Kunal Purohit | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/kunal-purohit-21049/ News Related to Human Rights Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:18:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png Kunal Purohit | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/kunal-purohit-21049/ 32 32 How Hate Crimes Destroy Old Friendships, Social Relations https://sabrangindia.in/how-hate-crimes-destroy-old-friendships-social-relations/ Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:18:23 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/07/12/how-hate-crimes-destroy-old-friendships-social-relations/ Gumla, Latehar, Koderma (Jharkhand): Mohamed Shalik knew his attackers. Imamul Haq did too. As did Majlum Ansari. Saira Bibi and her daughter at the family’s house in Nawada village of Jharkhand’s Latehar district. Manowar Ansari is seen in the background. When Manowar reached the spot where cow vigilantes had attacked and killed his brother and […]

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Gumla, Latehar, Koderma (Jharkhand): Mohamed Shalik knew his attackers. Imamul Haq did too. As did Majlum Ansari.


Saira Bibi and her daughter at the family’s house in Nawada village of Jharkhand’s Latehar district. Manowar Ansari is seen in the background. When Manowar reached the spot where cow vigilantes had attacked and killed his brother and Bibi’s husband Majlum, he was shocked to see that the two men leading the mob were his brother’s acquaintances.

Each of these three victims of mob lynching in Jharkhand, India’s second deadliest state for hate crimes, knew the members of the mob that attacked them. Shalik and Ansari were lynched, Haq sustained severe injuries that left him bedridden for six months.

During its investigation of seven crimes motivated by religious hatred across six districts of Jharkhand, FactChecker found that in at least four cases, the mob included friends and acquaintances of the victims. Religious hatred has spurred people to violence against schoolmates, childhood buddies and colleagues, forgetting old ties that lie severed ever since.

This is the last in a series of five stories from Jharkhand, which has reported 14 hate crimes and nine deaths since 2009–the second-deadliest state after Uttar Pradesh (23 dead)–all reported after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the general and state elections in 2014, according to our Hate Crime Watch database. Reporting for this series coincided with the recent national elections, in which the BJP won 11 of 14 parliamentary seats in Jharkhand.

Traveling across 3,000 km in 13 days, FactChecker visited sites where hate crimes had taken place, met victims’ families, the accused, local residents and police officials. The aim was to investigate the cases, find out what has happened since and document the long-term impacts of hate crime on the lives of people and communities.

In most cases, hate crimes had been provoked by hatred powerful enough to consume community and neighbourhood relationships. The hatred they inflamed seemed to have caused lasting damage to social relations.

Childhood friends, now strangers
Imamul Haq, 24, grew up in Kolgarma, a predominantly Hindu village in Koderma district of northern Jharkhand. He was never conscious of his identity as a Muslim, he told FactChecker on a scorching April day.

In school, his closest friends had all been Hindu boys from the village. “So, I would never be at home, except for my meals. After school, we would spend the day together, playing, goofing around. We would even do our homework together,” Haq said.

As a teenager, Haq was roped in by Hindu villagers to take part in the festivities around the popular Hindu festival of Ram Navami–a spring Hindu festival that celebrates the birthday of Lord Rama of Hindu mythology. He soon went on to become the village’s go-to actor for Ram Navami plays. “Sometimes, when I would be busy and not able to make it to the festivities, my friends would be so upset, they would not talk to me for days,” he said.

All that changed in 2017, ironically, on Ram Navami, which fell on April 4 that year.

A dispute between Hindu and Muslim villagers over the inauguration of a mosque, built on a contested piece of land, caused such tension that Haq did not participate in Ram Navami celebrations that year.

In the evening, Haq was offering his namaaz at the newly-inaugurated mosque when a mob of more than 200 people attacked. “They kept saying Jai Shri Ram [Hail, Lord Ram] and Quran padhna band karo [Stop reading the Quran], even as they assaulted me with sticks, rods and swords,” Haq said.

By the time Haq’s mother rushed in to save him, both his knees had been battered, leaving him bedridden for six months and unable to resume his lucrative job as a driver in Saudi Arabia. “The legs hurt so much even now that it is impossible for me to do any work involving my feet,” he said.


Imamul Haq, 24, outside the disputed mosque in Kolgarma village in Jharkhand’s Koderma district that was attacked by a 200-strong mob from a Ram Navami procession in April 2017. Haq and a few others who were praying inside the mosque were assaulted with sticks, rods and swords. Haq’s Hindu friends have since cut off all ties with him. To Haq, their silence makes them complicit with his assaulters.

Since then, his Hindu friends have cut off all ties with him, he said. “When I met them on the streets and called out to them, they didn’t even turn back. They would look away and walk on. These were people I spent my childhood with,” said Haq, in his measured, soft-spoken manner. “I tried my best to reach out. But the Hindu community imposed a social boycott on us–any Hindu found talking to us would have to pay a penalty.”
To him, his Hindu friends’ silence makes them complicit with his assaulters, he added.

Old ties forgotten
On March 18, 2016, 28-year-old Manowar Ansari got a call from family friend Nizamuddin that his cattle-trader brother Majlum, 32, had been attacked by a mob in Jhabar village in Latehar district. In the 15 minutes it took him to reach Jhabar, Manowar had feared many possibilities. But nothing, he said, had prepared him for what was happening: a mob had surrounded his brother and his fellow cattle-trader, 13-year-old Intiyazul Khan, and were assaulting them. The assault continued for some time before the mob dragged the two, still alive, to a large tree a few metres away.

Then, Manowar said, the mob hanged his brother and Khan. The two tried to free themselves. “So, people started pulling my brother’s legs from the ground to ensure he died,” Manowar said.


Families of both victims have retained, carefully, this image showing the bodies of 32-year-old Majlum Ansari and 13-year-old Intiyazul Khan, hanged from a tree. Cow vigilantes, led by men who were Ansari’s acquaintances, had assaulted these two cattle-traders in Latehar district of Jharkhand when they were taking oxen to a cattle fair, before hanging them alive.

In that small crowd was a familiar face–Bunty Sahu, later named the main accused in the case.

“Sahu knew us very well. He knew my brother so well. In fact, when my brother was making a new house, he had bought cement and other construction materials from Sahu’s shop,” said Mohamed Afzal Ansari, 46, Manowar and Majlum’s older brother.

The Ansari family later learnt that it was Sahu who had first apprehended the two cattle-traders and called up Arun Sahu, the other main accused in the case.

Arun, too, was a familiar face. Some months before the incident, Arun had threatened Majlum and asked him to stop trading in cows. “So, Majlum told him he didn’t deal in cows anyway. He only dealt in oxen, used for agricultural purposes. Majlum asked Arun if he should stop doing that, too,” Afzal said.

Arun “allowed” Majlum to continue, the family said.

Yet, Arun went on to lead the attack. “He was from the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]. He was said to be close to top BJP leaders here,” Afzal said of Arun.

That their brother’s killers were people so familiar with him and his work is a fact that still hurts Majlum’s family. So does the location of the assault–Jhabar village.

“Jhabar was a village my brother Majlum had visited tens of times. In fact, he had sold and bought countless cattle from the Hindu families there. Would they have allowed him to trade if he was selling the cattle for meat?” said Afzal.

Community ties severed
For families of hate crimes victims, the silence of friends, neighbours and other villagers becomes a sign of complicity.

“If you let such a crime happen in front of you, it means you’ve tacitly supported it,” said MD Minhaj, a 52-year-old shopkeeper and businessman of Gumla town, after his daily visit to the cemetery where his son, Mohamed Shalik is buried.

Shalik, 20, was lynched by Hindu villagers of Soso, a village 5 km from Gumla town, on April 5 in 2017. The villagers claimed Shalik was harassing a girl from the locality; Shalik’s family as well as the girl’s insisted the two were friends.

According to the first information report (FIR) filed with the police, Shalik was tied to an electric pole just off the Lohardaga road and lynched, with rods and sticks.

When Minhaj reached, Shalik was “adhmara” (half-dead)–slipping in and out of consciousness, his limbs seemed broken, his intestines were hurting. “He said two-three things constantly–he kept asking for water and kept repeating that his stomach was hurting, there was a leher [wave of pain] inside.”

Shalik died in the Gumla Sadar hospital 20 minutes later. But before that, gasping for breath, he managed to tell Minhaj the names of some of the people who had assaulted him. “All the six people he named were those who knew Shalik very well. They were his friends and acquaintances, some even went to school together with him,” Minhaj said. “They took the lead in lynching him. The other villagers joined in, because he was a Muslim.”


The house where Mohamed Shalik was found lying half-dead, the night he was lynched after being tied to a pole, in Soso village near Jharkhand’s Gumla town. Shalik had many Hindu friends from this area, and his school was nearby. His father M D Minhaj later found out that some of Shalik’s acquaintances and old friends had taken part in the lynching.

Six of the main accused were familiar to Minhaj, too. “All of them used to come here, meet me, come to the shops as well. All of them were locals so we knew them very well,” he said, asking his older son to bring out Shalik’s photo. “For two years, I haven’t seen his photo. I can’t bear to look at it.”

Minhaj said he did not know why his son was attacked. But, he links his son’s killing with other hate crimes in the country. “There were two major themes in the air then–love jihad and gau-raksha. This must have egged the mob on,” Minhaj said, pointing to a news clip in a local Hindi newspaper, which reported that Shalik had tried to marry and abduct the girl, painting it as a case of ‘love jihad’, a phrase often used by the Hindu right-wing to describe a relationship between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.

Minhaj continues to attend to both Hindu and Muslim customers at his shops in the heart of Gumla town’s commercial areas. It is difficult, he said, but he is determined to ensure nothing changes between the two communities after his son’s killing.

“After news of my son’s killing reached the Muslim neighbourhoods in Gumla, many were angry and suggested that we take revenge by attacking Hindu shops. But, I dismissed all such thoughts. I told them this was not acceptable,” Minhaj said, adding, “The Hindu community stood behind me. In fact, I received greater sympathy from them than the Muslim community.”

This concludes our five-part series. You can read the first story here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.

(Purohit is an independent journalist and an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He writes on development, gender, right-wing politics and the intersections between them.)

Courtesy: factchecker.in

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In Jharkhand, WhatsApp Is Both Polariser And Investigator https://sabrangindia.in/jharkhand-whatsapp-both-polariser-and-investigator/ Tue, 04 Jun 2019 05:04:53 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/06/04/jharkhand-whatsapp-both-polariser-and-investigator/ Nawadih village, Koderma district (Jharkhand): Jumman Miyan was having a relaxed morning. The last few days had been very busy for him–his son’s wedding celebrations were on, which close to 400 relatives, the entire Muslim community in the village as well as a handful of Hindu villagers had attended. The festivities had ended the night […]

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Nawadih village, Koderma district (Jharkhand): Jumman Miyan was having a relaxed morning. The last few days had been very busy for him–his son’s wedding celebrations were on, which close to 400 relatives, the entire Muslim community in the village as well as a handful of Hindu villagers had attended. The festivities had ended the night before with a lavish feast.

Jumman Miyan_750
The morning after his son’s wedding, Jumman Miyan of Nawadih village in Jharkhand’s Koderma district was attacked by a mob. Messages had gone viral on WhatsApp containing photos of animal remains found in the village, alleging that Miyan had served beef at the wedding feast. WhatsApp is often employed as a carrier of hate messages in Jharkhand. It is also helping some victims seek justice.
 
That April 2018 day, the morning after the feast, as he was bidding goodbyes and handing out wedding favours to relatives, something caught his eye.
 
In the clear vision his house offered to the “jungle”, as the villagers call the barren expanse of surrounding land, he saw that around 800 metres away, a crowd was gathering near a pink house. “Something felt off, so I went there with my son, Nayyum, to find out what had happened,” Miyan told FactChecker on a recent April day, in his deep baritone.
 
Some heads turned towards him. Some men were holding up a black polythene bag with animal remains–he could see the hoof of a young bovine.
 
Jolha Miyan, you had a party last night where you served beef and then you ask what happened,” the crowd said. ‘Jolha’ is a pejorative used to refer to Muslims.
 
Some of them started pushing him about but his son intervened and whisked him out.
 
Back home, Miyan tried to understand exactly what had happened, but within minutes, he saw a mob approaching. “They were in the thousands and I didn’t know what to do,” Miyan said. Breaking into the house, the mob caught Miyan by his beard and threw him to the ground. “Then, they started beating me with what looked like baseball bats. Someone hit my head and I fell unconscious.”
 
The mob assaulted his family and ransacked their house. The violence spread–nearby vehicles were damaged, the local mosque was ransacked and a maulvi (Islamic religious scholar) was also assaulted, locals said.  
 
Miyan later pieced together what had happened. Some Hindu villagers had found two bags of animal remains near Hindu homes. Within minutes, photos of these remains were on WhatsApp with the message: Miyan served beef at his son’s wedding feast.
 
That message was forwarded to different people in various neighbouring villages, said the village’s 29-year-old mukhiya (head-woman), Kumud Devi. “It was all because of WhatsApp. Because of it, the mob just swelled,” she said, adding that she had rushed to Miyan’s Muslim locality on hearing of the violence.
 
“They were all outsiders,” Devi said. “They all came here, angry.”
 
