Lynching of Dalit man who ‘stole from Gurdwara gollak’ latest in spate of ‘mob justice’ cases in Punjab

Chandigarh: A video of a Dalit man being lynched by a mob for allegedly trying to steal money from a gurdwara in Punjab’s Moga district has gone viral on social media.

The man, Karam Singh, a 28-year-old daily wager, succumbed to his injuries soon after the brutal attack, which took place on 15 October.

The video, which surfaced Saturday, showed Singh, a resident of Gurusar Mari Mustafa village in Moga district, with his hands tied to the grille of a window and a few people hitting him with blunt weapons. The incident took place in the early hours and many villagers were seen watching as he was thrashed.

The video also showed that Singh was unable to walk or stand on his own afterwards, and was then dragged onto a motorcycle. He was reportedly taken to the hospital by the same men who beat him up, where he was declared dead.

Police have registered a case of murder against six men identified as Nanak Singh, Gurnam Singh, Jagtar Singh, Seera Singh, Dharampal and Kaku. Another 16 unidentified persons have also been named in the FIR.

However, no arrests have been made so far, Ajay Raj, SP intelligence, Moga, told ThePrint.

“Our teams are raiding various places in and around the village. The accused are on the run,” he added.

Kashmir Singh, the investigating officer in the case, told ThePrint that, according to the information given to the police by villagers, the accused had identified Karam Singh through CCTV camera footage of the gurdwara as allegedly trying to steal from the gollak (money box).

“The victim was 28 years old and used to work as a daily wager. His father also works as a daily wager. Villagers allege that Karam Singh was a drug addict but we have to verify that,” said the officer, adding that Singh belonged to a Dalit family.

Meanwhile, police sources told ThePrint that, initially, Karam Singh’s family members were told that he had tried to steal from the gollak of the village gurdwara and had got injured while running away, following which the villagers had taken him to the hospital where he had died.

The police handed over the body of the victim to the family after inquest proceedings under section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), which is a routine police procedure done in cases of unnatural death.

“The family agreed to cremate the body following a compromise with the village panchayat,” said Kashmir Singh.

However, when the video of the mob lynching surfaced, the family members of the victim informed the police and a case was subsequently registered under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (murder) 342 (wrongful confinement), 148 (rioting) and 149 (unlawful assembly).

Karam Singh’s brutal killing is not an isolated incident in Punjab, where cases of “instant justice” being meted out by a mob to those accused of “sacrilege” are on the rise.

Speaking to ThePrint, professor Manjit Singh, a sociologist from Panjab University, Chandigarh, said the growing incidents of Sikhs taking recourse to meting out “death sentences” to those considered to have “desecrated” their religion shows the “increasing fanaticism in Sikhism”.

“The Sikh religion was considered different from others. It was a movement which was ever-evolving and growing based on the principles of service, simplicity and humility. But those ideals seem to have taken a back seat,” he said.

The police, he added, were also to be blamed for this shift. “They have lost their credibility in providing justice in sacrilege cases, which forces people to take the law into their own hands,” he claimed.

Punjab has the highest number of sacrilege and blasphemy cases registered in the country.

According to the 2021 data released by the National Crime Record Bureau, Punjab’s crime rate of offences related to religion (sections 295, 296 and 297 of the IPC) stood at 0.6 percent — the highest in the country. Goa comes next at 0.5 percent followed by Karnataka, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh at 0.3 percent.

Past incidents
In May, a Rajpura youth, Sahil, was thrashed by Sikh devotees after he allegedly tried to enter the Dukhniwaran Sahib Gurdwara at Rajpura twice while wearing shoes and without covering his head.

Onlookers dragged Sahil into a room and, along with the gurdwara staff, beat him up. Talking to media persons the same evening, Sahil’s brother Sagar said that he was suffering from depression and was undergoing treatment at a hospital in Patiala.

Barely three days before the Rajpura incident, on 15 May, a middle-aged woman Kulwinder Kaur (initially identified as Parvinder Kaur), a resident of a Patiala village, was allegedly consuming alcohol inside the complex of the Gurdwara Dukh Nivaran Sahib in Patiala and was shot dead by an enraged devotee for “committing sacrilege”.

The alleged killer, Nirmaljit Singh Saini, was arrested from the spot. He fired five bullets at her, killing Kaur and injuring another devotee.

The woman was divorced and worked in a salon at Zirakpur, said the police, refusing to divulge more details of her family, lest they also become a target of radical Sikh devotees. The police said Kaur was registered as an alcohol addict and was undergoing treatment at a de-addiction centre in Patiala.

On 24 April, Jasbir Singh Jassi, a resident of Morinda, allegedly desecrated the Guru Granth Sahib and hit the granthis at the Kotwali Sahib Gurdwara in Morinda. He was overpowered by the devotees, beaten up and dragged into a room at the gurdwara.

After he was handed over to the police, hundreds of Sikh youth surrounded the Morinda police station asking police that the accused be handed over to them so that they could deliver “instant justice”. When the police refused, the agitated crowd allegedly went to Jassi’s house and vandalised it, even as his family went into hiding.

On 28 April, when Jassi was produced before a court in Ropar, a lawyer, identified as Sahib Singh, tried to shoot him. On 1 May, the accused complained of chest pain and was rushed to hospital, where he died.

Courtesy : The print

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