On the night of 28 September, 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq and his 22-year-old son Danish were dragged out of their home in Bisada village in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri district, and brutally attacked by a mob of 200 on the suspicion that the family had consumed beef. Akhlaq did not survive the attack and his son has only just been shifted out of the ICU department of a local hospital.
Since the attack, the family of Akhlaq has maintained that there was no beef in the house. The meat seized by the mob and later by the police was mutton. And a forensic test proved just that.
According to this report, the meat that the mob found in Akhlaq’s fridge and which they claimed was the proof they needed to lynch him was mutton, not beef. After the brutal murder of Akhlaq, the police had sent the meat sample to a vet for preliminary testing. But the police, to be sure, sent the meat for testing to a Mathura lab and the results said that the meat found in Akhlaq’s fridge was not beef, but mutton.
Whether it was beef or mutton is inconsequential to the crime that was committed, but the lab report confirms how baseless rumours circulated by a handful led to the death of the man.
The most poignant part of the report was this excerpt.
Akhlaq’s daughter, Sajida, said the family had “mutton in the fridge” and not beef. “Can they bring my father back if it turns out it was not beef?”
Recalling the incident, Akhlaq’s wife told PTI,”There was a lot of noise and they were banging our doors and abusing us. The entered the house by jumping a wall from the other side. Then they started misbehaving and vandalising things after which they mercilessly thrashed us.”
Seven people allegedly involved in the incident have already been arrested. Reportedly, a priest at the local temple, who made the announcement on the public address system about the family having consumed beef, and two youths, who allegedly forced him to do that, were “major links” to the incident.
A political slugfest has been going on over the lynching case. While almost everybody came out in support of the bereaved family, Hindu radicals justified the killing saying cow was a sacred animal and slaughtering it will not be tolerated.
Like Sandip Roy rightly argues in this piece, “someone’s dinner is now part of a criminal investigation.” That is the reality that cannot be captured in the language of a law that bans the slaughter of a particular animal or puts limitations on it.