A beggar has been brutally thrashed on the suspicion of child lifting in Durg, Chattisgarh on Friday. The video of a mob hitting the beggar as took the social media by storms, the local police intervened and lodged an FIR.
Thrashing of beggars on suspicion have become one of the most common instances of street violence in India. Revisiting a few instances will help to understand how the nameless beggars have been given new attributions.
A beggar has been brutally thrashed on the suspicion of child lifting in Durg, Chattisgarh on Friday. The video of a mob hitting the beggar as took the social media by storms, the local police intervened and lodged an FIR.
The recent incident happened just a few days after the local mob had beaten up two seers on the same suspicion of being child lifters, reported India Today. Local sources said in the recent times the instances of child lifting has increased in this region and so the suspicion.
After the video went viral, the Police arrested three people for thrashing the beggar and lodged FIR under sections 34 (criminal act by several people for a common intention), 294 (utters any obscene words), 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The beggar was rushed to hospital and was found to have sustained minor injuries. Later, he was taken away to a mental asylum so the authorities can take care of him.
While looking at the situation of our asylums, what life this beggar is going to get is anybody’s guess, one throwback to the last few months will give us ample incidents where the beggars were violated at the whims of the passer-by.
The Delhi HC though decriminalised begging in 2018, their mundane criminalisation across Indian streets is what write the scripts of their fate. Following are a very few instances where the name-less beggars even lose their only identity ‘beggar’ to be replaced by something more heinous in nature.
In August 2021, a video went viral showing a young boy accompanied by a man and a woman surrounded by a group of five men who were kicking the boy in the head and slapping the other while asking them to go to Pakistan for begging on the streets.
The video from Ajmer, Rajasthan of hitting the beggar family didn’t at all take the audience by surprise as during the Covid lockdown period, it was a common scenario in different regions of the country. When the media-driven shifting of responsibility for Covid spread on a Muslim congregation got mileage, such incident became an expected sight.
As the video took pace in social media, the police arrested the five people and told The Indian Express that the victims were probably from ‘Muslim’ community. The video of hitting the beggar family also showed how the men were accosting the beggar and forcing him to hand over his belongings. He was also asked to identify a song that was played on the accused’s phone.
While being asked about the reason for hitting the beggar family, the accused claimed they were criminals in disguise. Boiling the communal pot further, the then Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra said that the beggars were passing off as Hindu hiding their identity and had two Aadhar cards in possession.
If this doesn’t amount to a justification of the brutal act, what else can do remains a matter of contemplation. The attacks on the ‘nameless’ beggars become attacks on demonised Muslim bodies if found in the wrong time at the wrong side of the history.
This year in May at Guntur, Andhra Pradesh reports came out of a beggar being killed for refusing a packet of Idli.
As per the reports, the accused Mahesh, who was in an inebriated condition offered a packet of Idli to a beggar at Housing Board Colony in Ankireddypalem, Guntur.
Mahesh’s offer to give the packet of Idli came along with abuses and his comparison of the beggar with the dreaded Chaddi gang. The beggar got humiliated and refused the packet of Idli.
The beggar’s refusal was the last thing that the caste and class position of Mahesh could afford to tolerate. Losing his mind, Mahesh along with his two friends Anil and Satish took the beggar to a secluded place on a two-wheeler and thrashed him with sticks and stones.
The beggar, more precisely the refuser of Idli died with several injuries.
Within one month of the case of Idli refusal took up the streams, another violent incident of killing two beggars came from streets of Pune. This time it was an owner of Anda-bhurji (Scrambled Egg) cart.
The reports said that the cart owner didn’t want to see the beggars around his business area. As per the eyewitness, he first had hit them with bamboo sticks and when they couldn’t move and lied down on the street, he threw boiled water on them.
Both of the beggars though were rushed to hospital, one couldn’t survive the injuries. The police consequentially arrested the vendor and booked him under charge of murder and voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means (Section 302 and Section 326).
These are just the tip of the iceberg. If one looks deep, one can find the mundane involuntary ways to hurt the beggars, considered as the demons of the streets.
The unnamed beggar becomes child lifter, terrorist, or a mere arrogant person depending on social positions of the accoster. What the liberal views of the middle and upper middle class don’t permit one to look through is the embedded prejudice they carry every moment. Their believe in the words of Oliver Goldsmith that ‘Aspiring Beggary is wretchedness itself’ doesn’t let them see beyond the clauses of aspiration.
Nobody aspires to be a beggar, something untold drives them to be.