On January 18, hours after a video went viral, showing a college student being thrashed by a group of people in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, the police arrested six people and filed a case in the matter.
But the police weren’t showing speed and efficiency. They had been informed of the assault 15 days ago – yet took no action until the video found its way to social media. It was shot on January 3 in the parking lot of a shopping complex. The student has been identified as Shahbaz Khan, a postgraduate student. His attackers have been identified as belonging to right-wing Hindu groups, including the Hindu Jagran Manch and the Hindu Student Army.
Accusing him of “love jihad”, they dragged him to a police station where the Khandwa police filed a molestation case against him.
Newslaundry has since learned that there are several similar cases in the state. Led by Hindutva activists, they claim to be tackling “love jihad” in the state – a Hindutva bogey that claims Muslim men seduce Hindu women with the express purpose of converting them to Islam.
In the cases scrutinised by Newslaundry, those attacked alleged the hand of the Hindu Student Army, which was founded in 2018 by a man named Madhav Jha and five others after the Mandsaur rape case in 2018. It began in Indore and now operates in Khandwa, Khargone and Burhanpur.
In at least two cases, Madhav Jha was mentioned to have led the assaults on Muslim men. But he’s never been arrested, and the police haven’t named him in an FIR.
‘They told me to say they caught me with a girl’
Shahbaz is shaken by the turn of events. On the afternoon of January 3, he had dropped his sister at SN College. He then went to the local market and returned to the college to pick her up. Near the college gate, he went to a Jio store to buy a SIM card when “two to three boys” accosted him at around 2 pm.
“They asked my name. As soon as I told them, they began hurling abuses at me,” Shahbaz told Newslaundry on the phone. “They called me religious slurs like baanda.”
Baanda is a derogatory term used towards Muslims in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh. Shahbaz said the group began “beating” him.
“People were mutely watching. I asked for help but no one intervened,” he said. “The group took me to the parking lot of Vishal Megamart near the college and beat me. They snatched my phone and checked the photos on it. They hurled abuses at the photos of my sister and family members. They then checked my contact list and asked why I had numbers of Hindu girls.”
Shahbaz alleged the group then checked his chats with a Hindu schoolfriend and beat him again. “They said ‘how dare you chat with a Hindu girl’ and kept beating me.”
He said this continued from 2 pm to 5 pm. “They told me to shout the slogan ‘Jai Shri Ram’. They told me to say they’d caught me with a girl, that she had been naked and I had been lying next to her. They forced me to say all this on video,” he said. “At 5 pm, they took me to a temple near the college, called my schoolfriend’s brother, abused him, and told him to file a complaint against me on behalf of his sister.”
Shahbaz said he was then “dragged” to Kotwali police station.
“I was put in lockup. My attackers were joined by some other friends and they told the police to file a case of ‘love jihad’ against me,” he said. He said the Hindu schoolfriend and her family even arrived at the police station after being called by his attackers.
“It’s not her fault or her family’s fault,” he added. “These people forced them to do so.” The police then carted Shahbaz to a hospital – he told Newslaundry he had a “severe ache” in his chest – and then filed an FIR on their own and made him sign it. The FIR said Shahbaz had been “talking to a girl” when three or four people accused him, assaulted him, and left him with “minor injuries”.
Shahbaz said it wasn’t true that he had been “talking to a girl”. He also claimed that the police asked him to sign his FIR against the attackers, but that this FIR claimed he was “talking to a girl”.
When questioned, superintendent of police Vivek Singh said, “It’s mandatory for police to accept the complaints of sexual harassment, that’s why we register these complaints.”
When the video went viral on January 18, the police arrested six people: Aniket Raipure, Ravi Kumayu, Prathmesh Patil, Sunil Mahajan, Abhishek Verma and Vishal Jave. They were booked under section 151 of the Indian Penal Code. All are members of the Hindu Student Army.
This story was originally published in newslaundry.com . Read the full story here