Kumud Devi
Kumud Devi, 29, the village head of Nawadih in Jharkhand’s Koderma district, is clear about what led to the attack on Jumman Miyan and the local mosque following a wedding feast in April 2018. “It was all because of WhatsApp. Because of it, the mob just swelled,” she says, talking of the misleading photos alleging cow slaughter that had gone viral.
 
This was not an isolated incident.
 
Jharkhand, with 68% Hindu population, 14.5% Muslim and 4.3% Christian (12.8% profess ‘other religions’ including tribal religions), is India’s second-deadliest state in terms of religious hate crimes. Since 2009, Jharkhand has recorded 14 hate crimes motivated by religion and nine deaths in our Hate Crime Watch database, just behind Uttar Pradesh with 23 deaths. All of them have been reported after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won national and state elections in 2014. The BJP has returned to power at the national level in recent elections whose results were declared on May 23, 2019. In Jharkhand, it won 12 of 14 parliamentary seats along with ally All Jharkhand Students’ Union.
 
Nationwide, over a decade to 2019, 93% of 287 hate crimes motivated by religious bias–which claimed 98 lives–were reported after 2014, according to the database.
 
Our investigation of seven hate crimes across the state found that WhatsApp, the popular but increasingly controversial messaging phone application, is often being employed as a carrier of hate messages.
 
Messages, often false and misleading, go viral on WhatsApp, polarising communities and instigating violence. But WhatsApp is also being deployed to spread visuals of hate crimes, sometimes live, often to drive fear into the minds of communities and to valourise the accused.
 
WhatsApp and India: A turbulent affair
 
The Indian experience of WhatsApp, the popular personal messaging application with an estimated 200 million users in India, its biggest market globally, has been wracked with controversies.
 
In 2017, police investigations showed that misleading WhatsApp messages about ‘child kidnappers’ had led to serial lynchings, leaving seven people dead in two episodes. Apart from these, 24 people across the country were killed over similar rumours, which had gained traction primarily through WhatsApp forwards. Many of these were in Jharkhand.
 
A WhatsApp India spokesperson said the company had taken steps to curb such forwarding of messages on its application, such as limiting the number of times a person can forward a message, while admitting that more needs to be done. “This step has reduced the amount of forwarded messages in India by over 25%. We continue to explore new solutions to address the spread of viral misinformation.”
 
The spokesperson said the company did not have any insights into why Jharkhand was repeatedly seeing such instances of misuse of WhatsApp.
 
Over two weeks of travels in Jharkhand, FactChecker found that in at least three of the seven hate crimes that we tracked, videos and images of the crime had reached WhatsApp almost immediately. In fact, the victims’ families had found out about the lynchings through WhatsApp videos and images, even while the attacks were afoot.
 
This is what happened on August 19, 2017, in Barkol village of Garhwa district in northwest Jharkhand.
 
‘How could I believe WhatsApp?’
 
Anita Minj, a Christian tribal from the Oraon tribe, had been worried. Her husband, Ramesh, had not come home the previous night. When she had tried calling him, an unknown voice had answered the phone, saying Ramesh had been “sent back”. The phone had then been switched off.
 
So, at 9 a.m. the next morning, as she started getting ready to go to Barkol village, where Ramesh was supposed to have gone, a neighbour came up to her with his phone. “He asked me, ‘Did you hear?’ I said, ‘Hear what?’ So then, he started showing me videos on WhatsApp of Ramesh being lynched by a mob,” Minj told FactChecker.
 
The caption accompanying the videos said a man had been caught consuming beef and assaulted.
 
The neighbour told Minj the visuals had gone viral in the area. She watched the videos again and again until she could convince herself they could be true, she said. She herself did not have WhatsApp.
 
Minj said she rushed to Barkol, where the family’s farm is located, but local Hindu villagers initially stalled her. “They refused to let adivasis [indigenous tribals] from our Tengari village to go to their village. But I persisted and started asking questions about the lynching and whether it was true,” she said. On going to the nearby police picket, she found Ramesh, who had been arrested for cow slaughter.
 
Piecing the story together, Minj said, she found out that some men of the Oraon community, including Ramesh, had consumed beef, as was their custom.
 
But Jharkhand had banned cow slaughter in 2005 under the Jharkhand Bovine Animal Prohibition of Slaughter Act, making beef consumption a crime. Cow slaughter is a cognisable crime (implying that the police can make an arrest without prior permission from a judge) and a bailable offence, punishable with a fine of up to Rs 10,000 or up to 10 years of imprisonment.
 
A mob of Hindu locals from nearby villages had assaulted the Oraon men while they were on their way back to their village. The assault had left Ramesh badly injured–reports show his leg had such a big gash that his bone had shown through. Three days later, Ramesh had died.
 
Earlier in that year, something similar had happened to Mariyam Khatoon in Jharkhand’s Ramgarh district, 300 kilometres away from Garhwa.
 
WhatsApp as evidence
 
The day was a blur for Mariyam Khatoon: first, she had heard that her husband had been lynched on a busy Ramgarh highway for carrying sacks of beef; later, that he had died. Then, she had spent three hours waiting to receive his body.
 
But there was work to do. For instance, a police complaint had to be filed so that the police could act against those who had lynched her husband Alimuddin to death early that morning of June 29, 2017.
 
There was a problem, though. “We didn’t know too many people who had seen the crime happening. Most bystanders would refuse to testify, we figured,” said Khatoon, explaining her dilemma, while trying to push the police to investigate the lynching.
 
Earlier in the day, neighbours and local boys from her basti in Ramgarh city’s Manuwa locality had come to her doorstep, holding mobile phones. “They kept looking at me, almost like they were wondering if they should show me what they were seeing. When I saw them doing this, I asked what was wrong,” Khatoon said.
 
Mariyam Khatoon
On the July 2017 morning when her husband Alimuddin was killed, Mariyam Khatoon was at home when neighbours suddenly crowded her house, with phones in their hands. They had all received videos on WhatsApp showing her husband Alimuddin being attacked by a mob.
 
The neighbours had received videos on WhatsApp–of Alimuddin, her husband, being lynched in full public view.
 
Watching the visuals of the fatal assault playing out was traumatic, Khatoon said, but they also became her biggest weapon–they would help the police identify the assailants.
 
Alimuddin
Watching visuals of the fatal assault on her husband Alimuddin on neighbours’ WhatsApp was traumatic, Mariyam Khatoon says, but they also became her biggest weapon: they enabled Khatoon and her sons to create a photo album of zoomed, still images of at least nine assailants, with additional photos from their Facebook accounts, to be used as evidence to get justice.
 
“We went back to the video, and frame-by-frame, started trying to identify all those who were involved in the lynching,” Khatoon told FactChecker, sitting in her living room and staring out the window.
 
Khatoon and her eldest son, 22-year-old Shahzad, with help from friends and family, froze each frame and painstakingly identified each assailant. “Once we found a face, we would ask around if anyone knew that person. After someone identified the person, we would go to their Facebook accounts and confirm their identities,” Shahbaz, Khatoon’s 15-year-old son, said.
 
This resulted in a photo album, one that now lies at a hand’s reach in the bedroom, ready to be displayed to any visitor. The album has zoomed images of at least nine assailants, with additional photos from their Facebook accounts.
 
“We then went to the police with this list and asked them to register a First Information Report [FIR],” Khatoon said.
 
The case came at an embarrassing juncture for the Jharkhand government–the lynching happened just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi issued a warning to gau rakshaks (cow-protection vigilantes) against violence in the name of cow worship.
 
Left red-faced by the evidence Khatoon presented, the state government issued strict orders to ensure action against the accused, sources in Jharkhand Police told FactChecker.
 
But even as the videos became a crucial tool for Alimuddin’s family, one of those convicted for his murder has alleged that he was made an accused only because he was present at the scene of the crime.
 
Former BJP district media cell in-charge Nityanand Mahato, speaking to FactChecker, said he had been unfairly arrested: “I was passing by because my office is opposite the spot where the lynching happened. Someone shot a video of me being present there and on the basis of those videos, Alimuddin’s family named me as an accused.”
 
Having secured bail from the Ranchi High Court, Mahato is currently out and insisted to FactChecker that he was not even an eyewitness. “When I reached the spot, the police had taken Alimuddin away already. The crime had already been committed.”
 
The 50-year-old former BJP leader, who contested the 2009 state assembly elections from Ramgarh as an independent candidate, said he was being accused of murder “solely on the basis of some photographs”. “I spent 15 seconds at the spot and the visuals of those 15 seconds are going to haunt me for life,” said Mahato, now a real-estate dealer, sitting in his Ramgarh home.
 
Ramgarh police dismiss Mahato’s assertions. “It is true that we relied on the initial videos and photos that went viral on WhatsApp. But we followed those leads with fool-proof investigations and only then framed charges against the accused persons,” said Nidhi Dwivedi, superintendent of police for Ramgarh district.
 
Dwivedi said social media tools such as WhatsApp have helped investigations of such violence. “What accused persons don’t realise, when they shoot videos of such acts of violence, is that these clips turn out to be very valuable tools for police investigations,” she added.
 
This is the second in a five-part series. You can read the first part here.
 
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist and an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, writing on development, gender, right-wing politics and the intersections between them.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/
 
 

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In Jharkhand, Ram Navami Celebrations Now Sites For Violence https://sabrangindia.in/jharkhand-ram-navami-celebrations-now-sites-violence/ Mon, 03 Jun 2019 04:44:11 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/06/03/jharkhand-ram-navami-celebrations-now-sites-violence/ Gumla town, Jharkhand: Irshad Khan knew there would be trouble when he saw the procession. “They were up to no good,” he said of the Ram Navami revellers in Gumla town on April 5, 2017. The rally had halted outside the Jama Masjid, when it was not supposed to. Rajiv Ranjan Mishra (centre, in blue) […]

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Gumla town, Jharkhand: Irshad Khan knew there would be trouble when he saw the procession. “They were up to no good,” he said of the Ram Navami revellers in Gumla town on April 5, 2017. The rally had halted outside the Jama Masjid, when it was not supposed to.

RamNavami_750
Rajiv Ranjan Mishra (centre, in blue) is a former chairperson of the Shri Mahavir Mandal and a key organiser of Ram Navami processions in Jharkhand state capital Ranchi for three decades. Mishra says up to 1 million people join the procession, often with weapons such as swords, sticks and rods. “After all, this procession is a shakti puja. So, men often get carried away, seeing all the weapons and the electric atmosphere.”
 
The halt made everyone anxious. Suddenly, the music changed and a new song came on. Khan does not remember the exact words. “But it was something to the effect of Mulle ki topi phenk do [let’s toss the Muslim man’s skullcap].”  
 
This was direct provocation for the Muslim community, said Khan, the Gumla head of Anjuman Islam, a socio-religious Muslim organisation. “Some of us tried to calm tempers in the Muslim community; others asked the procession members to stop the music.”
 
In those moments, Khan said, anything could have happened. Within minutes, however, the police intervened and defused the tension.
 
But Khan knew the situation was a ticking time bomb.
 
A few hours later, close to midnight, his fears came true, he told FactChecker on a recent April day. A call informed him that a group of Hindu men returning from the procession had lynched a Muslim boy, Mohamed Shalik, to death. The lynching had taken place in Soso village, 4 km from Gumla town, where the procession was held. The assailants had allegedly objected to Shalik’s relationship with a Hindu girl in the neighbourhood.
 
Calling Shalik a “jolha”, a pejorative term for Muslims, the mob had tied him to a pole and attacked him with sticks and rods, his father MD Minhaj told FactChecker. Shalik had died on the way to hospital, the first information report (FIR)–which is filed with the police by victims or eyewitnesses, and which FactChecker reviewed–said.  
 
Gumla_620
20-year-old Mohamed Shalik told his father, MD Minhaj (above), that he was going out to watch the Ram Navami procession that would travel across Gumla town. That night, when Shalik went to drop a Hindu girl to her village of Soso 4 km away, a mob of Hindu and tribal villagers lynched him to death. Many in the mob were returning from the Ram Navami procession in town.
 
Around the same time that evening, 280 km away in Koderma district’s Kolgarma village, Hindus participating in a similar Ram Navami procession had entered a Muslim neighbourhood, ransacked a mosque and assaulted local residents, including women.
 
Across Jharkhand, festivals are being weaponised in a bid to drive up religious hatred and polarise communities. Primary among them is Ram Navami, the occasion when the Hindu community celebrates the birth of Lord Ram.
 
Two of the seven hate crimes that this series investigated occurred on Ram Navami; the accused in both cases were procession participants. At the five other hate-crime spots, the festival played a key role in driving up communal frenzy, police officials and local observers said.
 
This is the first in a series of five stories investigating seven hate crimes across six districts of Jharkhand, recorded in Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2019, maintained by FactChecker.
 
Jharkhand’s population is 68% Hindu and 14.53% Muslim, according to Census 2011 statistics. Since 2009, the state has reported 16 hate crimes motivated by religion and 12 deaths–the second highest after Uttar Pradesh (23 dead)–all of which have been reported after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won national and state elections in 2014 but before general elections in April and May 2019. The BJP won 11 of 14 parliamentary seats in Jharkhand this year.
 
