A youth has been lynched to death for alleged ‘blasphemy’ on the second consecutive day in Punjab. After the murder at Golden Temple, Amritsar on Saturday evening, a similar incident in a Kapurthala gurudwara the very next day has claimed another life.

As per reports, a thief snuck into the Gurdwara Nijampur Mod on the Kapurthala-Subhanpur road in the small hours of Sunday morning, probably to steal the jacket worn by the sevadars (servers) of the gurudwara.

But the Gurudwara manager Amarjit Singh alleged that the man was trying to remove the Nishan Sahib, a Sikh religious flag – the same one that was hoisted at Red Fort during the tractor rally by lumpen elements.

An incensed mob soon gathered, whipped up by loudspeaker announcements from the Gurudwara asking people to take law into their own hands as “Punjab Police and state government are equally responsible for the sacrilege cases.”

A live video of the captured man being held in a room was also posted by Amarjit Singh on Facebook. In it he can be heard saying, “…he has been kept here and we have beaten him up. He is saying that he had come from Delhi and earlier his sister was killed for committing sacrilege. He could be part of a gang that has come to commit sacrilege in villages and cities of Punjab, like the incident at Darbar Sahib (the Golden Temple) yesterday.”  

Singh asked all Sikh bodies to reach the gurdwara, so that “appropriate action can be taken against him according to panthic traditions….We should give him religious punishment on our own, because if we hand him over to the administration, they will not do anything — only declare him mentally upset”.

By this time, police too arrived, but they were not allowed to take the man away. The crowd — led by Sikh organisations, including the gurdwara staff — refused and demanded that the captured man be punished by them. The deceased man is yet to be identified.

There seems to be a growing support for instant death penalty to anyone accused of ‘blasphemy’ in Punjab. Three Nihang Sikhs who were arrested for the brutal mutilation-murder of Lakhbir Singh at the Singhu protest site had been garlanded and felicitated in different gurudwaras for their crime.

Some netizens called out the hypocrisy of our left-liberal media and secular state institutions, in their muted reactions to these horrific murders in Punjab versus the hue and cry and community shaming of Hindus over a suspected Muslim juvenile thief being slapped in a Ghaziabad temple located in a Muslim-dominated area – the said temple had witnessed multiple incidents of thefts, desecration, harassment of female devotees, and murder of priests.

But many propagandists were seen justifying these brutal ‘blasphemy/sacrilege’ murders by saying “justice has been served” and laying the blame on Government of India (not Punjab government, mind you) for “deliberate inaction on sacrilege cases”

Most of these accounts, which are either justifying the murder or stressing on the ‘sacrilege’ allegation while airbrushing the mob lynching, were also seen spreading propaganda against the government during the one-year long protest against the much-needed farm reforms.

Another propagandist, Radio Mirchi RJ Sayema, said “Nothing can EVER justify lynching” before slyly blaming “trust deficit in justice system”.

But this benefit of doubt is never extended to Hindus when they resort to self-defense while protecting their villages from the deadly cow smuggler mafia. Cattle smugglers being let off easily by our broken criminal justice system has become the norm, forcing villagers to self-organize.

Hindus are demonized as ‘intolerant’ for merely demanding legal action against comics like Munawar Faruqui who committed sacrilege against Hindu deities and sacred texts, or teachers like Sadaf Jahan who threw the holy Bhagavad Gita into the dustbin and abused Hindu devi-devatas.

The hypocrisy and double standards could not be any starker.