The four persons convicted of lynching Haryana’s dairy farmer Rakbar Khan in Rajasthan’s Alwar district in 2018 did not intend to cause his death, though they had thrashed him brutally with lathis and sticks on the suspicion of smuggling of cows, the sessions court in Alwar has held. The court sentenced the convicts to seven years’ imprisonment on Thursday.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Sunil Kumar Goyal convicted the four persons — all residents of Lalawandi village — for “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” under Section 304 and wrongful restraint under Section 341 (wrongful restraint) of the Indian Penal Code. The court found that all the 13 injuries caused on the victim’s body were the result of collective beating by the convicts, but there was no injury on any of his sensitive organs.
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In its 92-page judgment, the court made a distinction between the application of Sections 304 and 302 (murder) to the lynching case, while holding that when the convicts thrashed Khan, they had neither an intention to kill him nor did they know that the injuries inflicted on the victim were sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death.
The judge held Paramjeet Singh, Dharmendra Yadav, Naresh Sharma and Vijay Kumar guilty under Section 304 and absolved them of the charges under Section 302 as well as Sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 149 (unlawful assembly). The fifth accused, Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Nawal Kishore, was acquitted because of lack of “clinching evidence” to connect him with the crime.
Khan, 31, and his friend Aslam were herding two cows on foot through the forest area near Lalawandi to their native village Kolgaon in Haryana, when a group of villagers stopped and attacked them around midnight on July 20, 2018. While Aslam managed to escape, Khan sustained severe injuries and died on the way to hospital. The lynching in the course of cow vigilantism had led to nationwide outrage.
‘Apparently overenthusiastic’
“The evidence [produced in the court] makes it clear that the four convicts did not know Khan before, neither did they have any enmity with him. Being associated with a cow vigilante group, they were apparently overenthusiastic. They took the law into their own hands and thrashed Khan while trying to stop smuggling of cows,” the judgment stated.
The court said if the convicts really intended to murder Khan, they could have done it on the spot. “On the contrary, they informed co-accused Nawal Kishore and helped the police officials in carrying him to their vehicle, removing mud from his body, changing his clothes and taking him from the police station to the hospital,” the court said, while reaching the conclusion that they did not want to kill him.
While acquitting Nawal Kishore in the case, the judge said though he was in touch with the convicts on his mobile phone, the prosecution could not prove his presence at the scene of crime and his complicity in the offence beyond reasonable doubt. Giving him the benefit of doubt, the court said merely being a member of an organisation or head of a ‘gaushala’ could not render him guilty of lynching.
The court observed that the convicts had taken the law into their own hands in the garb of religious faith, but no religion allowed spreading of hatred and violence. “In a secular country like India, such illegal acts deal a severe blow to the spirit of the Constitution. Adopting leniency in such cases will send across an adverse message to the society,” the judgment said.
The judge said the victim, who had several minor children, had died an untimely death. The ends of justice would meet if an appropriate sentence was handed down to the convicts, he added. In addition to seven years’ sentence and the fine of ₹10,000 each under Section 304, the convicts were also awarded one-month imprisonment and ₹500 fine under Section 341.