Of the 16, FactChecker shortlisted nine instances listed in the database, trying to balance out different types of cases and geographical spread. Traveling across Jharkhand, covering more than 3,000 km in 13 days, we visited these nine spots, met the accused, the surviving victims and their families, and spoke to locals and police officials. The aim was to investigate and verify the listings in Hate Crime Watch, follow up on the developments that have taken place since, and document the long-term impact of the crimes on the social fabric of these regions.  
 
From our reporting, two cases did not turn out to be hate crimes, according to the definition and methodology employed for Hate Crime Watch.
 
For the purpose of Hate Crime Watch, FactChecker collates data on crimes motivated partly or wholly by prejudice against the religion of the victim(s). For an incident to qualify as religion-based hate crime under our criterion, the act must qualify as a criminal act under Indian law. It is not necessary that formal criminal proceedings should have started for the fulfillment of this criterion; only that the available evidence should suggest that the act qualifies as a criminal act on the face of it. The target of a hate crime can be a person, groups of persons or property. Hate Crime Watch does not document speech crimes.
 
The first of these was the alleged lynching of an elderly couple and their three daughters. While two daughters had sustained injuries, the couple and their elder daughter had died. Some of the media reporting of the incident had said the family were tribal Sarnas while the attackers were Hindus and Christians. Our investigation found that the victims were Hindus of the Kewat caste while some of the alleged attackers were also Hindus, some from the same caste and others from the Lohar caste. The reason behind the lynching, we found, was that the family had filed a complaint with the police against a 23-year-old Lohar youth for allegedly abducting their daughter. The youth, who had recently converted to Christianity though his family had remained Hindu, had died while trying to evade police custody. As a result, there was tension in the village, which had resulted in the lynching.
 
In the second case, it was reported that a 20-year-old Hindu girl from Ramgarh district had been raped and killed by her husband, his father and his uncle. The reason, the media reports had said, was that the girl had refused to convert to Islam.
 
We visited the families of the victim and the accused, spoke to senior police officials in the district as well as with defence and prosecution lawyers. We found that there was no evidence to show that the killing had been linked to the girl’s religion. The girl’s family also said that they did not fully understand why their daughter had been killed.
 
We are removing both these cases from our database, which leaves 14 cases from Jharkhand which led to nine deaths.
 
In each of the six districts FactChecker visited, Ram Navami celebrations had become synonymous with communal clashes and low-intensity tensions.
 
“The scale of Ram Navami celebrations in Jharkhand is unprecedented; it isn’t celebrated with as much fervour anywhere else in the country,” said ML Meena, additional director-general, Jharkhand Police. “Playing communally sensitive lyrics, provocative songs–there are some elements, not all, who try and do this. Some people take advantage of such major festivals and create trouble.”
 
Small scale, big style
 
The scale of Ram Navami celebrations in Jharkhand is massive. In state capital Ranchi alone, the procession that starts from different parts of the city and culminates at the Tapovan mandir in Doronda locality of the capital, comprises nearly 1 million people each year, IndiaSpend learned from long-term enthusiasts.
 
Typically, different akharas (in this context, Hindu socio-religious groups) start marching towards mandals (social groups) in different parts of the city, said Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, a former chairperson of key procession organiser Shri Mahavir Mandal, who has been at the helm of the celebrations for more than three decades. “When they start marching, people keep joining in and the procession keeps growing,” Mishra said.
 
Snaking through lanes and bylanes, the procession covers almost all the major parts of the city before reaching the mandir by late night. “The procession starts around 4 pm and then takes up to 8-9 hours to cover around 15 km,” Mishra said.
 
Most members of the procession wear saffron scarves–a colour associated with Hinduism–and are armed with weapons, such as swords, daggers, maces and rods. The procession involves showing off fighting skills using these weapons. “So, men either airfight or fight each other using these weapons on the streets,” said Mishra.
 
Often, the atmosphere, the weaponry and the fights create a sense of hyper-masculinity, Mishra said, adding, “After all, this procession is a shakti puja [worship of Shakti, the goddess of strength]. So, men often get carried away, seeing all the weapons and the electric atmosphere.”
 
Traditionally, these processions featured live bands. These have given way to pre-recorded music, played by DJs (disc jockeys) atop trucks fitted with amplifiers.
 
Police officials said the music often sparks off altercations, as in the 2017 Ram Navami processions in Gumla, where provocative songs were played right in front of a mosque.
 
Hindu rashtra, Masjid gali and har ghar bhagwa
 
A dive into the world of Ram Navami music, and conversations with participants and observers, showed that many songs played at processions involve themes such as Ram Mandir, berating erstwhile Mughal rulers, and making India a Hindu rashtra (nation). The sub-text to the lyrics almost always threatens Muslims with violence. Consider this popular song.
 

 
Agar chhua mandir toh tujhe dikha denge,
 
Hum tujhko teri aukaad bataa denge.”
 
(If you touch the mandir, you won’t be spared,
 
We will show you your rightful place)
 
Another example is this song popular across many of Jharkhand’s Ram Navami processions which talks of a ‘Masjid galli’ (street).
 
 
One line goes:
 
Ram Seeta Lakhan sang hai Bajrang Bali
 
Chal tujhko ghuma laoon masjid galli
 
(With Ram, Seeta and Lakshman is Bajrang Bali
 
Let me take you for a ride to mosque lane)
 
“In that moment, with the slogans, the music and the weapons, the josh [fervour] is very high,” said Ramesh Singh (who did not wish to share his real name), 22, a Bajrang Dal member in Ranchi who has been going for these processions for years. “Some boys try and outshine the others by doing something.”
 
Singh’s ringtone is a wildly popular song often played at these processions, Har ghar bhagwa chayega (saffron will fly high in each house, saffron being a metaphor for Hinduism), which vows that gau-hatya (cow slaughter) will be stopped and insists that anyone who wants to continue to live in India must recite Vande Mataram (“Hail, Mother Goddess”, in popular usage taken to refer to Bharat Mata or Mother India). The song has gathered 230 million views on YouTube; its popularity has even elicited a second version.
 
That doing, Singh said, could include taking the lead in sloganeering in front of a mosque and provoking members of the Muslim community along the way.
 
Police precautions
 
Among police circles, Ram Navami celebrations have become a law and order issue. In some parts of Jharkhand, their link with hate crimes were direct and clear, as in the central Jharkhand district of Ramgarh.
 
One police official, not wishing to be named, narrated the sequence of altercations that the procession members would have with the police in the run-up to Ram Navami celebrations. “We would ask them to stick to the pre-decided route whereas they would insist on going to sensitive areas.”
 
Some of the main organisers of the Ram Navami celebrations in Ramgarh district have been Bajrang Dal members, including Chhotu Verma and Santosh Singh, a police official stationed in the district told FactChecker. Both of them led a mob in July 2017 that lynched and killed a trader, Alimuddin Ansari, for allegedly carrying beef.
 
“We had asked them [Bajrang Dal members] to submit a CD to us with all the songs they would play, because we had realised that the music is often provocative. They were angry but, finally, they had to submit the CD,” the police official added.
 
These precautions continue, current district superintendent of police Nidhi Dwivedi said: “We sit with both communities, map out a clear route and ask the organisers to submit a CD of the songs they are going to play.”
 
Despite these precautions, Ram Navami in Ramgarh district continues to be a thorny affair.
 
This year, there were clashes between two groups in the procession who hurled stones at each other, according to news reports. The violence left five people, including two police persons, injured.
 
Some instances are considered too local, or too sensitive, to be reported in the media, local reporters told IndiaSpend. “There have been times when there have been clashes between the two communities and the police defuse the situation. But, the authorities request the media to not report it so that it doesn’t lead to more tensions,” said Kasif Akhtar, a journalist based in Koderma district.
 
The Ram Navami procession in Koderma town passes through the Muslim localities peacefully, Akhtar said: “The Muslim community welcomes them with drinks and sweets when they pass by; the Hindu community does the same during Muharram processions.”
 
Yet, even in Koderma, fault lines exist.
 
‘Ram Navami an outlet for discord’
 
Kolgarma village in Koderma district, with a population of close to 1,700, has been on the edge since 2012, when construction of a mosque started on a piece of disputed land that both Hindu and Muslim communities claimed rights and ownership over.
 
In 2012, some Muslim villagers started voicing the need for a mosque in the village; the nearest one was at least 3 km away, said Mohamed Karim Rehmat Ansari, 35, the deputy village head.
 
But the construction ran into opposition, when the Hindu community objected. Hindu villagers said the Muslim community had deceived them. “We were told that a one-room madrassa [Islamic religious school] was being built. But then, once construction started, we realised it was not a small madrassa but a mosque that was being built, instead. That caused immense anger,” said Chhotu Yadav, 35, a daily-wage labourer.
 
The construction halted, but resumed after the Muslim community claimed they had obtained permission from the authorities. “We started construction again; in fact, the Hindu villagers were now on board, they even laid the foundation,” said Ansari.
 
But tensions were rising.
 
The mosque was inaugurated on March 25, 2017. On April 3, the Hindu community complained to the authorities.
 
A day later, on Ram Navami, the tensions spilled over. More than 200 members of the procession allegedly entered the Muslim neighbourhood during namaaz, assaulted people, and vandalised the mosque and some homes, according to the FIR filed at the Koderma police station. “The mob entered, shouting slogans like Jai Shri Ram [Hail Lord Ram], topi kholo [remove the skullcap], and Quran padhna band karo [Stop reading the Quran].”
 
24-year-old Imamul Haq was inside the mosque, praying, when he heard the slogans. “[But] I wasn’t afraid because the police were there,” he said. Within seconds, however, the attackers had broken in, and assaulted him with sticks, rods and swords, fracturing both his knee caps. “As soon as I received the first blow, I turned around to see a huge mob. They came from everywhere,” he said.
 
Kolgarma_620
24-year-old Imamul Haq stands outside the disputed mosque in Kolgarma village of Koderma district of northern Jharkhand, where he was assaulted on April 4, 2017, on the occasion of Ram Navami. A mob of more than 200 members from the Ram Navami procession entered the neighbourhood and attacked Haq as well as a few others who were praying in the mosque with sticks, rods and swords. Both his knees were fractured.
 
The injury was so severe that Haq, who was on a break from his job as a driver in Saudi Arabia, had to give up work. “For six months, I could barely walk,” he said. Even now, he cannot take up a job that involves using his legs.
 
Allegations and counter-allegations
 
Hindus blame Muslims for provoking Ram Navami processions.
 
“The procession was orderly. But when we were passing the Muslim neighbourhood, someone spat on us. Hence, some people got angry and reacted to it,” said Yadav of the clash following construction of a mosque in Kolgarma village.
 
Police officials registered a complaint from the Muslim community, against eight persons and 200 unnamed assailants.
 
Muslim villagers said after they lodged the complaint, the Hindu community boycotted them. “We were denied provisions at the shop; our fields went dry because we were not allowed to use sources of water on land owned by Hindus,” said Kayumuddin, 27, a local.
 
“We decided to not interact with them so that there is communal harmony and we don’t end up fighting. It was not a boycott,” said Dhaneshwar Sahu, 30, a Hindu trader from the village.
 
In 2018, the two communities clashed again in Kolgarma. Allegations and counter-allegations flew fast. Police officials at the Koderma police station said the incidents resulted from long-standing communal discord. “The dispute started with land–Hindu villagers had donated a piece of land and had agreed that a madrassa should be built. The Muslim community, instead, built a mosque,” Ram Narayan Thakur, the Koderma police station in-charge, said.
 
A police team from the Koderma police station were targeted while investigating the clashes, police officials told FactChecker.
 
The village now lives in an uneasy calm. Hindus told FactChecker that normalcy had returned, while Muslims said they felt fear.
 
Ansari, the deputy village head of Kolgarma, said the Muslim children in the local government school had stopped eating the government-distributed mid-day meals after a rumour spread that some Hindus were trying to poison their food. It has been two years since the clash in their village, but the children are still scared, he added.
 
This is the first of a five-part series.
 
Next: In Jharkhand, WhatsApp Is Both Polariser And Investigator
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist and an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, writing on development, gender, right-wing politics and the intersections between them.)

Courtesy: http://factchecker.in/
 

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How A Jumble Of Politics, Gender Issues And Economics Foments Hate Crime In UP https://sabrangindia.in/how-jumble-politics-gender-issues-and-economics-foments-hate-crime/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 07:46:29 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/02/04/how-jumble-politics-gender-issues-and-economics-foments-hate-crime/ Naseerpur village, Mau: When the residents of Bholapur Hindoliya village in north-western Uttar Pradesh (UP) caught a 20-year-old outsider near a cattle-shed, trying to draw out a buffalo, they were enraged. Zulfikar Khan, 17, and Noorjehan Khan, 18, younger siblings of Shahrukh Khan, the 22-year-old who was lynched by a mob in Bareilly’s Bholapur Hindoliya […]

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Naseerpur village, Mau: When the residents of Bholapur Hindoliya village in north-western Uttar Pradesh (UP) caught a 20-year-old outsider near a cattle-shed, trying to draw out a buffalo, they were enraged.

Zulfikar Khan_750
Zulfikar Khan, 17, and Noorjehan Khan, 18, younger siblings of Shahrukh Khan, the 22-year-old who was lynched by a mob in Bareilly’s Bholapur Hindoliya village for allegedly trying to steal buffaloes. Noorjehan wants to be a lawyer so that she can fight against injustice, such as that meted out to her brother.
 
