Docuseries: Their son was lynched for being Muslim in India
NEW DELHI— Two days before the Eid festival in June 2017, 16-year-old Junaid Khan was on a Delhi-bound train, returning home after a shopping trip with his brothers. They were playing Ludo, a dice-and-race board game popular in India, when a group of men asked them to vacate their seats. When the siblings resisted, an argument ensued.
The men called Junaid and his brothers “beef-eaters” (cows are considered holy by many Hindus) and “anti-national” – slurs often hurled by Hindu nationalists. The men threw away the boys’ skull caps, stabbed Junaid multiple times and threw him out of the train. Junaid died before he could be taken to a hospital. His brothers were also hurt but survived.
In the police complaint, officers chose not to include the sections of the penal code that relate to murder or attempt to murder. As a result, all the accused are out on bail. Junaid’s family hopes for justice: for the accused to stand trial and receive jail sentences and for the main accused to be hanged.
The incident did lead to an online protest, called #NotInMyName, but such hate crimes persist.
Between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 36 Muslims were lynched in India, according to Human Rights Watch, which also counted over 100 different incidents of violence related to “cow protection” across the country’s 20 states. Out of 287 hate crimes reported from January 2009 to April 30, 2019, in India, 262 took place since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won the national election in 2014 and Muslims were the victims in 62% of the cases, according to the Hate Crime Watch.
India is home to more than 200 million Muslims – the world’s third largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan – accounting for about 14% of the country’s population. Junaid was studying to become an imam.
In this first episode of “The Dinner Table,” an observational docuseries produced in partnership with India-based Newsreel Asia, host Harshita Rathore visited Junaid’s parents and siblings, the Khans, in northern Haryana, about 40 miles east of India’s capital, Delhi. As Rathore will do in each episode, she cooked a meal with the family and sat down to have supper with them while the crew filmed all the unscripted, heart-to-heart conversations that took place.
The upcoming episodes of “The Dinner Table” will feature India’s other persecuted communities to explore what identity-based discrimination and violence does to the minds and hearts of members of a community.