterthought arising out of pressure exerted – probably by an external agency against making this information public.”

Nayak says, refusal to part with information under the RTI Act runs counter to what the Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions said about the NDA government’s commitment to transparency while replying to the debate on the Bill to amend The Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) in the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2019.

Referring to RTI, the minister claimed that the government “has been absolutely committed, as in other wings of governance, to ensure full transparency and full accountability”. Comments Nayak, “Sadly, this governance philosophy does not seem to have percolated downwards beyond the corridors of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with which the Union Minister is associated.”

Courtesy: Counter View

Ambekarite denied admission at University of Madras

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Former secretary of the Ambedkar Periyar Circle, ideologically opposed to the RSS-BJP regime has been reportedly denied permission due to “pressure” from the Governor’s office

 
University Of Madras
Image Courtesy: India Today

Kripa Mohan alleges he has been targeted because he participated in several protests. A student activist and also a student of the Department of Buddhism of the University of Madras has been declared ineligible for the programme. Kripa Mohan, who graduated from the University’s Department of Journalism and Communication in 2018, applied for a master’s programme in the Department of Philosophy for a course in Buddhism on July 31. According to the Hindu, he said his admission was rejected as he had not produced an eligibility certificate. According to him, the head of his department told him that his admission was rejected due to pressure from the Governor/Chancellor’s office.
 

Mr. Kripa Mohan was active in student politics and a secretary of the student body of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle while being a student in the journalism department. “Now I am a member. We organised protests when Tarun Vijay (former Rajya Sabha member) and BJP leader L. Ganesan came to the University. We protested against ban on beef eating and the New Education Policy recently. When I applied for the programme the Buddhism HoD said I need not provide TC as I had graduated from another department in the same University. Just the PG provisional certificate was required.” On August 29, the department head rejected his admission since he had not submitted the eligibility certificate.

Rules not followed

Vice-Chancellor P. Duraisamy said when a student joins another programme in a different department he has to get a letter from the previous department head. “He had completely violated the admission guidelines. Last year and the year before, he created a lot of protests. The candidate had graduated from Anna University in engineering and then done a PG in journalism. He has not met the conditions of the admission guidelines,” he said and added that the letter from the head of journalism department regarding his conduct was factored in. The Chancellor’s office was not involved in the rejection process, he clarified.
 

Indian origin Labour MP demands British PM’s apology for racist remarks

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It’s good to follow Jeremy Corbyn on twitter. And this tweet by the Labour Party of Britain (Rebuilding Britain, for the Many and not the Few) attaches a powerful 1.32 minute video of a member of Indian origin making a powerful, succinct speech. The man is Tanmanjeet Singh Desi. Tanmanjeet is the Labour MP for Slough and the video on twitter has, by now 2.3 million views and 201.7k likes. While Desi has a modest 38.5 k followers on twitter, Jeremy Corbyn has 2.1 million!

Jeremy Corbyn tweeted yesterday, September 4” Everyone should watch this powerful moment.” And powerful and nerve tingling it is as one of our own (a turban sporting Sikh Member of the British Parliament) takes on the most powerful in his country, the prime minister. He was challenging Boris Johnson on his racist remarks on Muslim women.

Says Tanmanjeet Singh Desi,

“Mr Speaker if I decide to wear a turban, or you decide to wear a cross; or he decides to wear a kirpan or a skull cap. Or she decides to wear a burqa or a hijab. Does that mean that it is right open season for members of this Hon’ble House to make derogatory and divisive remarks about our appearance!
“For those of us from a young age have had to endure and face up to being called names such as ‘tower head’ or ‘Taliban’ or coming from Bongo Bongo land, we can appreciate full well the hurt and pain being felt by already vulnerable Muslim women when they are being described as bank robbers or letter boxes! (shame, thumps)..

“So, rather than hide behind sham and whitewash investigations, when will the prime minister finally apologise for his derogatory and racist remarks? (cheers, thumping approval from the House)

“Racist remarks, Mr Speaker, that have led to a spike in hate crime. And given the increasing prevalence of such incidents within his party, when will the prime minister finally order an Inquiry into Islamophobia within the Conservative Party, something which he and his Chancellor promised on national television?