Having suffered enormous losses due to frequent cattle theft, they thought they had finally found the thief. Eyewitnesses said the villagers, mostly Jats, then asked the thief’s name.
 
On hearing Shahrukh, a Muslim name, they lynched him and did not stop until he was dead.
 
This incident was one of 61 from Uttar Pradesh (UP) recorded in Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018, which accounted for nearly a third of such crimes in the country.
 
Our investigation from the site of many of these crimes found that hate crimes are not motivated by religious hatred alone. Instead, most lie at the confluence of various factors–local politics, gender, and crucially, economics. Religious bias often proves to be the last straw.
 
This story is the fifth of our six-part series (you can read the other parts here, here, here and here) on hate crime in UP.
 
‘Always an intersection’
Various factors have contributed to the rise of hate crime in UP, apart from an inherent religious bias, according to Sudha Pai, former professor of political studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has authored several books on UP. At the individual level, the people who commit such crimes are driven to it due to various micro and macro reasons, she told FactChecker.
 
“From sustained poor governance to the loss of aspiration among the young to poor social indicators, various factors have affected the population and created unhappiness in them,” she said. Such discontent, along with the growth of the Hindu right in the state, means “the state has become a fertile ground for mobilisation of such people by Hindu right-wing organisations, which then incite people into committing acts of violence”, Pai said.
 
Missing these factors, while examining religious-hate crimes, might lead to a flawed analysis, she added.
 
A hate-crime that creates more hate
Pai’s words find resonance in the death of 68-year-old Mohammed Younus in the eastern UP district of Mau.
 
Younus was killed late on the night of June 26, 2017, at the mosque in his village, Naseerpur, during Ramzan, a month of prayer and fasting for Muslims. Younus had intervened when one man in a group of five had thrown a gunny-sack at the mosque. The sack, it was later revealed, contained pork.
 
Mosque_620
The mosque in Naseerpur village of eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Mau district, where 68-year-old Mohammed Younus was killed on June 26, 2017, for trying to prevent a gunny-sack full of pork into this mosque.
 
Naseerpur residents remembered being stunned by the killing. This had never happened in their village before, they insisted repeatedly when FactChecker visited in December 2018.
 
Naseerpur has a population of around 2,000. Nearly 35% of households are Muslim, who, along with the many lower- and upper-caste Hindu families, have lived in harmony as far back as most people’s memory stretches.
 
Arvind Murti, a Mau-based civil liberties activist, saw a pattern in the method behind Younus’ killing. “The killing reflected a hark back to the older days, when people would instigate communal riots in Mau. The attempt, clearly, was to spark off another clash here,” he said, pointing to the timing of the incident–during Ramzan, less than a week before Eid, one of the most significant Muslim festivals. Murti, who heads the Inquilabi Kamgaar Union, a Mau-based union which works for workers’ rights, said the killing was an attempt to widen existing communal fault lines.
 
A peek into Mau’s history is instructive. In 2005, the district headquarters saw deadly clashes between members of the Hindu and Muslim communities, which left at least 14 people dead. The clashes occurred after a dispute over the use of loudspeakers at a time when the Hindu festival of Dussehra coincided with Ramzan.
 
Hindu Yuva Vahini activists played an active role in the riots, news reports revealed. A ‘citizens’ report’ by Saajhi Duniya, a Lucknow-based not-for-profit, said Hindu Yuva Vahini founder Yogi Adityanath, now the chief minister of UP who was then the member of parliament from neighbouring Gorakhpur, had stoked tensions by holding a public meeting after being prevented by Mau police from visiting the district during the riots.
 
When Younus was killed, the local police believed the perpetrators had tried to create a similar situation. The police arrested local criminal Ramesh Singh Kaka and four of his accomplices. “The police had been trying to track down Kaka and in order to distract the police’s work, Kaka planned this attack,” Alok Kumar Jayswal, the deputy superintendent of police of Mau, told FactChecker, “He was hoping for a full-blown communal riot, but the people of Naseerpur reacted maturely.”
 
While a riot was prevented, Younus’ killing changed the way Mau lives, locals said. “Now, we are told we are a sensitive village, in police records,” said Umair Khan, 28, who works as a construction worker. An eyewitness to the killing, Abdul Jabbar Khan, said the villagers suspected an insider hand in the killing and all fingers pointed to someone in the Hindu community. “Otherwise, how would outsiders know how to get here and then escape within seconds of the attack?” Khan said, adding that these suspicions have worsened distrust between the communities.
 
Gender meets hatred
Another common theme that FactChecker found, in at least three of the 13 instances, was of an insistence by upper-caste Hindu men to ‘save the honour’ of Hindu women by opposing their relationships with lower-caste or Muslim men. In all three cases, this was the primary motivation for the hate crime.
 
In the run-up to the UP assembly polls, chief minister Yogi Adityanath had said that ‘love jihad’, a term used largely by the Hindu right to describe a relationship between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman, was a “key issue” for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He maintained this stand even after being sworn in as the state’s chief minister, when he said ‘love jihad’ was “dangerous”.
 
In February 2017, BJP chief Amit Shah said ‘anti-Romeo’ squads would be created across UP to “safeguard the honour of women” by preventing their “harassment” by men. One prominent BJP leader conceded in an interview to Huffington Post that this was one way of preventing interfaith relationships.
 
This fits into the narrative that the Hindu right-wing has been trying to build around Muslim men being “invaders”, Pai said. “In this narrative, the Muslim invaders attack Hindu women who, then, need to be ‘protected’ from such attacks,” she said.
 
In Muzaffarnagar, a senior functionary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a Hindu right-wing organisation and an affiliate of the ruling BJP, said the organisation views interfaith relationships, especially ones where the man is a Muslim, very critically: “People don’t realise but this is a conspiracy against the Hindu religion.” The functionary said within the organisation and its affiliates, the general instruction is to try and ensure such relationships do not last. “We try and speak to their parents, we also speak to the couple,” he said, “Sometimes, things go out of hand and it gets violent.”
 
Pai’s words and the VHP functionary’s confessions find resonance in Bulandshahr’s Soi village, where the elopement of a Muslim youth with a Hindu girl ended with an elderly Muslim man, Ghulam Mohammed, being lynched by enraged Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) activists in May 2017. The activists believed Mohammed had helped the couple elope.
 
Soon after the couple eloped, HYV activists threatened Soi’s Muslim families, villagers told FactChecker. “We were threatened and abused because they thought that it was a conspiracy that Muslims had hatched against Hindus,” Chidda Khan from Soi said.
 
Such an interplay of gender with politics often has a caste element to it.
 
In Bulandshahr’s Sonda Habibpur village, power play around gender, caste equations and religion came together when a young Dalit boy eloped with a Muslim girl from the same village, in June 2018.
 
“They could kill me, and nobody would care”
“They could kill me, dump my body somewhere and nobody will care,” Shrikrishna, the father of the eloped boy, told FactChecker. He said he did not leave home after dark, and had curtailed his working hours to be home before dusk.
 
Shiv Kumar, 20, had eloped with Razia, a 19-year-old Muslim girl, on June 6, 2018.
 
Shrikrishna belongs to the Kori (weavers’) caste, considered a Scheduled Caste in UP, from which President Ram Nath Kovind also hails. Shrikrishna’s family and his brother’s family, who live next door, are the only two Kori families in the village of 2,000.
 
After the couple eloped on June 6, the villagers went to the police. Shrikrishna accompanied them and then, for the next few days, did all he could to trace the couple, he said. “I was livid. My son’s actions had landed us all into trouble,” he told FactChecker. Finally, the couple were traced to Noida, from where they were brought back by the police. However, they said they wanted to get married, and on June 21, their marriage was registered in court.
 
Five days later, Shrikrishna said, he got a call early in the morning. It was from an upper-caste village acquaintance, asking him to attend a panchayat meeting called to discuss the elopement.
 
At the meeting, some 100 people from the village had gathered, Shrikrishna said. They urged him to ‘return’ the girl to her family. “I kept telling them, they are both adults and the court has agreed to their marriage. How can I interfere in that?” he said.
 
At this, some upper-caste men caught him by the ear and pushed him to the ground, he said. “They said, how dare I sit on a chair in front of the village’s upper-caste men,” he said, “So, I sat on the ground.”
 
According to the First Information Report (FIR) he filed, the villagers then asked him to leave the village as punishment. When he refused, a few of them started assaulting him, throwing punches and kicks at him. Then, he said, they threatened to bring his wife and daughter to the panchayat and take turns to rape them in public.
 
The villagers then asked him to lick his own spittle from the ground, he said, adding, “In that moment, I felt they would kill me if I didn’t do it. So, I did it.” When he tried to go back home, the assaulters followed him, assaulting him all the while.
 
Shrikrishna said the panchayat was convened at the behest of the girl’s family. But he blamed four upper-caste men for attacking him, along with Bhura Khan, the girl’s father.
 
The issue continues to fester. Shrikrishna and his family feel ostracised, while the accused continue with their lives as before.
 
The economics of hate
The road leading to the home of Krishan Pal, at the end of Bholapur Hindoliya in Bareilly district, goes past most homes in the village. It is flanked by mud huts with thatched roofs, with cattle tied outside almost every household.
 
Pal’s house is a pukka one, a simple brick structure, with green paint so thin that it exposes the brick underneath.
 
Pal, 19, is in jail. He is one of the eight people that the Bareilly police have booked for the murder of 20-year-old Shahrukh Khan, who was lynched on August 29, 2018, allegedly after being caught stealing buffaloes. Two of Khan’s accomplices, the police and villagers said, had escaped.
 
For years, villagers had suffered massive economic losses due to cattle thefts, locals said. So that night, when Pal and other villagers caught Khan, they thought they had finally found the thief.
 
“This has happened so many times. We have complained to the police, but they do nothing,” one villager who lives in the house next to Pal’s told FactChecker.
 
In fact, just four months before the incident, in April 2018, some thieves had made away with some of Pal’s buffaloes. “We had to create a lot of ruckus with the local administration and look for the cattle, [but] we finally found them,” Ramshri, Pal’s sister-in-law, said.  
 
Cattle theft can be a huge financial setback in these parts. One cattle trader in Bareilly district, on condition of anonymity, said a buffalo would cost at least Rs 40,000. For families such as Pal’s, who depend on small-scale farming as well as dairy, buying cattle can be a substantial investment.
 
In August, weeks before the lynching, Pal’s family had just seen a heavy financial setback, having spent over Rs 1 lakh on a family member’s hospitalisation. “We had to borrow money to pay the bills, but despite that, she didn’t survive,” Ramshri said of her sister-in-law.
 
Villagers said these worries must have been on Pal’s mind when he spotted Khan next to the cattle shed that night, as he stepped out to go to the toilet.
 
But the family refuted the allegations that Pal had lynched Khan. “He was stressed; we all were. But we decided we will hand him [Khan] over to the police as soon as the sun breaks out,” his younger sister-in-law, Pushpadevi said. Around 6 a.m., when they called the police, other villagers gathered and started beating Khan up, she alleged.
 
Two blocks away from Pal’s house is the house of another accused, Mukesh (who goes by one name, even in the FIR), who is also currently in jail. His wife, Satwati (who also uses only her first name), said he had been falsely implicated. “One side of his body is wasted. How can he lynch someone?” she said.
 
Satwati_620
Satwati, whose husband Mukesh has been arrested on charges of lynching Shahrukh Khan, with her son, Naval.
 
The family depended on farm labour, Satwati said, and with her husband away, she did not know how to keep track of the investigations. They had not appointed a lawyer yet. “No lawyer came to us. No one even told us what to do,” she said.
 
But the police said their investigations had revealed that Pal, his 40-year-old uncle, Gajendra, along with three others, had lynched Khan to death because they were enraged that Khan and his accomplices were trying to steal their cattle. “In their anger, they lynched him to death,” a police official said, asking that his name not be revealed.
 
Khan’s family, on the other hand, made a counter-allegation. “They asked us to get Rs 1 lakh if we wanted to see Khan alive,” said Khan’s 18-year-old sister Noorjehan Khan, alleging Pal’s family had made a ransom call at 6 a.m.
 
Pal’s family denied having made the call, and blamed other villagers. “They got greedy, but we don’t want such money,” Ramshri said.
 
Pushpadevi said the family was in a bind. “As soon as we caught Khan, villagers mocked us for refusing to beat him up.” For hours, she added, the family ensured that Khan was safe.
 
“We kept staving off the mob, insisting that the police deal with him. Now, we are the ones in jail.”
 
In Thiriya village in Bareilly district, Zulfikar Khan, 17, and Noorjehan Khan, 18, younger siblings of Shahrukh Khan, recounted that the 22-year-old was a gifted embroiderer who worked in Dubai, and was his family sole earner. “I want to study to be a lawyer so that I can fight the injustice of the kind that my brother was dealt,” she said.
 
This is the fifth of a six-part series. You can read the first part here, the second here the third here and the fourth here.
 
