No poll buzz here as parties go mum on lynching

Sulaiman, 62, was still mourning his son Akbar Khan, allegedly lynched by a mob on the suspicion of cow-smuggling last year, when he lost his two grandchildren (Akbar’s son and daughter) in a car accident two months ago.

Political parties are busy touring the countryside with promises of good governance, but the family says nobody has bothered to visit Kolgaon, a village surrounded by Aravalli Hills in Mewat on the Rajasthan-Haryana border — also the hometown of Akbar Khan, the 31-year-old who was lynched by a mob in Alwar’s Ramgarh on July 20, 2018.

“In a year, I witnessed three deaths in the family. First, I lost my son. Two months ago, I lost two grandchildren. I don’t know why, but God has been unkind to us,” sighs Sulaiman, the sole breadwinner of the family.

Akbar’s wife Asmeena was on her way to drop two of their seven children at a madrasa in Aligarh when the car driver and two kids died in an accident. Asmeena escaped with fractures in the rib and is presently bedridden at her mother’s place in a nearby village. In her absence, elder daughter Sahila now takes care of her four siblings. She also tends the cattle — cows and four goats — the sole belongings of Akbar.

Amid the political hustle and bustle in Alwar, which is going to polls on May 6, and Gurgaon in Haryana which votes on May 12, Kolgaon looks like an island away from the bugle of democracy, with no sight of any politician.

“In the last year, no leader has bothered to visit us. Except for the media, no one ever came,” Sulaiman says. In Kolgaon, where Meo Muslims live amicably with Dalits, the key issues are education, health service, clean drinking water and sanitation.

It’s a similar scene in Nuh, the hometown of Pehlu Khan, another dairy farmer who was beaten to death by a mob of cow vigilantes in Alwar on April 1, 2017. No politician has ventured this side, too. It has been two years and Pehlu’s family says it is losing sight of justice, his son Irshad, who is also an eyewitness to the incident, told DH,

“Police are yet to make an arrest. No politician, be it from the Congress or the BJP, has ever visited us.” According to the 2011 census, Mewat, at 54%, has one of the lowest literacy rates in the region.

Both Nuh and Kolgaon villages fall in Gurgaon Lok Sabha constituency. The BJP has fielded its sitting MP Rao Inderjit Singh.

The others in the fray are Ajay Singh Yadav (Congress), Mahmood Khan (JJP) and Virender Rana (INLD). None of them has visited the villages of the victims of the alleged lynchings.

In Alwar, where three lynchings took place during the BJP rule in Rajasthan, the poll candidates have made no mention of lynchings in their speeches. BJP’s Mahant Balaknath, a priest, is taking on Congress’ Jitendra Singh, former union minister and erstwhile royal.