Dimapur lynching: Students, shop managers, teachers were part 'core mob', say cops

After four more people were arrested for the lynching of a rape accused in Dimapur district in Nagaland, the police have identified some of the people arrested for the incident, and it turns out the mob that first paraded a man naked and then beat him to death includes teachers and college students.

A study of the profiles of the 43 men arrested by the Nagaland police revealed that an airline staffer, two teachers, a man discharged from the Assam Rifles and several students were part of the mob which lynched Syed Sharif Khan, according to The Indian Express .

Police also identified 25 of the men as part of the ‘core mob’.

These 25 include two BA students, a B.Com graduate and an IT student. Others include an autorickshaw driver, a manager employed at a retail shop, and a person studying to be a Hindi teacher.

The report also quoted police officials as saying that the lynching, which had started as a march to condemn the rape, slowly turned into a ‘motivated political’ event and disturbing visuals on two blogs, Naga Blog and Naga Spear, were among the factors that contributed to it

The role of the CRPF personnel, who were guarding the three gates of the Dimapur jail where Khan had been locked up, is also being questioned, according to The Times of India . The home commissioner of Nagaland blamed the police force and district administration for the incident.

The report also said that after a meeting of the leaders of the Naga Students’ Federation (NSF) on 4 March, eye-witnesses said that “the students marched to the Dimapur Municipal Council and demanded the authorities cancel the trade licences of non-Naga traders. By 2 pm, the crowd had swelled to a huge mob and then it was uncontrollable.”

The parochial nature of the Dimapur lynching had also been described in Sandip Roy’s article , in which he wrote that the Dimapur lynching was never about justice.

_“Rape is a crime about power more than a crime about sex. And when an outsider commits it against a woman of another community, it is in effect the “emasculation” of that community. The community stands exposed as not being able to have protected the honour of its women and children or so it thinks,"_he noted.

The newest twist to the Dimapur lynching case came with the Nagaland government conveyed to the Centre on Thursday that Syed Sarif Khan did not rape the girl who accused him of assaulting her, adding that they had consensual sex twice.

In a report to the Home Ministry, the state government said Khan had given a statement to police after his arrest on 24 February in which he had said that he had paid Rs 5,000 to the alleged rape victim after they had sex twice.

According to the report, Khan had also told police that the girl went with him on her free will and had demanded more money from him after the sexual encounters which he had refused. An FIR of rape was filed soon after.

“It appears on the basis of Khan’s confession, that it was not rape but consensual sex,” a Home Ministry official quoted the Nagaland government report as stating.

(With inputs from PTI)