Syed Ali Mujtaba

The gory incidents of mob lynching of Muslims in Gujarat have once again shocked many, even as Modi 3.0 juggernaut rolls on in India.

This time it’s a case of twenty-three-year-old Salman Vohra who was mob lynched when he had gone to watch a local cricket tournament match in Chikhodra, Gujarat on June 22, 2024. He was mercilessly beaten to death.

Salman was a resident of the Polson compound in Gujarat’s Anand and worked in the garment business. He got married two months ago; his wife Mashira is a month pregnant.

The violence started with a parking dispute. A group of men, one of them being drunk, allegedly came in their motorcycles and got into a fight with Salman, telling him to move his bike from the stand. The drunk one mistook Suhail, another Muslim man to be Salman and began attacking him. To save Suhail, Salman jumped in and the mob surrounded him.

This is when the men started mercilessly beating Salman. He was hit by cricket bats and knives clubs etc. The crowd present looked on and some even cheered the attackers; “Maro! Maro! A section of the crowd eveN shouted ‘Jai Shri Ram’.  The attackers finally stopped hitting Salman when they assumed there was no life left in him.

A few onlookers picked up Salman, made him drink water, and called the ambulance on the way to the hospital Salman succumbed to his injuries.

An eyewitness account in the media says, “I saw his body, he had marks on his right hand, cuts below his eyes, his ear was brutally damaged. They (the attackers) almost bit his ear off. The knife cut damaged his kidney, which was the biggest wound. He was also beaten on his lower waist and neck and these areas of his body bled a lot.”

There have been a total of nine arrests made so far. Two of the accused Vishal and Shakti who brutally beat Salman with bats and knives have not been arrested yet.

Taking cognizance of the rising hate crimes against Muslims in north India Tamil Nadu Minorities People Welfare Association staged a protest in Madurai condemning the repeated attacks against members of the Muslim community after the Modi 3.0 rule.

1. Ganesan, district president of the association said that the BJP government is instrumental in staging various attacks against the minorities, particularly Muslims, targeting them because they did not vote for the BJP.

 “After losing their majority mark, the BJP government has started acting violently against people who seem to have not voted for them,” Mr. Ganesan said.

A compendium of rising hate crimes against Muslims is brought out New Delhi-based Association for Protection of Civil Rights. The APCR has brought out a report saying that the crime against Muslims has increased in India after the conclusion of the Lok Sabha election on June 4, 2024.

These crimes include mob lynching, communal riots, bulldozer injustice, and forced eviction.  According to the APCR report, there have been ten lynching incidents between June 7 and July 5. There have been reports of targeted bulldozer actions against Muslims in Madhya Pradesh and the U.P where the houses of 11 Muslims were demolished after an allegation of beef being found in the refrigerators in Madhya Pradesh.  There are also reports of attacks on Muslim establishments and their forced evictions from Himachal Pradesh.