Monitoring group Tell MAMA [Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks] had unveiled research earlier this week which claimed that Islamophobic incidents rose by 375 per cent in the week after Johnson’s references to the burqa as “oppressive” in the newspaper column.

Elegy For a Lost Friend: Gauri Lankesh (1962-2017)

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An extract from Battling for India: A Citizen’s Reader


 

Artist Pushpamala N recaptures the many facets of Gauri Lankesh in a loving verbal portrait. What made Gauri such a force of nature, even more than her zest for life and fighting spirit, was her extraordinary integrity. She moved from English journalism to Kannada without altering her voice or message. Staying true to the journalistic values of her father, P. Lankesh, she ran her Patrike without advertisements, but also brought to it her own straight-talking style, wide-angle vision and open-hearted sympathies.

September 5, the day of her assassination, was a special day of remembrance for Gauri since she regarded her father as her teacher. It now becomes a day to remember her exceptional life.

I was preparing to leave Bangalore for three weeks when I got a call from a friend in Mumbai asking me to switch on the TV immediately, saying that Gauri had been shot. I thought Gauri had gone driving off on one of her trips and been shot at. She had always received threats since the time she took over the Lankesh Patrike. Within minutes of the news of her death, people from all over were sending messages and calling. Many of my friends, who had met her at my place, were also devastated. By the time we rushed to her house, journalists and other people had already reached there, and a crowd began to gather. In the sleepless nights after that evening, an absurd thought occurred again and again—of Gauri sitting at her desk at the office that night before the edition and calling out, “Stop press! Gauri Lankesh has just been killed, we have to cover that!

Neither her family nor her friends had expected such a great public outpouring of grief and anger at her death, or that she would become a global icon of resistance. We had not thought that she was so powerful. With us, she was more vulnerable, speaking of her struggles and always good for an argument or a joke. We used to pop into each other’s houses when we were depressed, to unwind. She could be brutally frank.

Gauri lived two streets away from my place, in a house built by her mother Indira, an astute businesswoman who owned a popular saree shop which had supported the family in lean times. Though we both grew up in Basavanagudi in south Bangalore, we only met when I moved into my newly built studio in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in 1996, after twenty years of having been away from the city. But I had known her father, P. Lankesh, since the early 1970s when, as a silly teenager just out of school, I used to hang around Central College with a disreputable bunch of older friends known as the “Chod” gang. The English department was famous. It had professors like the influential intellectual T.G. Vaidyanathan and P. Lankesh, the celebrated Navya (Modernist) Kannada writer, each with adoring groups around him. Later, becoming a new wave filmmaker himself, Lankesh had played the role of the rebel brahmin Naranappa in the first Kannada new wave film Samskara (1970), directed by Pattabhirama Reddy and based on the novel by U.R. Ananthamurthy, with Girish Karnad playing the good brahmin. It was a strong critique of caste, dealing particularly with the hypocrisy of the influential Madhava brahmin community (to which my family belongs). Though the censors had initially banned Samskara, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had revoked the ban. I do not remember much commotion from the brahmin community when it was released in 1970. My mother and her friends went off to see the film with a naughty air. I even acted in a play directed by Lankesh which had been staged in the Town Hall. It was the Kannada translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a comedy about a woman, Lysistrata, who persuades the Greek women to boycott sex with their men to force them to end the Peloponnesian War. A family friend, member of the Swatantra party, wrote a strong letter to the Deccan Herald that the play was obscene. Though I was only in the crowd scenes, my father was furious and that was the end of my theatrical career.

Lankesh left his job and started the first Kannada tabloid Lankesh Patrike in 1980, to the disapproval of his literary friend who thought it would vulgarise his writing. He was probably inspired by the popular success of his political column in the Kannada newspaper Prajavani. Lankesh was a Lohiaite influenced by the charismatic Karnataka socialist leader Shanthaveri Gopala Gowda. I think his decision came out of a desire to “go to the people” after the tumultuous days of the 1970s, a decade marked by widespread movements for social justice and protests against the Emergency. Bangalore was the hub of the influential Navya literary movement, new wave cinema and new theatre dealing with social issues. Prasanna had founded the left-wing theatre group Samudaya just before the Emergency, and it had been performing political theatre all over Karnataka. The local paper Deccan Herald had also become a leading opposition after K.N. Harikumar came back from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and took over aseditor in 1978. The actress Snehalatha Reddy, socialist and wife of Pattabhirama Reddy, who had played Naranappa’s dalit lover Chandri in Samskara, wasfalsely accused in the Baroda Dynamite case and jailed and tortured during the Emergency. She died soon after being released.

