A Muslim man – Shaukat Ali – was at the receiving end in Biswanath district of Assam for ‘selling beef’. The man was allegedly forced to eat pork by the mob.
Reports stated that one person was detained after a video of the man in deep slush begging with the mob to let him go went viral on social media.
Sixty-eight-year-old Shaukat Ali was “roughed up” on the road and “forced” to eat pork by the locals – the price he had to pay for selling beef.
Ali is currently being treated in a government hospital. The Biswanath district police informed that two separate FIRs have been filed – one of them by Shaukat Ali’s brother.
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The police are investigating into the matter and are hot on the heels of the men seen in the video.
Sources said that the mob threatened Shaukat Ali and asked him whether he was from Bangladesh and had the license to sell beef.
“Are you Bangladeshi? Is your name in the National Register of Citizens (NRC)?” a person from the mob asked him.
A case has been registered under the appropriate sections. The SP has been asked to “go strong” on the case and not to “spare the guilty”.
The police are keeping a hawk eye in Biswanath district. Assam Director General of Police Kuladhar Saikia assuaged people’s fear and asked them to cast their votes in the knocking-on-the-door Lok Sabha elections freely.
The leader of the Opposition in Assam Legislative Assembly Debabrata Saikia has condemned the incident of thrashing Shaukat Ali for selling beef and forcing him to eat pork. He demanded immediate intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) over the incident.
“I would like to draw your attention to a distressing incident wherein a man was severely assaulted and his property ransacked by some vigilantes few days back in the Biswanath Chariali town of Biwanath district of Assam, simply because he was serving beef in his restaurant. The victim, Shaukat Ali, has had to be admitted to hospital due to severe injuries. Incidentally, there is no blanket ban on beef in Assam, and the victim has been running his restaurant for four decades. Although a case has been registered in this connection, none of the culprits has been detained so far,” Saikia said in his letter sent to the NHRC on Tuesday.
“Ali was beaten up by the hooligans in front of a police official. This sort of mob rule is a blot on our nation’s secular and democratic ethos and, if left unchecked, will imperil peaceful coexistence among various communities in Assam and the country as a whole. I would, therefore, like to request you kindly to take cognisance of the incident and initiate appropriate action to have the culprits brought to book according to the law of the land, and also ensure that this type of anarchic behaviour by fanatics does not recur,” he added.