The police have arrested 16 people including a Facebook instigator in connection with Friday night’s lynching of two adventurers by a mob at a village in central Assam’s Karbi Anglong district on suspicion that they were khupadhora or child-lifters.
The mob had bludgeoned Niloptal Das, a 29-year-old sound engineer and engineering dropout Abhijeet Nath, 30, to death at Panjuri Kacharigaon under Dokmoka police station. They had driven to the village, about 200 km east of Guwahati, in an SUV asking for directions to a waterfall.
Videos of their lynching, uploaded on social media, have triggered protests in Guwahati besides generating anger on the streets. Given a history of ethnic violence in the State, the BJP-led coalition government has advised restraint to ensure the incident does not lead to a communal backlash.
The village where the two non-tribal men were killed is dominated by the Karbi and Bodo tribal people.
“Apart from 15 villagers, we have arrested one Bhupendra Terang from Diphu (district headquarters) for propagating the child-lifter scare on Facebook,” Karbi Anglong Superintendent of Police GV Siva Prasad said.
“We are also holding meetings at various levels to ensure no one fans communal passion. Besides, we are asking a cross-section of communities to visit villages and educate people about potentially dangerous social media posts and forwards,” he said.
On Sunday, CM Sarbananda Sonowal held a meeting with Chief Secretary TY Das, Director General of Police Kuladhar Saikia and other top officers to assess the law and order situation triggered by rumours. “People found circulating rumours would be dealt with very firmly,” Mr. Sonowal said.
“Some mischievous elements are trying to create trouble through hate messages. We request request people to inform the police if they come across such messages,” Mr. Saikia said.
The police chief added that Additional DGP Mukesh Agarwal was monitoring the investigation while ADGP Harmeet Singh was tracking rumours of the khupadhora and ‘monkey-man’ kind on social media.
Music-mad campers
Sahil Abbas Khan, who studied audio engineering with Nilotpal at SAE Institute in Mumbai, recalled his friend as a great cook and a greater human being who would never even harm a fly. “He worked magic with mouth organs and percussion instruments,” Mr. Khan said.
Colleagues also remembered him as an incorrigible outdoors man, rushing off to the hills and jungles at the slightest of pretext.
Nilotpal’s Facebook page has photos of camping and biking in Europe and the Himalayan states in India. “This time, he had come home all the way from Goa on his (350cc) motorcycle. Nothing happened until he decided to explore his own State,” his brother Jyoti Prakash Das, unable to come to terms with the lynching, said.
More popular as Neel in the music circuit, Nilotpal had joined SAE Mumbai after attaining a commerce degree from Delhi University. He shifted to Goa where he was into disc-jockeying and participating in musical events such as the 2nd World Mouth Harp Festival in 2014.
Music and love for nature had brought Nilotpal and Abhijeet, a businessman, together. The two had planned to check out some remote areas of Assam to record sights and sounds after Nilotpal came home on vacation in mid-April.
“My son was fond of ornamental fish and dogs. Little did I know that he would pay with his life for his love for nature,” Abhijeet’s father Ajit Nath, a district agriculture officer posted in Morigaon district, said.
The two friends had left home early morning on that fateful day. Their destination was Kangthilangso, which boasts of a waterfall. They ran into a mob while asking for directions on the way back about 8 pm.