Next: How Hate Crimes Change Lives, Livelihoods And Ways Of Living
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/
 

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In The Wake Of Hate Crime, Leaving Home In Search Of Safety https://sabrangindia.in/wake-hate-crime-leaving-home-search-safety/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 08:12:55 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/01/31/wake-hate-crime-leaving-home-search-safety/ Soi village, Bulandshahr: “Baba loved the village,” said Vakeel Ahmad, a year and a half after his father Ghulam Mohammed was lynched outside Soi village of Bulandshahr district in Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the family had lived for generations. Ghulam Mohammed, left, loved his village Soi in Bulandshahr in western Uttar Pradesh, where the family […]

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Soi village, Bulandshahr: “Baba loved the village,” said Vakeel Ahmad, a year and a half after his father Ghulam Mohammed was lynched outside Soi village of Bulandshahr district in Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the family had lived for generations.

Ghulam Mohammed_750
Ghulam Mohammed, left, loved his village Soi in Bulandshahr in western Uttar Pradesh, where the family had lived for generations. “He always said there can be no better place than the village,” his son Vakeel Ahmad said over the phone from Aligarh, where the family relocated after Mohammed was lynched in May 2017.
 
“He always said there can be no better place than the village,” Ahmad said, on the phone from Aligarh, where the family have relocated, reflecting on the irony of his father having refused to leave the village even for the promise of a better life.
 
It was in this village that Mohammed, 60, was lynched on May 2, 2017. His neighbour, a Muslim youth named Younus, had eloped with a Hindu girl from an adjoining village. An enraged mob, which the police later said had belonged to the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), a right-wing militia founded in 2002 by current chief minister Yogi Adityanath, had been responsible.
 
The lynching, and the happenings before and after, convinced Ahmad and his family that they had no option but to leave. Ahmad, along with all three of his brothers and their families, left the village in May 2018, exactly a year after Mohammed’s death.
 
Mohammed’s lynching was among the numerous hate crimes recorded from UP in Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018. India’s most populous state, UP accounts for the largest number of such crimes in the database.
 
This story is the fourth of our six-part series (you can read the other parts here, here and here) based on reporting from the site of many of these crimes, which found numerous families who have left their villages in the aftermath of a hate crime, hoping to find safety elsewhere and start life again. In interviews, people spoke of fear as well as a newfound suspicion of neighbours, friends and acquaintances, which had compelled them to keep their final destination secret. Many cited inadequate police support as a reason, too.
 
Communal hatred on slow boil
“Across UP, we now see an everyday, low-simmering communalism which a full-blown communal pogrom is not,” civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace, which works to combat hate speech and hate crimes, said. This low-boil communalism instills fear in the minority communities and prevents them from going about their daily life, she said, “So, people start worrying if they can travel by trains, what kind of food they can carry…”
 
In the weeks following the attack on Mohammed, Ahmad said, the village became communally charged, so that he and his family constantly felt pushed into a corner.
 
When FactChecker visited Soi a year and a half later, neither Mohammed’s family nor other villagers were able to explain just why Mohammed had been killed. The family blamed it on Hindu villagers, who, they said, had told the mob that Mohammed was the eloped boy’s father.
 
The police investigations found that the accused had believed Mohammed had helped the couple elope, but many villagers told FactChecker there was no way that Mohammed was linked to the elopement.
 
After the elopement, the village had been tense and the local cops had paid several visits. HYV activists had come along, villagers told FactChecker. Along with some locals, these activists would visit the Muslim neighbourhood, abuse the Muslim families and threaten them, Ahmad said. “We would not respond, thinking that they are angry and just venting their feelings,” he added.
 
Six days after the elopement, on May 2, some men wearing saffron scarves to hide their faces lynched Mohammed close to a mango orchard where he worked. Minutes later, they went to his house and assaulted the women in the neighbourhood.
 
Ahmad said he knew which way the police investigations would go.
 
Political connections
The HYV link, if proved, would be an embarrassment for Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. A month before the lynching, 80 km away in Meerut, HYV activists had barged into the home of an interfaith couple and assaulted them, among many such assaults before and after the Soi lynching. Their acts had reportedly caused friction within the chief minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the larger Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar, which the BJP represents in electoral politics.
 
Ahmad specifically named some HYV activists, including some from the village, in his statement to the police. The police initially dithered, but made the HYV link a week later.
 
“We told them, the elopement became such a major issue only because of the HYV’s intervention,” Pyare Khan, a villager from Pahasu, 3 km from Soi and an acquaintance of Mohammed, told FactChecker. “Everyone in the neighbouring villages knew that this couple were in love and would get married at some point.”
 
In six months, the accused were out on bail. Around 20 young men from the upper-caste, land-owning Thakur community hired a DJ and some loudspeakers to welcome back an accused, Gavendra (police records contained only his first name), and the crowd garlanded him, Ahmad said.
 
Screenshot
A screenshot showing Gavendra (second from left), one of the men arrested for Ghulam Mohammed’s lynching, garlanded by Thakur men from Soi village in western UP’s Bulandshahr upon his return from jail.
 
Ahmad saw celebratory posts from villagers on his Facebook. “I wanted to pack my bags and leave right then,” he said, adding, “Ghrina hone lagi mujhe [I felt a sense of loathing].”
 
Pappu Khan, Mohammed’s 45-year-old brother, and some family members approached some village elders, who were upper-caste Hindus, asking for help and protection, Ahmad told FactChecker. The elders said there would be no attack on them in their presence, but they couldn’t guarantee there would be no attack in their absence.
 
“We were just four Muslim homes in a village of 5,000 Hindus,” Khan said. “We started thinking, even though most HYV activists were not villagers, someone in the village must have helped them. This could not have happened without insider help.”
 
“How would they know where we lived? People in the village must have showed them the way here,” neighbour Chidda Khan chipped in.
 
Finally, a suspicion took root in their minds, Ahmad recounted.
 
Ever since news of the elopement had broken out, the police had made many rounds of the village in the hope of finding the couple. They would routinely pick up Muslim men and ask them to accompany them in their search. “I had even accompanied the police to Mathura and Aligarh,” Ahmad said.
 
The morning of Mohammad’s lynching had seen one such round. The police had asked all the Muslim men of the four families to accompany them. The only man who did not go was Mohammed, because he had already left for his mango orchard.
 
“They lynched him to death and assaulted the women in our homes only because they knew there was no other man around to stop them,” Khan said, asking why the police had taken all men with them.
 
They decided to leave the village, for good.
 
Many villagers came to see them leave. “The village Pradhan [head] also came; no one said anything, no one asked us to stay back,” Ahmad said.
 
The remaining Muslim families are pondering a move too, but do not have the wherewithal. “For us to leave, we need to sell this house. No Muslim would want to buy it and no Hindu would want to give us a good price,” Khan said.
 
Pappu Khan
Pappu Khan, 45, sits outside the abandoned house of his older brother Ghulam Mohammed, who was lynched in a mango orchard just outside Soi village of Bulandshahr, allegedly by Hindu Yuva Vahini activists. His family and neighbours, seen standing around him, said they felt scared to live there and wanted to migrate. “We are just four Muslim homes in a village of 5,000 Hindus,” Khan said.
 
No easy options
Another family compelled to leave was that of Zeeshan, a 55-year-old cattle-trader of Kadhli village in Muzaffarnagar district in western UP, who was released from prison in April 2017.
 
On July 30, 2016, a mob had attacked his house on the suspicion that a cow was being slaughtered there. The mob had consisted of some local villagers and a large contingent of people from outside the village, eyewitnesses told FactChecker, claiming the outsiders had belonged to Hindu right-wing organisations such as the Bajrang Dal.
 
Zeeshan was away when the mob attacked, but his family were hurt. “His wife, Shehnaz, managed to free herself from the mob and flee from the spot with her children,” a neighbour said, adding that the children were bleeding.
 
The police did not register a case against the mob. Finding a slaughtered calf in the house, the police booked Zeeshan, his wife and his nephews for cow slaughter under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the UP Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act, 1955.
 
Zeeshan and his nephews Saddam and Parvez were all jailed for nine months.
 
Neighbours remembered the family always struggling to put food on their plates. “They used to live on one meal a day. Zeeshan, with his poor health, would try and do daily-labour and trade in cattle but that wasn’t enough,” said Zakir, 55, a neighbour.
 
After his release, Zeeshan found his work in the cattle trade all but finished, and he started remaining ill. “He was afraid for his family’s safety now,” Zakir said.
 
Left with little choice, the family left shortly after the release, as did Saddam, Parvez and their families.
 
“He was a very nice man, who didn’t want to leave the village,” said Sabila Begum, who lives opposite Zeeshan’s now empty house, “He went away crying.”
 
This is the fourth of a six-part series. You can read the first part here, the second here and the third here.
 
Next: How A Mish-Mash Of Politics, Gender Issues And Economics Foments Hate Crime In UP
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/

 

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Why Police Action Across UP’s Hate-Crime Hot Spots Is Causing Fear And Alarm Among Muslims https://sabrangindia.in/why-police-action-across-ups-hate-crime-hot-spots-causing-fear-and-alarm-among-muslims/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 07:58:21 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/01/30/why-police-action-across-ups-hate-crime-hot-spots-causing-fear-and-alarm-among-muslims/ Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh: Recalling his reaction on hearing that all three of his buses had been set afire by a mob, Abdul* said his first emotion was not fear. Shaukat Ali, a 40-year-old farmer, was among the dozens of Muslims arrested for the August 2018 clashes in Purbaliyan in western UP’s Muzaffarnagar district. He denied […]

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Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh: Recalling his reaction on hearing that all three of his buses had been set afire by a mob, Abdul* said his first emotion was not fear.

Shaukat_Ali_750
Shaukat Ali, a 40-year-old farmer, was among the dozens of Muslims arrested for the August 2018 clashes in Purbaliyan in western UP’s Muzaffarnagar district. He denied that he had been involved in the clashes or even been a witness. When he heard stories that Muslim men were being detained, he fled the village. Fearing for his mother’s deteriorating health, he turned himself in eight days later. Days after, his 60-year-old father, Ali Mohammed, was also detained by the police. Ali was in prison for 38 days and his father for 70.
 
It was panic.
 
In January 2018, a ‘Tiranga Yatra’ (Tricolour March) taken out by Hindu activists on Republic Day triggered a communal clash in Kasganj in western Uttar Pradesh, leaving one person dead. Abdul was a victim of the violence, he said, but “I felt like I could be easily made the accused in a false case and there is nothing I would be able to do about it.”
 
Kasganj
Veer Hamid Chowk in Baddu Nagar, Kasganj city, in western Uttar Pradesh, where the first clash between Hindus and Muslims took place on January 26, 2018, when a motorcycle rally by Hindu youngsters waving the tricolour and saffron flags allegedly demanded right of way.
 
Abdul also feared for his son’s safety. “The police were knocking on the doors of Muslim homes and picking up any Muslim men they could find,” he said. Amid a crippling curfew, he rented an ambulance and smuggled his 36-year-old son Yusuf* out to a neighbouring district.
 
In Uttar Pradesh, the state where almost a third of religious identity-based hate crimes in 2018 were recorded–as per Hate Crime Watch, our tracker that records hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018–stories of such distrust of the police abound among the Muslim community.
 
Our investigation from the site of many of these crimes reveals allegations of police excesses including falsely implicating and arresting Muslim men, levying onerous charges against them that are disproportionate to their alleged crime, and applying different legal yardsticks to Muslim and Hindu accused.
 
This is the third of our series on ground reporting on recent hate crimes from Uttar Pradesh. Read the first and second parts here and here.
 
Facts much contested
 
In Kasganj, the local police registered a First Information Report (FIR) about the clashes the same night. It described in detail the clashes, the sequence of events, the provocations and the police response to them, and how people from both communities had been involved.
 
However, the FIR did not name any Hindu men, not even the organisers of the Tiranga Yatra, during which young Hindu men waving saffron flags were alleged to have shouted provocative slogans in the Muslim-dominated Baddu Nagar of Kasganj–some videos purportedly of the scene had gone viral–leading to the first clash.
 

 

 
The FIR named only four men–all of them Muslims. The other 100-150 people estimated to have been involved were all termed “unidentified”. (FactChecker has a copy of the FIR)
 
The police filed a separate FIR regarding the casualty, 22-year-old Chandan Gupta, based on a complaint by his father, Sushil Gupta, who was not present at the spot when his son was injured in firing.
 
Gupta had been injured by a single bullet, for which the police had booked 20 Muslim men under Section 302 of the IPC, which relates to murder, in addition to some other “unidentified” persons.
 
“There were so many videos of Hindu men, sloganeering, provoking the Muslim community,” Shamim Javed, whose three brothers, Salim, Nasim and Wasim, were arrested as the main accused in relation with Gupta’s death, told FactChecker. “Despite that, Muslims were picked up immediately, while some of the main Hindu men who organised the Tiranga Yatra were picked up after nearly two months,” he said, referring to Vishal Thakur, who had allegedly called for the yatra and was arrested at the end of March.
 
Javed, 30, is the only male member of his household not behind bars.
 
In Baddu Nagar, a Muslim-dominated locality which was the epicentre of the clashes, many people spoke to FactChecker, but none wanted to be named. Some had stacks of papers in their shops and offices to point out flaws in police investigations–applications written to the police, copies of FIRs, copies of documents submitted for bail, and so on. “Even during the clashes, people who spoke to the media were named by the police as accused the next day and arrested,” one resident said. “One bullet hit Gupta. How can 30 people be booked for firing that one bullet?” he asked. While the FIR booked 20 people for the murder, this Baddu Nagar resident claimed that many more were detained in the days after the incident.
 
