By Abhilash Mahajan
While the recent lynching of Sabir Ali, a migrant worker from West Bengal, over the suspicion of eating beef in Haryana made news, two incidents of vigilante violence apparently by the same group of lynchers have gone unreported.
Indianexpress.com visited Hansawas Khurd village in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri district on September 7, roughly two weeks after Sabir Ali was killed, and met families from Assam and West Bengal who saw the brutal assault. Two weeks later, a panch and the sarpanch of the village confirmed that none of the 25-odd migrants lived there anymore.
In Hansawas Khurd, there are three fields where migrant Muslim families from Assam live in shanties made of plastic. Between two fields stood a police vehicle, stationed there to provide security to the migrants after the lynching incident.
The migrant families used to pick rags for a living but have stopped it out of fear since the lynching incident. “We are not relatives of Sabir, but even we were troubled,” Zoya (name changed), one of the residents of these shanties, told indianexpress.com. “Around 7 pm on August 26, a man came, asked us about our native place and Aadhaar card, etc.”
The next morning, Zoya said, when she and others went to work, her neighbour Aijaz (name changed) was at home with his family. “We were not at home. Around 15-20 men came and started thrashing Aijaz with sticks on suspicion that he had consumed cow meat. He told them that they had eaten buffalo meat, but these men did not listen,” she said.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.