Blaming sustained venomous communal campaigns for the murder, the National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled demands justice for Mohammad Zahiruddin
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — The National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD) has strongly condemned the recent killing of Mohammad Zahiruddin in Bihar’s Saran district.
Zahiruddin, 55, was a driver and a person with a disability. A mob of cow vigilantes belonging to Hindutva chauvinist organisations lynched him while he was repairing his truck after it broke down in the middle of the road.
Zahiruddin, the NPRD claimed, 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,” a press release issued here on Saturday said.
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 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.
