01, Nov 2015

Kavita Upadhyay
Birloka (Rajasthan), November 1, 2015
Routine disposal of cow carcasses by municipality contractor led to rumours
A tin-shed that lies tumbled over the sand in village Birloka marks the spot where 60-year-old Abdul Ghaffar Qureshi was lynched by a mob on May 30 this year. Once a meat shop, the shed was ruined, Ghaffar was beaten up and his house destroyed, on the pretext that he might, in future, sell beef at his shop.
Four months before the Dadri lynching, in the Rajasthan village of Birloka, 350 km from Jaipur, an angry mob allegedly beat Ghaffar with sticks and iron rods till a family in the neighbourhood tore through the mob to save him. Ghaffar died the following day.
Thirty-five years ago Ghaffar had entered Birloka in Nagaur district’s Khinwsar tehsil as a young man from another village of Amarpura 200 km away to earn a living as a meat seller. “Few years ago Ghaffar’s meat shop was objected to by a family from another community that resided opposite his shop,” Haider (name changed), a resident of Birloka, told The Hindu.
The series of events that led to Ghaffar’s lynching began on May 30 in Kumhari village, also in Nagaur district, where carcasses of about 200 cows were strewn across a field after a municipality contractor had rented the field to dispose of a cattle carcass, as a routine municipal exercise.