Mortal rights group Amnesty International has called the flogging of Muslim men by police in the western Indian state of Gujarat “a serious mortal rights violation” that shows “maximum discourteousness towards the law”.
A videotape of the incident that took place on Tuesday in Udhela vill of Gujarat’s Kheda quarter went viral on social media. It showed several Muslim men tied to a pole and beaten with a stick by bobbies in mercenary apparel, as a crowd that included women and children cheered.
The men, indicted by the police of throwing monuments at a Hindu religious event, were told to apologise to the crowd after the flogging and also whisked into a police van.
“The Gujarat police’s use of striking bias similar as lathis(sticks) to beat Muslim men who were tied to a pole by the police themselves is a serious mortal rights violation and shows their maximum discourteousness towards rule of law,” Amnesty said in a tweet on Wednesday.
“We remind the Gujarat Police that discipline is noway a licit ideal for a law enforcement action, indeed if using lower murderous munitions. In this case, it blatantly ignored the guiding principles of legitimacy, necessity, proportionality, and responsibility.”
Gujarat is one of India’s most polarised countries, with religious screams in 2002 killing what some sources estimate to be further than 2,000 people, utmost of them Muslims.
Religious Pressures in India have heightened since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) came to power in the country in 2014.
The BJP has been ruling Gujarat for further than 25 times and the coming state choices are due in December.
Amnesty said a new state government “has a chance to break this cycle of wide and unbounded immunity and bring to justice those responsible for this unlawful and inordinate use of force”.
Kheda’s elderly supervisor of Police Rajesh Gadhiya told Al Jazeera the Muslim men in the videotape had allegedly thrown monuments at addicts as they shared in Garba, a traditional cotillion generally organised during Navratri, a nine-day periodic Hindu jubilee.
Gadhiya said Muslims in the area had expostulated to the event being held near a synagogue, which sparked pressures with the Hindu community.
He said the pressures led to Muslim men throwing monuments at the event on Monday night, wounding at least seven Hindus, two of them seriously.
“We’ve filed a case against 43 people and arrested 18 people so far,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that all the indicted were Muslim.
When asked whether police officers intimately flogging Muslims was legal, Gadhiya said a disquisition has been launched into the assault.
“Muslim men who disintegrated the event were beaten by police and made to apologise to the public,” Shobna Patel, a townie who had been in the crowd during the incident, told Al Jazeera.
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‘Targeted violence’
Muslim politicians and activists say the flogging is “a new low” in India’s treatment of its Muslim nonage.
Imran Khedawala, a state solon belonging to the opposition Congress party, told Al Jazeera the BJP was designedly to create religious pressures ahead of the state choices and that the officers involved in the flogging should be held responsible.
“There should be a disquisition into the incident. There’s a law in place. We demand that the police should be penalized for this flogging,” Khedawala said.
Since Navratri started in late September, Muslims were banned from entering religious events in several places. Hindu groups purport Muslims engage in “love jihad” – an unproven conspiracy proposition that accuses Muslim men of luring Hindu women to convert them to Islam – at similar events.
Indian media reports over once a week said some Hindu groups checked the identity of people entering the religious events. In some cases, Muslim men who were just passing through the area were also assaulted.
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In Madhya Pradesh, another state ruled by the BJP, authorities on Tuesday demolished the homes of at least three Muslims indicted of throwing monuments at Hindu events, according to original media reports.
Prominent Muslim parliamentarian Asaduddin Owaisi condemned the flogging by the police in Gujarat.
“Every day, there’s further substantiation of mass radicalisation. Floggings and mob violence by bobbies
have come common. Targeted violence against Muslims is treated as ‘justice’,” he said in a tweet.
Apoorvanand, a New Delhi- grounded academic and activist, told Al Jazeera “ the state outfit is complicit in targeting ” Muslims.
“Police are involved in flogging and police are bulldozing houses of Muslims, which is fully illegal. India is no longer a country that’s ruled by law. It’s now a country ruled by road goons related to the testament of Hindutva,” he said, using the Hindi word for India’s Hindu racist movement.
Apoorvanand said the Indian state outfit was serving the cause of the “Hindutva mugs” and that Muslims “can not anticipate justice in this country”.
“They(Muslims) aren’t facing redundant state violence but the state has intermingled itself with the non-state Hindutva network. This has proved that all Hindu carnivals have come the cause of misery for non-Hindus,” he said.
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