Based on Gandhi’s Harijan, the Lankesh Patrike was a powerful anti-establishment voice for the oppressed and marginalised, running on readers’ subscriptions with a strict policy against advertisements. It grew to have a huge readership. It was a mixture of political exposés and sensational tabloid writing mixed with a strong literary content, providing a platform to new voices. What Lankesh also did was to invent a new language, or maybe many languages, delightfully tweaking Kannada with the fluidity of a master. Film scholar Madhav Prasad says he used to wait to see the new edition in Kolkata for the sheer pleasure of reading the language. One cover had the title “Bam Gum Yuddha”(Bangarappa–Gundu Rao War). No one had used Kannada with such audacity.

When I moved to Rajarajeshwari Nagar, I was introduced to Gauri by our older friend, the ex-cricketer Balaji, a neighbour of the Lankeshes. His house had served as an intellectual adda in Basavanagudi where Lankesh used to go to play badminton every evening. Basavanagudi was the centre of Kannada literature and theatre. The Vidyarthi Bhavan café in Gandhi Bazaar had been the meeting place for two generations of writers. Prasanna used to have a running joke that the great Kannada Navodaya (Renaissance) writer Masti Venkatesha Iyengar was so lusty thathe had not one, but “two-two dosas” every day.

When I first met Gauri, she was a journalist for the Sunday magazine edited by Vir Sanghvi. We used to meet often. Rajarajeshwari Nagar was lonely and scarcely populated. Gauri and her filmmaker sister Kavitha would talk in a racy, slangy Kannada that was delightfully new to me. We had completely different sets of friends and would throw large parties. My then husband Ashish Rajadhyaksha and our group of friends, all old Bangaloreans who had returned, had just started the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society—CSCS. Gauri had been married to journalist Chidanand Rajghatta, but they had broken up before we met. Lankesh and Ananthamurthy were the yin and yang of Navya literature and their children were good friends. But after Lankesh attacked Ananthamurthy in his paper, there was a rift. Gauri was loyal to her father and I never met the U.R.A. crowd at her place after that. I remember that at one of her parties, I was dancing on one foot because my other leg was encased in plaster after a bad scooter accident, when Prakash Belawadi (now a leading Modi bhakt) came up to me and bemoaned that people did not use theirhands to dance. He demonstrated some fancy moves.

In 2000, when Lankesh suddenly died, there was a crisis and Gauri had to take over the paper as editor. The sisters adored their father. Though Kavitha had been Lankesh’s favourite and Indrajit, the youngest son, was his pet, Gauri was the only journalist in the family. She had recently moved to Delhi and was enjoying working in the new ETV channel for the first time as a television journalist. After Lankesh’s death, the family realised that the paper was broke and there were only a few thousand rupees—“just enough for his cards money”—in his bank account. The Lankesh Patrike, which had a readership of two lakhs in its heyday when Lankesh was known as a kingmaker, had lost out in the new era of 24/7 television. The family thought of shutting down the paper, but Gauri told me that if the paper had been shut down, the agents would not return the collections from the last issue and they would not be able to pay salaries. When her younger brother Indrajit was named proprietor, she chafed at the thought that she would have to work under him as the editor. Some years later, when they fell out over her activism, she began her own paper, the Gauri Lankesh Patrike.

 

Pushpamala N is a photo and visual artist based in Bangalore, India. She has been referred to as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art “. Her work has been described as performance photography, as she frequently uses herself as model in her own work. She uses elements of popular culture in her art to explore place, gender and history.

This is an excerpt from Battlling for India: A Citizen’s Reader edited by Githa Hariharan and Salim Yusufji and published by Speaking Tiger. Republished here with permission from the publisher.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

Iqbal Ansari, litigant in Babri masjid case attacked

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The main litigant in the Babri Masjid litigation, Iqbal Ansari, was on Tuesday attacked by a woman named Vartika Singh and her male companion in his house.

