Bharatpur: When he drove out of his village of Ghatmeeka in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur district on Tuesday, Mohammad Junaid was a happy man. The 37-year-old truck driver had teamed up with his cousin Nasir to find a match for Junaid’s niece, and were driving to the neighbouring district of Alwar in a white Bolero. He told his wife Sajji that he would be back by midnight.
But even as the morning sun came up over the village of Ghatmeeka, the two men weren’t back. Alarmed, Sajji called on their phones, but to no avail. “Both the numbers were switched off. I sensed something bad happened,” she said.
With fear rising inside her, Sajji waited in the courtyard of her one-bedroom brick-mud house, in the congested courtyard of which she cooks using firewood in one corner and a buffalo is tied in another. Around afternoon, the phone of one of her relatives, Jahulaq, rang.
“An ex-sarpanch from a village in Haryana called my nephew to say that two badly thrashed men were brought by a group of eight-ten people to the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) office in Haryana’s Ferozpur Jhirka, 15kms from our village,” said Junaid’s uncle, Mohammad Ismail.
The ex-sarpanch was, in turn, tipped-off by a policeman in CIA, a unit of Harayana Police, said Ismail. “The mob accused Junaid and Nasir of smuggling cattle,” he added. CIA has denied allegations that its personnel were involved in any way in the case.
The call set off a sweeping search by villagers, which ended in tragedy when the charred bodies of the two victims was found inside a car. Families of the two victims filed a first information report (FIR) with Bharatpur Police in Rajasthan and alleged that the men were abducted and beaten by members of the Bajrang Dal unit in Haryana. One person, Rinku Saini, who was named as an accused in the FIR, was arrested on Friday.
The grisly deaths have sparked an outcry in the region and a political tussle, with police saying the deaths may be linked to incidents of cattle smuggling. But back at the village, a blanket of anger and sorrow shrouds the residents.
Many local villagers remembered the frenetic search they were all part of on Wednesday. “We searched for Junaid and Nasir in a dozen police stations, and many hospitals and clinics,” said Nasir’s brother, Hamid.
Around late noon on Wednesday, the villagers finally came across some people who said they had spotted the duo being thrashed by a mob in a jungle, some 10kms from Ghatmeeka. “They said they heard Junaid and Nasir shouting out to the gods for help, but didn’t interfere because they believed that the thrashers were policemen,” said Ismail.
By this time, the families of the two men feared the worst. On Wednesday night, Ismail filed a case of abduction at the local Gopalgarh police station. But worse was still to come. On Thursday morning, the phone of the Bolero owner rang. On the other side of the call was an officer from Bhiwani Police in Haryana, some 175kms away, who said that the Bolero and two occupants inside it were found charred.
Nasir’s wife said her husband didn’t have to die. “They should have given him back to me in whatever broken condition he was left after the thrashing. I would have cared for him all my life,” said his wife, Parmeena, who is now left to care for an informally adopted three-year-old daughter, for the couple did not have a child of their own.
As the sun came up on Friday, hundreds of men and women from across the Mewat region gathered in a mahapanchayat at the village, demanding the arrest of the five men who were named by the victim’s families in the FIR and compensation to the families of the deceased. “You shouldn’t burn alive even your enemies,” said a weeping elderly woman, Salma Begum.
Zahida Khan, the local legislator, made a clutch of promises to pacify the gathering. “Rajasthan Police is pressuring their Haryana counterparts to arrest all the suspects,” she said.
As the evening approached, an elderly religious man sought to salve the pain of the families. “Even the non-Muslims are sad with these killings,” a maulvi said, reciting the last prayers before the bodies could be carried away for cremation.
Separated by a decade, Junaid and 27-year-old Nasir were grandfather-grandson by distant relations. According to the police, Junaid was earlier booked in five cases of cattle smuggling; Nasir had no criminal past. Villagers said Junaid was wrongly framed, and he ran a grocery store in the village until he took to truck driving two years ago.
