Lucknow: Four persons have been arrested for assaulting a Bhagwat Katha narrator in Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district.
A Brahmin community in Dandarpura village subjected Mukut Mani Singh Yadav, a kathavachak (holy text narrator) to horrific assaults and humiliation after inviting him to present a recital, Siasat Daily reported
Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was to perform a recital from June 21 to 27 when the community members on the first day, discovering him as a Dalit, questioned his intensions and assaulted.
Yadav was thrashed, tonsured, his clothes torn and was humiliatingly forced to rub his nose on a woman’s foot.
Denigrating him as a “false Pandit”, they forced him to touch the feet of local village elders and broke his harmonium, his only source of livelihood.
The footage of the incident went viral causing widespread outrage with Yadav himself later narrating the ordeal.
‘They asked me, ‘how dare you come into a village of Brahmins, posing as a pandit while being a Chamaar?’ They cut off all my hair and brought the urine of a village elder’s wife to throw on me,’ he was quoted as saying.
Yadav’s companion, Shyam Kethariya, who was also subjected to similar torture and humiliation, said: ‘They cut off our hair, and then chanted slogans of ‘Jai Bajrangbali’’.
The state’s Opposition leaders including Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav called out the heinous attack while accusing Adityanath government of Dalit atrocities.
Azad Samaj Party President and Nagina MP, Chandrashekhar Azad, said that assault is ‘not only a shameful act of casteist terrorism but also a direct attack on the self-respect, Constitution, and humanity of the Bahujan community. This cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.’