Condemn the brutal killing of Mohammad Afrazul

Mohammad Afrazul, a Daily Wager from West Bengal Brutally Hacked and Burnt alive by Goons in Rajsamand, Rajasthan!

Communal Goons on a Killing Spree in the BJP Ruled State! CM Vasundhara Raje and Rajasthan Home Minister Must Resign NOW!

Stop Communal Madness and Hatemongering and State Impunity to Killers!

In a horrific incident of communal lynching, Mohammad Afrazul, a daily wager from West Bengal was brutally hacked and burnt alive by communal goons in Rajsamand – around five hours from state capital Jaipur. The killer, Shambhu Lal, with an absolute sense of impunity, also circulated a chilling video clip of the gruesome act. The nauseating video showed how the killer attacked Afrazul repeatedly with a pickaxe. When the victim finally felt silent, Lal looked into the camera and launched into a hate speech, declaring that he committed the murder to save a woman from “love jihad”! He again took the blood-soaked axe and struck once more before brutally setting the body on fire.

Such gruesome murders is a clear result of the climate of hate-mongering created by the BJP against Muslims, branding the latter as ‘jehadis’, ‘love jehadis’ and ‘cow smugglers/killers’. The Rajasthan police is trying to claim that Shambhu Lal is “not normal” – but sadly this kind of murderous hatred is the new ‘normal’ manufactured by the hate ideology and propaganda of the BJP and RSS.

Influential sections of the media – mainly certain channels – also help foster such murderous hatred against minorities by continuously running stories legitimising the myth of “love jehad”. Unfortunately even the Kerala High Court gave a boost to this communal and patriarchal myth in the Hadiya case – and the Supreme Court failed in its duty to throw out that verdict.

This is not the first horrendous killing that is happening in Vasundhara Raje ruled Rajasthan. In 2015, 60 year-old Abdul Ghaffar Qureshi was killed in Birloka village in Rajasthan’s Nagaur district after social media was used to spread rumours accusing him of slaughtering 200 cows for a feast. In 2016, Meo Muslim families in villages in Alwar, Rajasthan were victims of mob attacks following rumours that they were slaughtering cows. On that occasion, police did not arrest the assailants, but instead arrested several of the Muslim men. At the same Alwar in 2017, a dairy farmer Pehlu Khan, returning to Haryana after buying cows at the Jaipur cattle market, was lynched to death by a mob accusing him of smuggling cows for slaughter. Another dairy farmer and cattle trader Azmat suffered a spinal injury at the hands of the same mob. All accused in the Pehlu Khan lynching case are out on bail. The Rajasthan Police had brazenly closed its investigation against the six men whom Khan had named just before he died. Their names were removed from the case as an inquiry had found them not guilty! The excuse of “cow” is also no longer necessary to attack and kill religious minorities. In the name of Swach Bharat Abhiyan, comrade Zafar Khan of CPI (ML) was beaten to death by the Municipality chairperson and others in Pratapgarh town, when he was opposing their naming and shaming policy as part of making Pratapgarh open defecation free. The police has not arrested anybody, claiming that he died of a heart attack! Just last month, cow vigilantes brutally killed Umar Mohammed in Bharatpur and then threw his body at the railway tracks to make it look like an accident. Two other victims of the same attack, Tahir and Javed are now behind bars with the absurd charge of “cow smuggling”!

Communal killings and vicious attacks on minorities has become a regular phenomenon in Rajasthan. And the entire state machinery is time and again used to shamelessly defend the murderers accused in lynching. AISA demands that all the perpetrators of communal must be immediately booked. Vasundhara Raje also must resign now, she has no moral authority to continue one single day in the context of absolute impunity provided to communal killers. We must also unitedly fight back the madness of communal goons and the state impunity to these killers.