The woman went to Ansari’s house accompanied by a male on the pretext of discussing issues like Triple Talaq and then brought up the issue of the Ram Temple, which the Hindutva groups claim was demolished and the Babri masjid constructed in its place.

The duo then blamed Ansari for delaying the construction of the temple at that spot where the Babri Masjid had stood and subsequently razed tot he ground to pave for the construction of a temple. And soon got into a scuffle with him and became aggressive hurling allegations.  They even threatened to kill him if he did not withdraw the case.

Ansari was saved by his security personnel and he later lodged a complaint in the PS. The police took them in custody. Vartika Singh was taken to a Mahila PS. She is being interrogated there. Vartika Singh is said to be an international shooter.
 

A few days back Rajeev Dhavan, senior advocate, representing Muslims in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmbhoomi dispute was threatened by some people both in the court and in his home for fighting the case on behalf of Muslims.

Courtesy: Two Circle

76 percent applicants in Jharkhand did not get any installment of PMMVY since inception

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Action research study led by Jean Dreze in June 2019 indicates that only 8 percent of the beneficiary gets all the installments of central government’s maternity scheme

 

Ranchi: Jaya, a resident of Raidih, Gumla had applied in 2017 for Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandan Yojna (PMMVY). She had provided all the documents to the respective Anganwadi centre, but she did not receive a single installment.

Rani and Sweta of Shikaripara, Dumka faced a similar fate. They complaints registered at the Anganwadi also went in vain.

And same happened with Ganga of Peterwar, Bokaro, who had applied for PMMVY two years back but did not receive any installment.

The four women are among the 202 women from 42 gram panchayats, who had interacted with a team of social activists headed by renowned Development Economist Jean Dreze. The meeting took place in six blocks of Jharkhand’s five districts to know how well the PMMVY had been implemented in Jharkhand.

Under PMMVY, Rs 5000 is given to a pregnant woman, if she gets registered to an angawadi centre and delivers a child in any government hospital. The First installment is of Rs 1000 while second and third are of Rs 2000 each.
 

Jean Dreze told eNewsroom, “Pregnancy is a time of hardship and uncertainty for rural women, when their special needs for food, rest and health care get little attention. Maternity benefit is a legal right under the National Food Security Act. It can be of great help to them and their children. Alas, the PMMVY’s restricted coverage, reduced entitlements and bloated formalities have undermined this essential right.”

But a survey done by non-government organization (NGO) volunteers found that 76 per cent women, who had applied for PMMVY benefits, since it got implemented, did not receive any installment.

Only 24 per cent of the total women applicants of PMMVY received any installment. And only 8 per cent received all the three installments.

The survey’s report was presented today at Ranchi during a press conference.

The study also found that the National Food Security Act 2013 (NFSA) directs the central government to provide all pregnant women a maternity benefit of Rs 6000, unless they qualify for maternity benefits as formal-sector employees. After negating this responsibility for four years, the central government launched the PMMVY in 2017. The PMMVY provides for maternity benefits of Rs.5000 in three installments, but only for the first child.

And women have to fulfill conditions such as early registration of pregnancy, an ante-natal check-up, and immunisation of the child. They also have to fill a long application form at the local Anganwadi for each installment.

The entire PMMVY system runs on the shoulders of Anganwadi workers, but in Jharkhand, the workers have not been paid for many months, thereby directly affecting the scheme.

The team also submitted a letter to Amitabh Kaushal, Principal Secretary, Social Welfare, Women and Child Development and demanded that the PMMVY scheme to be universalized as it will only cost Rs 400 crore for the Jharkhand government, 0.5 percent of the state’s budget. It also demanded for transparent in its process for both information and payments. Also the need for the payment to be timely was also expressed. And also the scheme should also be well-publicized or advertised to let know the people about the scheme as most of the rural women are not even aware about it.

After the PC was over, economist Jean Dreze told eNewsroom, “Pregnancy is a time of hardship and uncertainty for rural women, when their special needs for food, rest and health care get little attention. Maternity benefit is a legal right under the National Food Security Act. It can be of great help to them and their children. Alas, the PMMVY’s restricted coverage, reduced entitlements and bloated formalities have undermined this essential right.”

