RAJKOT: In a heart-wrenching incident, a Dalit named Mukesh Vaniya, a ragpicker, was brutally thrashed to death by unidentified men in Gujarat’s Rajkot.
The incident took place in Shapar-Veraval industrial area of Rajkot district on Sunday morning May 20.
The wife of the deceased, Jayaben Vaniya, was also beaten up by five people when couple had gone to collect garbage and was mistaken to be thieves.
While the man died on the spot, the woman got brutally injured and was hospitalized.
A video of the incident shared by many on social media platforms shows two people taking turns to beat the victim with a stick as he winces and screams while another person holding him by a rope tied around his waist.
Following this, police registered a case under sections 302 (murder) and 308 (culpable homicide) of the IPC and arrested the five people.
Family of the deceased is sitting outside postmortem house for justice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3oo3L3z77E
Gujarat lawmaker Jignesh Mevani tweeted the disturbing footage.
“Mr Mukesh Vaniya belonging to a scheduled caste was miserably thrashed and murdered by factory owners in Rajkot and his wife was brutally beaten up,” he tweeted with the hashtag #GujaratIsNot Safe4Dalits.
Mevani even describes the incident as “worse than the 2016 Una attack.”
“This is a far more gruesome incident than Una. In Una, the victims were beaten up and humiliated. Whereas, here a man lost his life amidst caste violence… The government of Gujarat has still not learned from its past mistakes,” Mr Mevani wrote on Facebook.