Not in My Name: Thousands throng streets across country to protest lynching
Dear Ma, I am home. You wanted me to buy new clothes in Delhi, but fate has landed me in heaven, where you don’t have marauding mobs. I am home. Yours, Junaid.
There was not a dry eye at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar when 22 -year-old Mohammed Asaruddin read out from what he called his brother Junaid’s “letter to his mother from heaven”, at a citizens’ protest here today.
Asaruddin’s voice quivered as he read out the lines in Hindi from a makeshift dais, set against the backdrop of a “lynch map of India”, highlighting the places where people had been lynched in the country since 2015. The letter, he said, had been penned by a journalist friend.
“Even I was called a terrorist in college. This issue is of identity and we have reached a point where we have to conceal skull caps and other symbols that define Islam,” Asaruddin said.
Hundreds of people from Delhi joined the protest, called “Not in My Name”, held six days after the 17-year-old Junaid was killed by a mob on board a Mathura-bound train.
Simultaneous protests were held in several other cities, and are also slated to be held elsewhere in the world, the organisers said.
Among the protesters …read more