Mangaluru: Moral police strips youth, ties to a pole and assaults in public for being with a girl

 

Mangaluru, 25 Aug 2015:  Suspected members of a Hindutva vigilante group stripped a youth, identified as Shakeer, tied him to an electric pole and assaulted him in full public view at Babugudde near Attavar in the city of Mangalore on Monday evening. 

 

The notorious right wing moral police struck again in the Mangalore region of coastal Karnataka on Monday by attacking a Muslim youth for being in the company of a Hindu girl who was a colleague at his work place. Suspected members of a Hindutva vigilante group stripped a youth, identified as Shakeer, tied him to an electric pole and assaulted him in full public view at Babugudde near Attavar in the city of Mangalore on Monday evening. The Muslim youth who worked at an Easyday Supermarket in the city had offered a Hindu colleague a ride in his car when he was targeted by the vigilante group.

 

 

“We have arrested 13 people in connection with the incident. Some of the arrested men belong to the Bajrang Dal. We are investigating if the incident was motivated by the Bajrang Dal,’’ the commissioner of police in Mangalore S Murugan said. The incident is the latest among hundreds of moral policing cases reported from the coastal Karnataka region in the last decade since the political rise of the Hindu right wing in the region.

 

Most of the incidents involve vagrant youths loosely affiliated with the youth units of right wing outfits. As many as 12 moral policing incidents have been reported this year while there were 39 reported in 2014 and 45 in 2013 in the region according to statistics maintained by the Karnataka Forum for Communal Harmony an organization working to highlight incidents of communal intolerance in the coastal Karnataka region.