Note: Names of the women have been changed.

First published in https://enewsroom.in/

Bihar Mob Beats 4 Over Child-Lifting Suspicions, Intensifies Attack After Learning Muslim Identity

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Gaya, Bihar: Five Muslims, including an eight-year-old boy, were injured as a mob here attacked them over suspicions of child lifting on August 25, 2019.


Mohammed Kaisar (43) and three of his relatives were attacked by a mob on suspicions of child-lifting in Gaya, Bihar. On learning the victims’ faith, the mob shouted “Maar Miyawan Hai [Beat them, they are Muslims]”, and intensified the attack. This is the ninth attack in August 2019 over rumours of child lifting in the state. Photo shared by the victims.

“Maar Miyawan Hai [Beat them, they are Muslims]”, the mob shouted and intensified the attack when they discovered their victims were Muslim, eye-witnesses told FactChecker.in. In an unrelated incident on the same day, the forest department booked the four adult victims for killing protected birds.
This is the ninth attack over rumours of child-lifting in Bihar–after five people were killed in eight attacks during August 2019, as FactChecker.in reported on August 27, 2019. 

Nationwide, since 2012, 44 people have been killed and at least 136 injured in 88 attacks linked to child-lifting rumours, according to a FactChecker.in database that tracks such attacks. Odisha had the most attacks (15), followed by Tamil Nadu (13) and Bihar (10). Most attacks (69) were reported in 2018–94% of those in the May-July period.

This is also the third hate crime motivated by religious bias in Bihar this year, according to Hate Crime Watch, a FactChecker.in database that records such attacks. Since 2009, Hate Crime Watch has recorded 302 hate crimes, which led to 101 deaths and at least 746 injuries.

Muslims (14% of India’s population) were victims in 60% of hate crimes; Christians (2% of population) in 14% cases; Hindus (79.8% of population) in 14% cases. In 10% or 30 incidents, the religion of victim(s) was not reported. Of the 272 incidents in which the religion of the victims was known, Muslims were victims in 67% attacks, Christians in 15% and Hindus in 15%.

Of 302 cases, Hindus were alleged perpetrators in 59% or 178 cases, Muslims in 12% or 36 cases. In 86 cases, the religious identity of the perpetrator was not known. Of the 216 incidents in which the religion of the alleged perpetrator has been reported, 82% or 178 cases involved Hindus as perpetrators, and in 17% (36) cases the perpetrators were Muslims. Sikhs were perpetrators in 1% (2 incidents).

The attack
At about 3 pm on August 25, 2019, the victims–Waliur Rahman alias ‘Goldy’ (35), Mohammed Kaisar (43), Liyaqat Ali (24), Mohammed Ayaan (8) and their driver Abu Sheeh (27)–were travelling in a car from Gaya to Maher village, 20 km away, to meet Shivbaalak Yadav (referred to as Mukhiyaji or headman) for a litti chokha (stuffed whole wheat dough balls) party.

Waliur, Kaisar and Liyaqat are cousins, and Ayaan is Waliur’s son. The victims run a bunch of petrol pumps and Rahman is the grandson of Mohammed Latifur Rahman Sardar, a former Bihar legislator and a freedom fighter active in the Khilafat movement.

Only Ali and Ayaan were present when we visited them: While Rahman was being treated for a severe head injury in Ranchi, Kaisar and Sheeh were being treated in Delhi, Mohammad Hatim, Ali’s brother, told FactChecker.in at Rahman’s residence in Gaya. Ali refused to speak to FactChecker.in citing his lawyer’s advice. “I will have to record my statement in the court so our lawyer had advised me not to talk to media,” he told us, his fractured  right hand in a cast.


Liyaqat Ali fractured his right hand during the assault. He is seen here at his home with Waliur Rahman’s mother, Ayesha Rahman.

On the way to Maher, the victims called Yadav to ask him where he was. Yadav told them to wait in the market, at Maher chowk, saying he would meet them there. They waited at the market until one of Yadav’s relatives told them he was back home. At 7 pm, the men set off towards Maher village to meet Yadav.

At this point, locals shouting “bachha chor (child-lifter)” chased the car and threw stones and bricks at it, Hatim said. The windows were damaged and the victims were injured by the stones and bricks, Hatim said.

