BELIEF IN THE EXTREME

THE NIA INVESTIGATION INTO THE BRUTAL UDAIPUR MURDER SUGGESTS THAT THE ACCUSED MAY HAVE BEEN RADICALISED AND RECRUITED BY ISLAMIST EXTREMISTS FROM ACROSS THE BORDER

- Rohit Parihar

As the National Investigative Agency (NIA) gets custody of the accused in two murder cases being linked to the Nupur Sharma incident—the brutal killing of a tailor in Udaipur in Rajasthan on June 28 and the earlier murder of a pharmacist in Amravati in Maharashtra—it faces significant challenges. The main task for the investigators is to discover whether any more related attacks have been planned. “We know that handlers in Pakistan of the two accused in the Kanhaiya Lal Teli murder in Udaipur did instigate them to do something big,” says a senior officer, adding that it was too early to attribute any cross-border connection to Umesh Kolhe’s killing in Amravati. What worries anti-terrorism agencies in India is whether external forces are plotting a new form of terror, getting extremist Islamists to target those guilty of ‘blasphemy’.

A week after two middle-aged Muslims killed a Hindu tailor in the walled city of Udaipur, recording the crime on videos that inevitably went viral, curfew has been relaxed and the city is returning to normal. The internet ban imposed in most parts of the state has also been lifted (Rajasthan ranks second after Jammu and Kashmir in disrupting web services to maintain law and order). The NIA court in Jaipur sent the two main accused to 10-day police remand on July 2; the central agency has also taken more suspects into custody including those alleged to have been in the know about the plot. Across the state, the police has been booking and arresting people from both communities for circulating videos of Sharma or the murder to instigate violence. Describing the killers, Gaus Mohammad and Mohammad Riyaz, an officer who interrogated the two told India today: “They had no remorse whatsoever for their actions.”