Another heartwrenching incident took place in Panipat, Haryana where a Muslim youth, Akhlaq was brutally beaten up by Hindu men after having found that he was a Muslim.
Ikram Salmani, the elder brother of the survivor told Maktoob that his brother Akhlaq came to Panipat in search of work, rested on the bench in a park in Kishanpura, which is 2Km away from the bus station.
28-year-old Akhlaq is a barber by profession.
Salmani says: “Two men came and asked for his name and later started threatening, pushing and hitting him and then left. Later, Akhlaq went to a nearby house to get water and found that he had reached the house of the same men who’d beaten him earlier. Those people including two women dragged him inside the house and started beating him brutally and on finding a tattoo on his right hand which read ‘786’, they cut his arm off with a saw blade. Akhlaq fainted and was later found on the railway track.”
In Arabic literature, there is an equation where when used; words and letters converted into numbers, there to 786 is a conversion of words of (in Arabic) Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim which means in English as: “In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate the Merciful”.
Brutally injured Akhlaq got help from a man crossing by who helped him inform his family about the mishap.
“We’ve been running in and out for help but no one seems to be paying attention to us. Neither the doctors nor the police has been a help. Even the Sub Inspector Balwan has been misguiding us by calling it a train accident although I’d been to the sight with the police and we have found the saw blade there,” Salmani added.
According to Salmani, the Sub Inspector showed him papers in which the statement given by Akhlaq has been removed to some extent. The papers state that Akhlaq’s arm was cut off by the train while Akhlaq himself told the police that it was that group of men that did that to him.
Akhlaq’s family has been told that their case has been filed and transferred further to Chandi Bagh police station and as soon as the papers get ready, the culprits are going to be arrested.
“Haryana has been cruel to us. Nobody came forward to help in this strange city. All I’ve noticed here is that everyone kept ignoring us. From physicians-to-policemen, everyone has been misguiding us. We had never imagined that searching for work would show us a gloomy future,” Salmani said in a disheartened tone.
Unsa Khan is a student of Media Governance at Jamia Millia Islamia and a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
