A court in a northern Indian state has awarded life imprisonment to 10 people for mob lynching a Muslim man over a rumor of cow slaughter.
The district court in Hapur in northern Uttar Pradesh on March 11 convicted the killers of Qasim Qureishi, a meat trader. The 10 convicts also assaulted his companion, Mohammad Samaydeen, who later filed the complaint in the case.
Mob lynching has been defined as a murder punishable with life imprisonment or even death sentence in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, a legal code that came to replace the colonial-era Indian Penal Code in December last year.
Qureshi and Samaydeen were assaulted on June 16, 2018, over a rumor of their involvement in cow slaughter, which is banned in Uttar Pradesh. India’s largest and most populous state is ruled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The state’s police registered the incident in which Qureshi was beaten to death and Samaydeen was badly injured as a case of a road accident.
However, Samaydeen moved the Supreme Court seeking a thorough probe.
The court directed the police to investigate it as a case of mob lynching, which resulted in the trial court convicting the 10 people involved.
“It is certainly a laudable job,” Christian activist Minakshi Singh told UCA News on March 13.
She said the district court’s order had come at the right time. “People had started to believe that courts were failing to do justice to ordinary people, especially minorities,” she said.
Singh, who is general secretary of Unity in Compassion, a charity based in Uttar Pradesh, said the judgment will give hope to victims of mob violence.
Muhammad Arif, chairman of the Centre for Harmony and Peace, told UCA News that the judgment “will boost the confidence of ordinary people.”
“Muslims anywhere in India live under constant fear that they may be attacked under the false allegation of cow slaughter,” said Arif, who is also based in Uttar Pradesh.
Mob lynching of Muslims engaged in the meat trade and Dalits or former untouchables who disposed of dead animals started becoming a serious law and order problem in 2014 when the BJP came to power in India and most of its states.
The crime is mainly attributed to hardline Hindu organizations, specifically cow vigilante groups, who resort to violence under the guise of protecting the cow, a revered animal in Hinduism.
According to media reports, between 2012 and 2022, at least 82 cases of violent mob attacks by cow vigilante groups have been reported in the country, claiming 45 lives and hurting 145 others.
Islam is the second largest religion in Uttar Pradesh and forms 19.26 percent of the state’s 200 million population and Christians account for a mere 0.18 percent. Nearly 80 percent of the state’s people are Hindus.
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