License_Plates
In Baddu Nagar, the Muslim-dominated locality that was the epicentre of the clashes in western UP’s Kasganj city in January 2018, many homes and offices are maintaining documents and other evidence of lengthy correspondence with the police. This document notes the license-plate numbers of motorcycles that Hindu youngsters left behind after the clashes. Another paper in the stack contains an inventory of all the Muslim-owned shops and property damaged in the clashes.
 
That bullet has spawned many conspiracy theories in Kasganj. The police and many in the Hindu community said Gupta was killed by a bullet fired by Salim, whereas Salim’s family and many people in Baddu Nagar said the bullet was fired accidentally by one of Gupta’s own companions in the Yatra.
 
FactChecker tried to get in touch with Kasganj superintendent of police Ashok Kumar. Despite repeated attempts, Kumar remained unavailable.
 
An independent investigation by civil society organisations has questioned the police version.
 
A civil society investigation
 
In August 2018, civil society organisations and activists led by former Indian Police Services (IPS) officer S.R. Darapuri, civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, and Magsaysay award-winning activist Sandeep Pandey, among others, released a report on the police investigations.
 
The police’s responses were partisan, the report said: Muslims had been “selectively targeted”, the prosecution was “tainted” and the police probe was “grossly compromised”.
 
The report recorded inconsistencies in the police probe “from wrong timing of starting of the scuffle, place where the clashes began, an incorrect distance of the crime scene from the police station and the delay in filing of an FIR, 12 hours after the violence”. It also cited specific mistakes that the police had made–one accused, Zahid, had been in Lucknow, 330 km away from Kasganj, on the day of the incident; there were delays in filing the FIR; the police had recorded the location and the time of the clashes incorrectly in the FIR. The report also found that the FIR had ignored the origins of the clashes–the first skirmish in Baddu Nagar.
 
The report alleged that there had been an attempt to protect members of the Hindu community, despite there being substantial evidence of their involvement. No members of the Hindu community had been arrested until the end of March, it said, whereas 21 members of the Muslim community had been arrested during the same period.
 
In fact, the report also points to the possibility that Gupta was killed by firing by the Hindu mob or by the police, which had fired to control the violence.
 
Javed’s family claim that of the three brothers arrested, the oldest, Salim, 40, was at a primary school attending a flag-hoisting ceremony, while Wasim, 35, was 60 km away in Hathras city for a religious congregation, and claim to have submitted eyewitness accounts of Wasim’s presence in Hathras. The third brother, Nasim, had clinical depression and was asleep at home, they said.
 
“The police have not been able to present any substantial evidence against us,” Javed said, “Neither are my brothers in any videos nor are there any independent eye-witnesses who have alleged that they were present.”
 
The Allahabad High Court granted them bail in the murder case under Section 302, along with 20 others. “Before the bail could be executed, NSA [National Security Act] was imposed on my brothers,” Javed said, pointing out that a case under the stringent law was imposed seven months after the incident. “And their prison stay continued,” Javed said.
 
The NSA allows for preventive detention for up to 12 months. The person detained has to be informed of the charges within 10 days, but if the authorities consider this disclosure against public interest, they can withhold this information. Effectively, this means a person can be detained for up to a year without being told why.
 
Detention is reviewed within three weeks by one or more advisory boards appointed by the state government concerned, each consisting of three persons “who are, or have been, or are qualified to be appointed as, Judges of a High Court”. In practice, if the accused are not informed of the charges, they are unable to contest them before the advisory board.
 
“My brothers have never had a single criminal case in their life. How can they suddenly be deemed to be such threats that they need to be kept in preventive custody, after the High Court grants them bail?” Javed said.
 
Beyond Kasganj
 
By its own admission, the Uttar Pradesh government had invoked the NSA against 160 people in less than a year of coming to power in March 2017, according to this September 2018 report in The Wire.
 
In Purbaliyan village in Muzaffarnagar district in western UP, four Muslim men have been held under the NSA since August 2018, for allegedly stirring up a communal riot and assaulting some Hindu villagers after a dispute that originated over a cricket match.
 
Purbaliyan, a village consisting largely of Jats and Muslims, is known to be communally sensitive in police records, especially since the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. During the riots, three Jats had allegedly been killed by a mob of Muslims, some of them from the village. The local police told FactChecker that Yamin, one of those arrested and charged under NSA for his role in the latest clashes, was also accused in the 2013 riots.
 
Several people that FactChecker spoke to questioned the use of NSA. “Have you ever heard of someone being prosecuted so severely for a riot in which not a single bullet was fired, nor was anyone even seriously injured, nor were any weapons used?” one Muslim villager said, not wishing to be named.
 
At the heart of the clash was a fight on a cricket field, between boys from all faiths. Twenty-year-old Sumit Kumar’s teenage cousin was part of the game when the fight broke out. That connection alone landed him in the middle of the clash that followed–he is the complainant in both the FIRs that the police filed about clashes on two separate days, August 21 and August 24, 2018.
 
Sumit Kumar
Sumit Kumar at the door of his house in Purbaliyan village in western Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district. He is the complainant in two FIRs filed after a fight over a cricket match escalated.
 
After the first dispute on the cricket field, Kumar told FactChecker, he was walking back from his field when he was ambushed by some Muslim men. “I didn’t know why. I later found out that my cousin, Lucky, had had a fight with some children from the other community while playing cricket,” he said.  
 
However, in the FIR that FactChecker has a copy of, Kumar said he had intervened in the fight on the cricket field and brought his cousin home.
 
Kumar said he was targeted again, at his house, a few hours later by a mob of 30-odd people from the Muslim community; his sister and mother were also attacked, he said. Kumar named 12 people in the first FIR he filed, on the night of August 21, and also accused 15-20 “unidentified” persons.
 
On August 24, the two sides clashed again–Kumar claimed he was attacked by Muslim villagers while the Muslim families in the village denied this, and countered that one Muslim family’s domestic help, Abid, was assaulted by Hindu villagers including Kumar.
 
The police told FactChecker there had been no attack on Abid and that the story had been concocted to settle scores with Kumar.
 
After the clashes, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of parliament and former union minister Sanjeev Baliyan visited the village and said the NSA would be invoked against the accused, The Indian Express reported on September 26, 2018. This was before the local administration had passed the order.
 
“Soon after, the administration invoked the NSA–this shows that the order was a political decision, not an executive one,” Vipin Baliyan, the national chief of Rashtriya Jatt Sanrakshan Samiti, a socio-cultural organisation which works for the interests of the Jat community in the region, told FactChecker.
 
Thereafter, dozens of Muslims were arrested for being involved in the clashes.
 
Shaukat Ali, a 40-year-old farmer, was one of them. He denied that he had been involved in the clashes or even been a witness. When he heard stories that Muslim men were being detained, he fled the village.
 
“Every night, the police would cut off the electricity and enter my house, where my mother and wife continued to live,” Ali said. They would search the house and ask questions. Fearing for his mother’s deteriorating health, he turned himself in eight days later. Days after, his 60-year-old father, Ali Mohammed, was also detained by the police.
 
Ali was in prison for 38 days and his father for 70.
 
Many in the village said the attention the clashes got was disproportionate to what had happened. “This issue started off as a dispute between two families. That is where this should have remained. But that would not have benefitted politicians, would it?” said Ali Mohammed, adding that people like him and his son had been victims of politics.
 
Muzaffarnagar superintendent of police Sudhir Kumar Singh denied allegations of partisan policing, saying the police had clear evidence against the accused. “If people from one community have acted against the other, the police cannot book innocent people just to show a false sense of balance in the investigations,” he said.
 
Singh refused to comment on the imposition of the NSA on the four accused, saying he could not comment on the decision of the advisory board that had ratified it.
 
A pattern
 
The politicisation of Uttar Pradesh Police has reached a new low since the Yogi Adityanath government took charge, Darapuri, the ex-IPS officer who was part of the civil society group that reported on the police investigations, told FactChecker. He retired as the inspector-general of Uttar Pradesh Police. “[Politicisation] has been a slow process, where each regime has used the police to further its own political agenda,” he said, adding, “Police officers have their own prejudices, often religious, caste-based and gender-based. When a government like this comes into power, such prejudices are emboldened.”
 
In 1987, 16 UP police personnel from the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) had shot dead 42 Muslim youths from Meerut city’s Hashimpura mohalla and thrown their bodies in a canal, while Meerut was ravaged by communal riots. The National Human Rights Commission had called the incident the “worst incident of targeted custodial killings by the police since Independence”. Instances such as these, Darapuri said, point to a history of biases in UP’s police force. Use of the NSA shows perpetuation of that bias, he said.
 
The use of NSA as a political tool has become a pattern, said Rajeev Yadav, an activist with Rihai Manch, a Lucknow-based advocacy group that focuses on fighting hate crimes and hate speech, citing Kasganj and Muzaffarnagar as examples. Rihai Manch has chronicled the use of NSA under the Yogi Adityanath government, which, Yadav said, is a way of sending out a larger political message.
 
Yadav, drawing parallels between Kasganj and the recent killings of policemen by mobs in two separate instances in Bulandshahr and Ghazipur districts, said NSA has been used inconsistently.
 
In Ghazipur, the main accused is a leader of the Rashtriya Nishad Party, which recently tied up with the Samajwadi Party and defeated the BJP candidate in the Gorakhpur by-polls held last year. In Bulandshahr, the UP government recently invoked NSA against three people who were accused of cow slaughter. Those accused in the death of the policemen, including the main accused who was a local Bajrang Dal activist, have not been charged under the NSA.
 
“If the NSA is invoked in Kasganj and Ghazipur, why is the government applying a different yardstick and not invoking it in Bulandshahr?” Yadav asked.
 
*Some names have been changed in the interest of interviewees’ safety.
 
This is the third of a six-part series. You can read the first part here and the second here.
 
Next: In Hate Crimes’ Wake, Leaving Home In Search Of Safety
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/
 

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Across UP’s Hate Crimes, A Pattern: ‘Outsiders’ Fuel Passions, Police Act Selectively, Relationships Crumble https://sabrangindia.in/across-ups-hate-crimes-pattern-outsiders-fuel-passions-police-act-selectively-relationships/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 07:17:15 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/01/29/across-ups-hate-crimes-pattern-outsiders-fuel-passions-police-act-selectively-relationships/ Adhauli village, Bulandshahr: Now, with the benefit of hindsight, people can connect the dots and see the pattern emerging across hate crimes in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Dinesh Rajput, in Bulandshahr’s Adhauli village, was one of the first to call the police when a carcass, purportedly of a cow, was found near a pond. In a […]

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Adhauli village, Bulandshahr: Now, with the benefit of hindsight, people can connect the dots and see the pattern emerging across hate crimes in Uttar Pradesh (UP).

Dinesh Rajput_750
Dinesh Rajput, in Bulandshahr’s Adhauli village, was one of the first to call the police when a carcass, purportedly of a cow, was found near a pond. In a few hours, an angry mob–including people from outside the village, as villagers later said–had unleashed violence and vandalised a mosque. The issue would have been resolved in a less-violent way, if not for the “outsiders”, Rajput told FactChecker, “They egged the villagers on.”
 
It starts with a minor incident, controversial enough to draw the crowds, but the situation remains on slow burn. Until people from outside the village appear, fueling passions and inciting the mob until it commits a crime that destroys lives, relationships and neighbourly coexistence, for a long time to come.
 
Mahual kharab karna chahate the wo log,” Dinesh Rajput of Adhauli village of Bulandshahr district in western UP, where a mosque was vandalised on August 25, 2017, said, meaning “they wanted to vitiate the atmosphere”.
 
After the crime, “they” disappear as quickly as they had arrived, often before the police reach the scene. Unable to pin the blame on anyone, the police start rounding up people at random.
 
Saddam (who shared only one name) of Purbaliyan village in Muzaffarnagar in western UP, where a dispute over a cricket match resulted in violence, narrated just such a series of events to explain how a riot was flamed and a hate crime committed; as did the neighbours of Mohammad Younus, who was shot dead in Naseerpur village of Mau district in south-eastern UP on June 26, 2017, where police investigations showed that the accused were local criminals trying to stoke communal tensions to distract the police from an ongoing investigation.
 
In Bulandshahr’s Soi village, where an elderly Muslim man was lynched, allegedly by a mob of Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) activists, locals said the activists had intervened in a dispute between two families over the elopement of an interfaith couple. The police, initially, had dithered over confirming the link to the HYV.
 
In Sonda Habibpur village of the same district, the police are yet to arrest the main accused in a case of violence against a Dalit man, after his son eloped with a Muslim girl from the village. The victim’s family alleged that the police were going slow because the accused had links with local leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in power in the state and at the Centre.
 
UP has reported the largest number of hate crimes since 2009, as per Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018. In our reporting from the site of many of these crimes, witnesses and victims veered towards a consensus–there is a pattern to these incidents, which is nearly formulaic in its reiteration.
 
For many, the link became clear after the December 4, 2018, violence in Bulandshahr, when two people–including a policeman–were killed during a violent demonstration by a mob protesting against the alleged slaughter of cows. “The way the carcasses appeared, the way a mob gathered and indulged in violence. This was exactly how it happened here as well,” Rajput of Adhauli said.
 
