Drive in rural India ends in mob attack and lynching
MURKI/MUMBAI: In the tiny hamlet of Murki in the hinterlands of South India, Inspector V.B. Yadwad surveyed a pile of bricks and stones in a ditch where he and other police officers had been attacked earlier this month while trying to save a group of five men on a road trip from a violent mob.
"We tried hard to stop them," said Inspector Yadwad, pointing to injuries on his back. "They would not listen to anyone."
The inspector was one of eight policemen who rushed to the village on July 13 to try to control a mob of more than 200 that attacked the five friends, wrongly assuming they were child kidnappers.
The vicious assault left one of the five men, Mr Mohammed Azam, a UK-educated IT worker from India's tech hub in Hyderabad, dead, and at lest two of the others badly beaten.
All eight officers were injured, two seriously.
Mr Azam, who was 32 and worked for global consulting services firm Accenture, is one of the latest victims of a wave of lynchings in India, as ill-equipped and outnumbered police struggle to contain mob violence triggered by false messages about child kidnappings spread via platforms such as Facebook's WhatsApp service.
The Indian government says it is not tracking data for lynchings, but data portal IndiaSpend has tallied more than 30 deaths from nearly 70 such incidents since January last year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration, which has been facing criticism from opposition parties and the public for failing to do enough to stop the lynchings, has blamed WhatsApp, warning the messaging service of legal action if it did not curb the spread of fake news.
On July 20, WhatsApp said it was limiting the number of people someone can forward messages to simultaneously and considering more changes to curb the spread of fake messages in its largest market. But it is unclear how much this will restrain mob violence.
Police probing the lynchings of Mr Azam and others say they are often triggered by deep-rooted prejudices against minorities in India.
Mr Azam's job at Accenture, according to his younger brother Akram, included reviewing the propriety of video content before it was uploaded to Alphabet Inc's YouTube.
"India is already vulnerable due to religious and caste fault lines," said Mr Rema Rajeshwari, a superintendent of police in the southern Telangana state, where some recent lynchings took place.
"When you add WhatsApp to the mix, things can easily spiral out of control." - REUTERS
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