President Mukherjee condemns lynching, calls on India to 'pause, reflect'

Condemning the recent string of brutal lynching incidents emerging from across the nation, President Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday called on the country to pause and reflect if they are being proactive enough to save India’s basic system of belief.

“With the change of history we can see colonialism now as dominance, exploitation by one power to another power. When we see on the TV and read the newspapers that an individual has been lynched, and when the mob frenzy becomes so high and uncontrollable then we have to pause and reflect,” the President said at the re-launch of the National Herald website.

“I am not talking of vigilantism, I am talking of are we vigilant enough proactively to save the basic tenets of our country?” he questioned.

The President’s assertion comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday strongly voiced out against the lynching incidents, saying that there are growing atrocities against innocent people in the guise of cow protection.

“Killing people in the name of Gau Bhakti is not acceptable. This is not something that Mahatma Gandhi would have approved. There is no place for violence in the society,” Prime Minister Modi said at Sabarmati Ashram centenary celebrations in Ahmedabad.

The PM asserted that violence is not a solution of any problem and no one has the right to take the law in his or her own hands in this nation.

However, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s condemnation of violent cow vigilantism is “too little, too late”.

Rahul said that words mean nothing when actions out do them.

Just hours after Prime Minster Modi condemned the killings in the name of cow protection, a Jharkhand man was attacked by a mob on the suspicion carrying beef in his car on Thursday.

He was stopped by a group of people near Bajartand village before being brutally killed.

The van was later set on fire.

A case has been registered on the basis of a video footage of the lynching.

Image: People protest against the recent cases of mob lynching of Muslims who were accused of possessing beef, in New Delhi. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/Reuters