Punjab: In the last 24 hours, Punjab has witnessed two lynching incidents over an alleged attempt to sacrilege, reports said on Sunday.
According to reports, a youth was beaten to death over an attempt to sacrilege in the Golden Temple, Amritsar, followed by the same incident in which another unidentified youth was lynched by the Sikh activists at Nizampur village in Kapurthala.
Reports said that this was the second incident in the state since Sunday over the suspicion of an alleged attempt of sacrilege in the presence of police.
One report suggested that the second man was beaten to death in Punjab today over an alleged instance of sacrilege, stoking tension in a state that has barely recovered from the shock of a similar incident in Amritsar’s Golden Temple less than 24 hours before.
Quoting the residents of Nijampur village in Kapurthala district, a report by NDTV said that they caught the man from a gurdwara early this morning.
They alleged that he was seen “disrespecting” the Nishan Sahib (the Sikh flag) around 4 am.
Though the police team reached the spot and took the man into custody, Sikh groups insisted that he must be questioned in front of them. The man was killed by the locals after a scuffle with the police, the report said.
Cellphone videos from the spot showed the man being beaten up with sticks. The police later took him to the hospital where he was declared dead.
In the Amritsar incident, according to the report, the closed-circuit television footage showed the man in his early 20s, who had a yellow cloth tied on his head, jumping over the golden railing into the enclosure where the Granth Sahib- which the Sikhs call their 11th Guru- is kept.
He is then seen picking up a golden sword kept there as the priests sitting at the spot rushed to overpower him. He was beaten to death.
On Wednesday last week, there was another incident in which a man had thrown a holy book ‘gutka sahib’ into the lake at the Golden temple.
Saturday’s incident at the Golden temple – considered the spiritual capital of the Sikhs- created tension in a state where sacrilege is a highly emotive issue. Ahead of next year’s elections, it has adopted political overtones, with the alleged failure of the state’s Congress government to address the last series of sacrileges.
“It is an attempt to weaken Punjab which is the sword arm of India. Some people have made it a political game over the last five years,” NDTV quoted Akali Dal MP Balwinder Bhunder as saying.
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