S R Darapuri, a former Indian Police Service officer who retired as an inspector general of the UP police, agreed, pointing to a “careful strategy” behind these hate crimes.
 
“The plan now seems to be to communalise these small, seemingly trivial, and often even personal disputes so that both communities get mobilised,” said Darapuri. “The police, then, quickly steps in and imposes harsh charges on the Muslim community.”
 
Such a strategy is important to those among Hindu right-wing groups that want to trigger communal riots. “Their efforts to trigger major communal riots in UP have failed, largely because the Muslim community has not responded to provocations,” said Darapuri.
 
This is the second story in our series reporting from the site of 13 recent hate crimes in Uttar Pradesh. Read the first story here.
 
The pattern
 
Early on the morning of August 25, 2017, a carcass, purportedly of a cow, was found in a pond just outside Adhauli village.
 
“We immediately called the police because we didn’t want any trouble,” said Arman Khan, whose uncle carries out commercial fishing in the pond. But, before the police could come, a crowd had converged at the pond. The villagers suspected them of being “Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena-wale”–Hindu right-wing activists–from neighbouring villages.
 
Villagers such as Dinesh Rajput, who was the first to call the police, kept a tense watch–the village has always been communally sensitive, the local police told FactChecker during our field visit in December 2018. The crowd started chanting slogans, insinuating that Muslims from the village were responsible for slaughtering the cow whose carcass had been found.
 
After a couple of hours, the police decided to leave and file a First Information Report (FIR). Rajput said he was afraid that things would spiral out of control, and tried to prevent the police from leaving: “I told them they must stay in the village or else the situation might get worse.”
 
Shortly after the police left, Rajput’s fears came true. The mob in the village square, now in the hundreds, marched to the narrow lane where most Muslims live, and started shouting slogans. Locals later said the slogans were largely around “Bharat mata” and “gau mata”. As the anger built up, the mob reached Jama Masjid, the village mosque. A few in the crowd decided to break into the mosque, and the mob followed, armed with sticks and stones. Within minutes, the mosque had been vandalised, its doors broken and furniture upturned, Khan said.
 
Before the police could return, Rajput told FactChecker, the people from outside the village had left. “Most of us could not identify them properly because they were not locals,” he said, “So the police started picking us [villagers] up.”
 
Rajput said the issue would have been resolved in a less violent manner were it not for the “outsiders”. “People here know their limits,” he said, “We fight but we back off soon enough–it has never reached such a state. Those activists egged the villagers on.”
 
Rewind. Repeat.
 
A year before this, on July 30, 2016, a near-identical sequence of events had played out more than 150 km away, in Muzaffarnagar’s Kadhli village.
 
This is the story we pieced together from our visit. Around 8.30 a.m., some villagers had started suspecting that a calf was being slaughtered in the home of cattle-trader and daily-wager Zeeshan (who was referred to by only one name, even in the FIR, and has since left the village). Some told FactChecker they had seen a calf being taken into Zeeshan’s house. However, one neighbour who did not wish to be named, said a Hindu man had sold Zeeshan the calf the previous night to entrap him. The neighbour alleged that the same man, later, tipped other villagers off about the slaughter.
 
Shortly after, a crowd had gathered, a trickle turning into a stream. “In no time, there were around 500 people there,” Ravi Kumar, a resident of the village, told FactChecker while pointing to a narrow lane outside Zeeshan’s house, less than 20 feet wide.
 
Kumar, an advocate, was getting ready to leave for work that day, he said, when he noticed the crowd. There was one thing about the crowd that disturbed him and led him to make a call to the police: “Most of the crowd were from the neighbouring Mandwandi village. Some of them were with the Bajrang Dal and other gau rakshak dals [cow protection groups].”
 
Before the police could come, the swelling crowd had attacked Zeeshan’s house and assaulted his wife Shehnaz and children. “They were beaten badly; we could see even the children bleeding,” a neighbour said, not wishing to be named. Scared, Zeeshan’s family fled the scene, only to return a week after the incident to find their house destroyed and their cattle stolen.
 
“The situation would not have escalated so much if not for those outsiders,” said Kumar, pointing out that the family had been living there for decades, despite whispers that they slaughtered the odd calf now and then, sold to them by villagers who had no use for it any more.
 
Until that violent episode, Kadhli had had an impeccable record for communal harmony. Around 40% of its 1,500-odd residents are Muslim. “In fact, our longest-serving pradhan was a Muslim man. He was loved and respected by all; even today, the village remembers him,” another villager added, also preferring to remain anonymous.
 
Life has gone back to usual for many Muslim families in Kadhli. Sabila Begum, who lives with her daughters in the house opposite the one where Zeeshan’s family lived, said that to her, the village remained safe. “No matter what happens outside in the world, nothing happens here. The Hindus and Muslims have always lived in peace,” she said.
 
Zeeshan_House
The house where Zeeshan lived, in Kadhli village of Muzaffarnagar district in western Uttar Pradesh, is now vacant, having been sold to another Muslim family. This wall was knocked down by an angry mob, which gathered there on July 30, 2016, on the suspicion that the family was slaughtering a calf. Villagers said the new owners had rebuilt the wall.
 
Nevertheless, Begum did remember the day the mob attacked her neighbour’s house. “Before we could do anything, the family had fled,” she said. “While they were being beaten up,” a neighbour interjected.
 
What happened next is another common strand that ties together the hate crimes we examined.
 
Partisan policing
 
When the police came to Kadhli, they saw Zeeshan’s house ransacked from the inside and its outer wall broken down. The first thing they did, however, was to register a First Information Report (FIR) against Zeeshan, his wife and a few other members of his family for cow slaughter, local police records, reviewed by FactChecker, show.
 
The station diary of the local police showed that no complaint was registered about the family having been assaulted, the house vandalised or the cattle stolen–these did not find mention in the investigations at all. Zeeshan, Shehnaz and their nephews Parvez and Saddam were booked under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the UP Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act of 1955.
 
Zeeshan, Parvez and Saddam spent close to nine months in jail, though Shehnaz was bailed out.
 
Officials at the Khatauli police station, under whose jurisdiction Kadhli falls, told FactChecker there had been no violence at Zeeshan’s house or against his family. Instead, they said with finality, Zeeshan had been booked for cow slaughter previously too.
 
Turning the known into unknown
 
Across the UP hate crime spots that we visited, police action, or inaction, took different forms. In two of the hate crimes we investigated, the accused had been identified but the police did not press charges and closed the investigation within months.
 
In Bijnore, this played out in full police and media presence on July 5, 2018, when an interfaith couple, Monica and Suhel, were assaulted by BJP activists outside the Additional District Magistrate’s office where they had gone to register their marriage, as directed by the Allahabad High Court.
 
According to Monica’s FIR, a copy of which is with FactChecker, before they could do so, “a mob of 15-20 people led by Neeraj Vishnoi and BJP leader Harjinder Kaur barged into the room and starting assaulting and abusing us. Wanting to kill us, the mob even tried to abduct us and warned me to not get married with my partner.”
 
Monica added that despite the Allahabad High Court’s directions to the police to protect the couple, she feared for their lives.
 
The FIR mentions Kaur’s BJP links, and police officials told FactChecker that Vishnoi is a part of several Hindu right-wing organisations.
 
However, five months after the incident, when FactChecker visited Bijnore’s Kotwali Shahar police station where the FIR was lodged, the investigations had been shut down. “The couple was not keen on pursuing the case and hence, we found no point in pressing it,” one police official said, speaking anonymously.
 
In Moradabad, Haji Aslam had a similar experience. A meat-trader, 38-year-old Aslam’s mini-van was burnt down by five men on two motorcycles in August 2018.
 
Haji_Aslam
Haji Aslam outside his house in Moradabad city, western Uttar Pradesh. He recognised the Hindu men who set his mini-van afire, but police said they would file an FIR only against “unknown” persons. Needing the FIR to claim insurance, Aslam gave in. The case was closed, no arrests made.
 
His driven and cleaner, who were in the van, were dragged out, abused and assaulted, and some people in the mob drove away in the van.
 
Driver Aamir and cleaner Asim have since taken up other jobs. “The mob called them ‘katuwein’ [a communal slur referring to Muslim men] and asked them what they were carrying. As soon as they responded, the mob dragged them out and slapped them repeatedly,” Aslam said.
 
As soon as Aslam heard the news, he rushed to where the mini-van had been taken, in the heart of a Hindu-dominated basti (hamlet), a five-minute drive from the spot where the vehicle had been intercepted. “A huge crowd had gathered there to witness the burning of my mini-van. I heard slogans being shouted,” he said.
 
Aslam rushed to a local police post to get help. A constable accompanied him, “saw the sight [of the burning mini-van] and said there was nothing he could do. Instead, he told me to flee from the basti or else the mob would kill me too,” Aslam said.
 
Aslam then went to the Katghar police station in Moradabad city to register an FIR. The police did register one, but with different facts. “They insisted that I say that the mini-van was burnt by some locals who were upset with the pungent smell [of rotting animal remains],” he said.
 
When he refused, the police suggested another change–that Aslam record an FIR against “unknown” persons. Aslam refused: “After all, I had seen those people burning the van. I could not forget them. I knew their names, too; some of them were with the Shiv Sena.”
 
But the police insisted. Aslam was desperate–he needed to register an FIR to claim insurance for the van, whose loss had destroyed his livelihood. He had bought the van only two years earlier and was still paying off the loan. “I gave in. They realised my weakness and told me that they wouldn’t help me if I insisted on the names,” he said.
 
The “unknown” people were never arrested, and the police closed the investigations less than four months later.
 
When FactChecker visited the Katghar police station, the Station House Officer, Komal Singh, said he did not know enough about the case. “The officers in-charge of that case have been transferred out,” he said.
 
Aslam said he no longer cared about the outcome of the investigations. “Nothing is going to come out of this. I am certain the police won’t do anything,” he said.
 
This is the second of a six-part series. You can read the first part here.
 
Next: Why Police Action Across UP’s Hate Crime Hot Spots Is Causing Fear And Alarm Among Muslims
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/

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A Field Report From 13 Sites Of Hate Crime In Uttar Pradesh: Lingering Fear, Distrust, Justice Delayed, Denied https://sabrangindia.in/field-report-13-sites-hate-crime-uttar-pradesh-lingering-fear-distrust-justice-delayed/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 08:11:55 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/01/28/field-report-13-sites-hate-crime-uttar-pradesh-lingering-fear-distrust-justice-delayed/ Varanasi: With 92 attacks, 2018 recorded the most hate crime in India in a decade, according to Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018, maintained by FactChecker. Twenty-two-year-old Shahrukh Khan was lynched to death by an angry mob for allegedly trying to steal buffaloes in Bholapur […]

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Varanasi: With 92 attacks, 2018 recorded the most hate crime in India in a decade, according to Hate Crime Watch, a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from 2009 to 2018, maintained by FactChecker.

Shahrukh_750
Twenty-two-year-old Shahrukh Khan was lynched to death by an angry mob for allegedly trying to steal buffaloes in Bholapur Hindoliya of Bareilly in western UP. Khan worked in Dubai as a zari (embroidery) worker and was slated to return to Dubai just three days later.
 
Uttar Pradesh, as per the 2011 Census, accounts for 16.5% of the country’s population. However, almost a third of the hate crimes recorded in 2018, 26, were reported from one state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous. Since 2009, 61 of the 278 attacks recorded in Hate Crime Watch have been reported from UP.
 
To understand and investigate why, FactChecker travelled across the state in early December 2018, covering 3,500 kilometres over 14 days.
 
We listened to the main actors on the ground–the victims and alleged perpetrators, the purported eyewitnesses, local politicians, local police, and members of various religious communities. This was essential to understand not just what had happened, and why, but also what has happened since–have the cracks dissolved or do enmities continue to divide individuals and communities?
 
There was one more crucial purpose: To check on the status of the cases filed–whether investigations were on track to bring justice to the victims.
 
We selected 14 cases reported from different regions of the state over the last three years, which were reportedly driven by various religious bias-related motivations such as opposition to cow slaughter and interfaith marriage. There were some cases whose motivations were unclear.
 
This is the first in our six-part series. In this story, we outline our key findings and some common threads that run through most of the cases. We will explore these in more detail in the stories that follow.
 
Overlapping caste, religion and gender dynamics
Our investigation from the site of many of these crimes found that hate crimes are not motivated by religious hatred alone. In many cases, we found a common thread of overlapping caste, religion and gender tensions. In Sonda Habibpur village of Bulandshahr in western UP, a Dalit man, Shrikrishna, was assaulted by Muslim and upper-caste men of his village and was forced to lick his own spit. This was a form of “punishment” by an enraged village panchayat for his son having eloped with a Muslim girl of the village.
 
In Bholapur Hindoliya of Bareilly in western UP, a 22-year-old Muslim boy, Shahrukh Khan, was lynched to death in August 2018 after he was allegedly caught stealing buffaloes in a Jat-dominated village. Jats are a land-owning, traditionally cultivator caste, and the village had seen multiple such cattle thefts and resultant economic losses.
 
