A Delhi journalist has written a first–person account for Scroll.in, a news and opinions website, alleging that on 4 October, some members of the Delhi police threatened to cut him into pieces if he interacted with anyone protesting the beef ban. His requests to call his family and his lawyer were both rudely denied, he writes.
“The law can protect criminals but it won’t protect sinners like you,” a constable said to him, he writes.
The same policemen allegedly detained Mayank Jain, the journalist, for seven hours, despite him telling them he was a journalist and that he was merely going to cover an event called the ‘Beefy Party’ by those protesting the recent lynching of a Muslim man in UP’s Dadri district for allegedly having consumed beef. Police tore up his business card saying it was “all fake media”, Mayank writes.
Also detained along with Mayank was Gaurav Jain, the organiser of the ‘Beefy Party’ protest. Gaurav had urged protestors to ‘BYOB’ – ‘Bring Your Own Beef’ – and eat it at a “Beefy Picnic” on Ashoka Road.
The fact that their surnames were Jain, enraged the policemen even more, Mayank writes. “Today’s kids are throwing Hinduism into a gutter,” he quotes the policeman as saying. “Is this what your parents teach you? That you go out and eat beef?” the policemen is said to have asked.
Mayank’s bag and phone had been checked thoroughly – for beef and for texts showing he was ‘the one’, respectively, as he exited the Patel Chowk metro station not long before his detention. The real ‘one’ they were looking for, was the protest’s organizer, Gaurav, who later told Mayank that the security check at the metro station couldn’t find the beef he was carrying, because it was hidden deep inside his bag.
“Almost seven hours after being detained, there had been no written complaint, no First Information Report, no paperwork of any sort that could prove that we had actually been detained. When we asked why we had been taken in, we were told that we had “offended the feelings of a lot of people” for which we would be “punished”, Mayank writes. He was then let go.