The victims tried to escape by driving towards the highway, when the driver lost control of the car–1 km away from Maher chowk. The car rammed into a tree, and the locals forced them to come out of the car.


The location where the victims’ car rammed into a tree, and the locals forced them to come out of the car. 

When the victims identified themselves, Hatim said, the mob raised communal slogans: “Maar Miyawan Hai [Beat them, they are Muslims]”. This was followed by “Hindustan Zindabad, Pakistan Murdabad (Long Live India, Death to Pakistan)”.

Local Muslims intervened and tried to pacify the mob, saying they belong to a reputed family and were no child-lifters. “By then Ayaan too had come out of the car and begged the mob to not hurt his father and uncles,” added Hatim. Ayaan was injured in the process.

The aftermath
Local brought the victims to Takiya Mohalla–4-5 minutes by walk–to prevent further attacks. They eventually called the police, who arrived with an ambulance. 

Acting on the complaint filed by Kaisar, Tankuppa police lodged a first information report (FIR) against 19 named and 100-150 unnamed suspects. So far, three people–Ganesh Chaudhary, Sanjay Yadav and Arvind Manjhi–have been arrested. Chaudhary lives in the nearby village of Mahmadpur while Sanjay Yadav and Manjhi are residents of Maher.

An eyewitness, Mohammad Rafique Shah of Takiya Mohalla, confirmed the sequence of events. The attackers were drunk, Shah added, saying that the illegal liquor business continues to thrive in the area despite an April 2016 state government ban on liquor.

“As the people of Takiya Mohalla took the victims to their homes, the mob accused them of giving shelter to terrorists,” said another eyewitness who did not want to be named. At one point, he said, he thought riots may break out. 

Local mukhiya (headman) Kanhai Paswan corroborated the claims of Rafique Shah and other eyewitnesses. “I was not present on the spot, but next morning my Muslim friend came to me and said that these types of slogans were raised,” he told FactChecker.in. “This kind of Hindu-Muslim thing was never seen in this village.”

Police denied such slogans were raised. “When we were on the spot, no such slogans were raised,” Vikash Chandra, station house officer of Tankuppa, told FactChecker.in. Other police officers including Circle Officer Chhotelal Paswan said they had no knowledge of such slogans being raised, and that no proof existed to substantiate this claim. 

Police had only reached Takiya Mohalla, as we said, after the victims were brought to the area to prevent further attacks.

The victims’ statement also does not mention the communal slogans. When asked about the exclusion, Hatim told FactChecker.in that they were injured and disoriented at that time.

The killing of protected birds
The forest department has lodged a case against the four adult victims, charging them with killing protected birds.

“We have lodged a complaint in the DFO [divisional forest officer] court,” said Manoj Kumar, the DFO of Gaya. “Our field officers reached the spot after the attack where two air guns, one rifle, and the carcass of four spotted doves were recovered from the car.”

Spotted doves are a protected species, under Entry 19, Schedule IV of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. “From the condition of the carcass, it seems like they were hunted barely 4-5 hours earlier, but we can confirm only after the postmortem report,” Kumar told FactChecker.in

Hatim said the men were only carrying one licensed rifle due to the Maoist presence in the area, but that the rifle was “snatched by the mob”. The next day, when they visited Tankuppa police station to enquire about the rifle, the police told them to focus on their treatment and let them deal with the recovery of the weapon, he added. 

The victims learnt about the charges only later. 

“They had only one rifle, which was snatched by the mob. So how did the forest department recover it from the car?” said Hatim.

The DFO has accused the victims of cooking up a story which they did not find coherent. “So far, the investigation has not been initiated. When we start the investigation, they will be produced before DFO court and judicial court.”

Back in Gaya, the incident has left the victims and their family in shock. Ayesha Rahman, Waliur’s mother, said, “If they [the mob] were shouting ‘child lifter, child lifter’ then they should have stuck to that slogan only. Why did they raise slogans against Muslims?” 

“If they were child lifters, then they should have been handed over to the police,” she added. “Why were they beating them, including an eight-year-old child? The child has still bruises on his body.” The family has demanded stern punishment for the culprits.

(Ray is a Patna-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.)

First published on https://www.factchecker.in/
 

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