The Uttar Pradesh unit of the Congress has alleged that the police is trying to save the culprits in the matter of a young boy being beaten up for drinking water from a temple in Ghaziabad.
Shahnawaz Alam, the chairperson of the party’s minority cell said, “The FIR has excluded the important section of 153A.”
The said section is for the offence of promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc, and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony.
The FIR registered in the case is under the Indian Penal Code’s sections 352 (using force without provocation), 505 (offence in a place of worship) section 67 (transmitting obscene material in electronic form) of the Information Technology Act.
On March 12, a viral video from Ghaziabad’s Masuri village showed one Shringi Nandan Yadav beating a boy after he drank water from the premises of a temple called Dasna Devi Mandir. The 13-year-old, called Asif, kept saying “Uncle, I had come to drink water,” as Yadav rained blows and kicks on him.
According to a instagram account (hinduektasanghh), A muslim kid was mercilessly beaten for drinking water in a temple.
— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) March 12, 2021
Cc : @ghaziabadpolice @Uppolice pic.twitter.com/61ezNX0zMn
Alam, who led a Congress delegation to meet the family, said, “The family is very poor. They have migrated from Bulandshahr. The father is a labourer while Asif is a rag-picker. They are scared.”
The boy also told the delegation that there were two police constables present on the temple premises when the incident happened, but they did not intervene.
Yamin Malik, the district chief of minorities in Ghaziabad, said, “The pujari of the temple, Narsinghanand Saraswati has often given anti-minority statements in the past. Even Yadav said that he was not in the least ashamed about his act and would do so again if the occasion arose.”
Among Saraswati’s many statements was one made in March 2020 when he called for rooting out “evil like Islam”.
Yadav has since been arrested by the district police.
Alam said that the state leadership had emboldened self-styled Babas. “These are new kinds of Babas whose only ambition is politics. They are part of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s plans to foster enmity.”
He said that had it been a member of the minority community who had committed a similar offence many sections would have been slapped on.
The Congress has supported the family to give an application at the local police station to add relevant sections to the FIR.