Bareilly_620
The spot where Shahrukh Khan, 22, was attacked in Bholapur Hindoliya village in Barreily in western UP. Villagers alleged that Khan, along with three friends, tried to steal buffaloes. His friends managed to flee across the river but Khan did not know how to swim. The villagers found him here, struggling to breathe, and lynched him to death, eyewitnesses and police told FactChecker.
 
The villagers were desperate and angry. But the mob, before they lynched the alleged thief, asked his name. “Shahrukh”, he replied, a recognisably Muslim name. Moments later, he was being beaten, with bare hands and lathis (rods).
 
From our reporting, one case turned out not to be about a hate crime, as per the definition we use for the Hate Crime Watch database and methodology. In eastern UP’s Fatehpur district, some of the media reporting on an incident that had left a Hindu man dead had categorised it as a clash between members of the Hindu and Muslim communities over a piece of land. Our investigation from the ground found that the reality was more complicated–a forceful, illegal land-grab had met with resistance from local villagers; the faith of the actors was incidental. This case has now been dropped from our database.
 
The role of the police
Several other patterns were repeated in many of the crimes, primarily the role of the police. A clear religion-based pattern emerged as we found many instances where cases against members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–currently in power in UP as well as at the Centre–or activists from Hindu right-wing organisations were watered down or prematurely closed.
 
Cases involving Muslims were followed up with mass arrests, with many of the accused alleging they had been falsely implicated. In two of these major incidents, the police invoked the stringent National Security Act (NSA) against Muslim accused.
 
The NSA allows for preventive detention for up to 12 months. The person detained has to be informed of the charges within 10 days, but if the authorities consider this disclosure against public interest, they can withhold this information. Effectively, this means a person can be detained for up to a year without being told why.
 
In Purbaliyan village of western UP’s Muzaffarnagar district, there was a clash between Hindus and Muslims, but no lethal weapons were used and no major injuries caused. Yet, four Muslim men were arrested and later charged under the NSA. They have been detained since August 2018. Many Muslim men and women that FactChecker spoke to said they had come to expect such treatment from UP’s law enforcement system.
 
Muzaffarnagar
Muzaffarnagar lies in the sugarcane belt of western Uttar Pradesh and is often called the country’s sugar bowl. The district witnessed riots in 2013, which created deep divisions between the Jat and Muslim populations. Five years on, some cracks have healed but in Purbaliyan, where a communal clash took place in August 2018, the divisions remain.
 
Often, the police version of events was very different from the version we could piece together from talking to a range of people at and around ground zero. The police version often left out the role of the majority community. If the accused were from Hindu right-wing organisations or from the ruling BJP, the investigations were often shut down or left incomplete, as happened in Moradabad.
 
In these cases, the victims said they were told to water down their allegations in the First Information Report (FIR). In Moradabad, Haji Aslam, a meat trader whose van was burnt down, allegedly by Hindu right-wing activists, said the local police asked him to say the van had been set afire because some locals had been angered by the pungent smell of rotting meat that it carried.
 
Aslam said he had bought the van only two years earlier and was still paying off the loan, and needed to claim insurance. “I gave in. They realised my weakness and told me that they wouldn’t help me if I insisted on the names,” he told FactChecker.
 
One police official had been present at the spot when the van was burnt, Aslam said. “I even named the suspects and pointed them out to the police,” he said, but no one was arrested or charged.
 
FactChecker made numerous attempts at getting comments from the UP Police and sent out questionnaires to various officials, but none of them responded. We also tried contacting local district police officials in all the hate crime spots. Those who responded have been quoted in later pieces.
 
Outsiders foment trouble
Most of the hate crimes played out in a strikingly similar manner. Typically, a small incident would occur. Soon after, groups of men from outside the village, many belonging to right-wing organisations, would descend on the village and stoke tensions.
 
In Adhauli village of Bulandshahr, local villagers told FactChecker how, on August 25, 2017, hundreds of Bajrang Dal activists and members of cow-protection groups had gathered within minutes of a cow carcass being found in a pond. They had marched through the lanes of the Muslim locality, shouting slogans of “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” and “Gau Mata ki Jai!
 
Slowly, the sloganeering had turned into anger against the Muslim community, until an agitated mob had started pelting stones to eventually vandalise a mosque. “Those people came and incited us against our own neighbours and vanished before the police could come back,” Dinesh Rajput, an Adhauli resident who made the first call to the police, told FactChecker.
 
An exodus
 
For days after an incident, community elders send young Muslim men away from the village in anticipation of police action.
 
“The town looked like a town for the old; all the younger men had been smuggled out,” 70-year-old Abdul (name changed for safety), a businessman who had sent his son out of Kasganj in an ambulance following a communal clash on Republic Day in 2018, told FactChecker. He said he had heard that the police were indiscriminately arresting Muslim men.
 
Villages that had not seen any communal tension in recent history are now divided along communal lines. Many, especially among the victims, question whether it is safe to carry on living in the village. Some have left, in search of a new home where they can feel secure.
 
Many villagers came to see Vakeel Ahmad and his family leave Soi village of Bulandshahr district, where the family had lived for generations. A year earlier, his father Ghulam Mohammed had been lynched and killed just outside the village. “The village Pradhan [head] also came; no one said anything, no one asked us to stay back,” Ahmad said.
 
This is the first of a six-part series.
 
Next: Across UP’s Hate Crimes, A Formula At Work: ‘Outsider’ Elements, Police Action Against Victims Of Violence
 
(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)

Courtesy: https://factchecker.in/
 

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Thrown Out Of Land And Home, Farmer Widows Demand Rights, Govt Support https://sabrangindia.in/thrown-out-land-and-home-farmer-widows-demand-rights-govt-support/ Sat, 24 Nov 2018 06:52:29 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/11/24/thrown-out-land-and-home-farmer-widows-demand-rights-govt-support/ Mumbai: On November 21, 2018, close to 80 women widowed by farmer suicides across Maharashtra gathered at the Azad Maidan grounds in south Mumbai with one demand: That the government acknowledge their existence as women farmers with rights to the land that they had once tilled with their husbands. Protesting women farmers from across Maharashtra […]

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Mumbai: On November 21, 2018, close to 80 women widowed by farmer suicides across Maharashtra gathered at the Azad Maidan grounds in south Mumbai with one demand: That the government acknowledge their existence as women farmers with rights to the land that they had once tilled with their husbands.


Protesting women farmers from across Maharashtra gathered at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan on November 21 to demand their rights from the government, at a rally organised by the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM). Seen on stage is Shiv Sena member of the legislative council in Maharashtra, Neelam Gorhe, who also participated in the meeting.

Anitatai, whose husband had killed himself five years ago because he could not pay off mounting debts, travelled 400 km from Osmanabad in central Maharashtra to join the protest here. When she was widowed, her in-laws refused to give her a share of the family land and threw her out of the house as well.

When Anitatai went to buy subsidised grains through the public distribution system, the shopkeeper refused. “The rules say you must have an independent ration card,” he told her. But her in-laws had not allowed her to get herself an independent ration card as long as she was married.

Did she have any farmland in her name to establish her identity as per rules? the shopkeeper asked. “Would I need your ration if I had land in my name?” she had retorted. Anitatai had to return home without rations.

There is no social or government safety net to protect the interests of Anitatai or any of the women gathered at the Mumbai rally, all with similar stories to tell. They are ostracised by society and often held responsible for the deaths of their husbands, said the women.

Over the last two decades, the drought-prone Marathwada and Vidarbha districts in Maharashtra has seen over 62,000 farmer suicides. The crisis was brought on by repeated crop failure, poor remuneration, growing debt, frequent droughts as well as pest attacks on standing crops.

Forty percent of women widowed by these suicides between 2012 and 2018 were yet to get rights to the farmland they had cultivated with their husbands, according to a study conducted by Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM), an umbrella body of organisations working for women farmers. And only 35% of them secured the rights to the family house.

The study released on November 21, 2018, on the sidelines of the rally, surveyed the lives of 505 women farmers whose husbands had committed suicide due to agrarian distress. It covered 11 districts across Marathwada and Vidarbha, the regions most affected by agricultural distress in Maharashtra.

“Most times, the land is in the name of the husband or family, so is the house and the ration card,” said Aarti Bais of Swarajya Mitra, an NGO based from Amravati district, and also a member of MAKAAM. “As a result, they can access neither institutional credit nor other farm-related government schemes.”

Without any security net and with limited access to government benefits, women are likely to be driven deeper into the circle of debt and penury, said activists.

The survey and its results showed that there is little reference in government policy to the struggles of these widowed farmers, said Seema Kulkarni, a member of MAKAAM’s national facilitation team. Since the government’s conversation with these women begins and ends after the suicide of the male farmer, MAKAAM wants to push for more gender-sensitive policy making, she said.

“Women are never recognised as farmers,” she said. “The truth is that they are farming alongside their husbands and continue to do so even after their husbands die.” Existing policies only recognise these women as farm labour, she added. All this means that it becomes very tough for women to re-enter agriculture after the death of their husbands.

33% women did not know they were entitled to pension
Maharashtra’s social security systems have been criticised for their fragility: In recent years, the state has been cutting down its spending on crucial social welfare schemes. The situation is compounded by the lack of awareness among beneficiaries. For instance, 41% of the women interviewed for the survey either don’t have a ration card or are listed only in the family’s ration card. The reason is that 63% of them don’t know that they were entitled to an independent ration card.  

There is a Rs-600 pension offered through the Sanjay Gandhi Niradhar Yojana, a state scheme for vulnerable sections of women, such as widows and those abandoned, orphans and disabled persons. Even that pension money got through to only 34% of women surveyed and even fewer got it every month. Around 33% did not even know about the existence of such a pension and had not applied for it.

Madhuri Bhoge, 45, from Karanji Bhoge village in Wardha used to be a farmer but switched to working as a tour guide at the Gandhi Sevagram Ashram in Wardha after her husband hanged himself at the family farm in 2007. The government pays an ex-gratia sum of Rs 1 lakh to women who are widowed under such circumstances but Bhoge did not know about the scheme.


Madhuri Bhoge, 45, from Wardha’s Karanji Bhoge village, lost her husband in 2007, after he hanged himself from a mango tree in their farm. The family owed lenders over Rs 1.5 lakh after their crops failed repeatedly. Bhoge’s husband, Omprakash, developed mental health issues due to this debt. When he committed suicide, the government denied that it was due to agrarian reasons. As a result, Bhoge never received the government’s ex-gratia payment of Rs 1 lakh for all homes which saw a farmer’s suicide.

She was thrown out her home by her in-laws. “They blamed me for his death. In our villages, families often do that–when farmers commit suicide, they blame the wives for it,” she said.

It was only now, 11 years later, that Bhoge realised that she could have had access to money that could have helped her tide over the crisis. There was another problem. Her husband had “mental health” issues at the time of his death; Madhuri attributes this to the stress of repaying a loan of Rs 20,000 that had compounded to over Rs 1.5 lakh after three bad harvests.

“Government officials refused to categorise it as (farm-related) suicide because they said his records show he was mentally ill,” said Bhoge. “Rules prevented us from getting the help that we needed then.” But she fought back and refused to leave the family home till she and her children were given their share in the farm.

State cuts in education, health budgets compound the crisis
Maharashtra’s fiscal priorities–it has made cuts in social spending–could have compounded the distress of farmer widows, the report suggested. The lack of affordable healthcare, for instance, has meant that families have to borrow to fund medical expenses, increasing their existing loan burden.

Here is what the study showed: Of the 69 families surveyed who needed to fund medical procedures, 47 had to take a loan to meet the expenses. This is despite the Rs 1.5 lakh offered by the Maharashtra government as health cover through its flagship health insurance scheme, Mahatma Phule Jan Arogya Yojana. Only 19% of those surveyed knew about this scheme.

Lack of awareness about the scheme and the resultant poor access for families also coincided with a decline in the government’s motivation to keep the scheme functional: The Maharashtra government announced a 56% cut in the funding for the scheme in 2018.

In 2016, Savita Shelke, 33, of Osmanabad’s Baula village, was dispossessed of her home and property after her husband, depressed by repeated crop failure, killed himself by consuming petrol. “He never told me how much debt there was, but I knew the lenders had been troubling him,” she recalled. Harassed by his family, she migrated to Pune city, where she works as a domestic help.


Savita Shelke, 33, lived in Osmanabad’s Baula village and farmed with her husband till 2016, when he consumed petrol to end his life after rising debts. Her in-laws mistreated her, she says, forcing her to relinquish her rights to the farmland and family house. She now lives in Pune, where she works as a domestic maid. However, her two children’s education costs consume 40% of her income and she struggles to meet all her expenses.

Shelke earns around Rs 72,000 a year but the annual cost of educating her two children comes to around Rs 30,000, leaving her little to cover rent and other expenses. “The family did not help me at all, but can the government not do anything to at least ensure my children’s education?” she said.

Many of the women who came to Mumbai were on their first trip here. For them, the day was about re-asserting their identity. Neelima Bhalerao, 37, from Wardha district’s Amalgaon village has an idea how the state can ensure that women like her get access to the welfare schemes they are entitled to: “The government talks of smart cards. Can they not give us a smart card which says we are widows of farmers?”

(Purohit is an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, migration and the intersections between them. He is an SOAS alumnus.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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