Five days back , at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh (UP), on March 19, a Muslim youth named Amjad was reportedly brutally beaten over the suspicion of car theft. In what is turning out to be a singular pattern in the state, the young man later died due to severe injuries to his lungs.

This is not the first time that mob violence has targeted minorities there. On September 2, 2022 (incident reported by The Wire on October 2022, a 50-year-old Muslim man named Dawood Ali Tyagi was reported to have been attacked by a mob in Vinaipur in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat district. At the time, around 20 men reportedly charged at Tyagi with sticks and sharp objects late at night, inflicting fatal injuries upon him. While the police claimed that four arrests have been made in the case, five months down little progress appears to have been made in the case. While the authorities contested the claim, Tyagi’s family had claimed that the attack was not random and that it was, in fact, a targeted crime aimed at instilling fear in Muslims. The police claim otherwise.

Tyagi, a farmer, lived in Vinaipur with his wife and daughter while his three sons lived and studied in Delhi. Speaking to The Wire about what transpired, one of his sons, Shahrukh, said, “My father was sitting on the porch of the house chatting with our relatives. At around 10 pm, a group of 22 men on about seven or eight bikes arrived.”

“He was attacked with sharp weapons; chain sockets latched onto sticks,” Shahrukh continued. “They attacked my father on his head and he also suffered three separate injuries on his hand. They fired on my cousins too, however, since they were much younger, my cousins escaped.” “As they attacked him, they were raising the slogan of ‘Jai Shri Ram’,” Shahrukh said. 

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