Cops denied medical treatment to Tabrez Ansari, says family

Jharkhand : The family members of Tabrez Ansari, a youth who was lynched by mob which forced him to chant "Jai Shri Ram" and "Jai Hanuman" in Jharkhand, have alleged that the cops threatened them with a similar fate when they asked him to provide medical treatment while he was bleeding in the custody.

In the lockup, the family found the main perpetrator of the violence addressing Ansari, asking him why he was not dead yet, in spite of the severe beatings they administered on him.

These aspects of lynching and other information were published in a report written by a fact-finding team of the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha. On June 25, the team travelled to the Kadamidiha and Dhaktidih villages in Jharkhand, where the attack on Tabrez took place.

The team, comprising human rights activists and advocates, spoke to Ansari’s family and his neighbours, all of whom were vehement in suggesting that it was very unlikely that he would have been involved in a case of thievery.

Tabrez Ansari was married around one and a half month back and was planning to take his wife to Pune, where he has been working as a welder for the past six or seven years.

The team also tried to speak to villagers living around the scene of the lynching, at Dhaktidih, but were interrupted by a group of men who swarmed them and begun saying that they were the “Jai Shri Ram waale” and that a thief has no religion and could easily be asked to chant “Jai Shri Ram,” be he a Hindu or a Muslim. Dhaktidih, the report noted, had a significant population of backward castes.