By CJP Team

In Telangana’s Nizamabad district, a transgender person was killed in what is reported to be a mob lynching.

The incident took place on February 13, 2024. The victim, Raju, a 50-year-old trans person was subjected to a brutal mob assault after rumours of child kidnapping spread. Raju was not a stranger to the village and was familiar to the villagers, they were reportedly trying to make a livelihood as a cattle herder and beggar. The authorities cleared their name, asserting that they were not involved in any case of child kidnapping, however, it was too late. Raju was rushed to the hospital, but soon succumbed to their injuries.

The police soon filed a complaint by registering a murder case against the five people who are suspected to be party to the attack. The police also sought to clarify that Raju was not involved in child kidnapping and that the recent kidnappings in the area were isolated incidents with no connections to organised gangs. Furthermore, the authorities confirmed that the children, earlier missing, were now reunited with their families. The Commissioner of Police of Nizamabad also made a public appeal and urged residents to not take the law into their own hands and stressed the need for people to maintain calm and patience in such times.

As per a report in Behanbox, data from the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) reveals that India documented 102 registered murders of transgender people between 2008 and 2021. Additionally, the National Crime Records Bureau for the year 2021 also reports that only 236 cases involving crimes against transgender persons have been officially recorded in India. The article points that these numbers are not indicative of actual figures due to the lack of complaints filed in these cases. It has been observed that trans people are extremely vulnerable to violence, in public and in private. A case from Telangana from last year when a wife hired contract killers and paid them to murder her estranged transgender spouse, is just one such example.

This story was originally published in cjp.org.in.