New Delhi: The National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD) has strongly condemned the recent killing of Mohammad Zahiruddin in the Indian state of Bihar.
Zahiruddin, 55, was a driver and a person with a disability after a Hindutva chauvinist organisations lynched him while he was repairing his truck after it broke down in the middle of the road in Saran district.
The NPRD said, Zahiruddin was transporting animal bones for medicinal purposes to a factory. “Even this has now become a ‘crime’ for which the punishment is death, as this gruesome killing reveals,” said a press release.
The NPRD said that even though incidents of killings and lynching of disabled people are reported at regular intervals, the incident in Saran district has acquired a much more dangerous portend with people being targeted for their religious identity.
On February 25, another Muslim youth, Mohammad Faiyaz, a person with ‘mental health issues’, was beaten to death by a Hindutva mob in Bihar’s Samastipur, it said.
“These horrible incidents, in which even the disabled are not spared, are the outcome of sustained venomous communal campaigns. It is incumbent that the state government cracks down against all those indulging in communal and hate propaganda. While some arrests have been made, the case should be taken to its logical conclusion and justice delivered,” the press release concluded.
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