The ‘lynched’ man for whom Harsh Mander’s ‘Karwan e Mohabbat’ did a spontaneous ‘fund collection’ comes back alive

Harsh Mander (Source: The HIndu)

A bizarre story has emerged from Bihar. Krishna Manjhi, previously believed to be murdered in a case of mob lynching, has returned from the dead. The Police say that his dead body was identified by his wife and father. Investigations are currently underway to discover the accurate identity of the murdered individual.

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Twenty-three people were even arrested for the murder of Krishna Manjhi. The wife claims that she was told by the Police that it was her husband and the Police had identified the person based on the clothes worn by the corpse. Meanwhile, Manjhi himself says that he had gone out of town to work but he wasn’t aware that he had been murdered in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Harsh Mander’s ‘Karwan e Mohabbat’ had used the ‘lynching’ to peddle the narrative of rising hate crimes in the country. The wife of the deceased, Rudhi Devi, is a poor woman and a mother of six. Mander wrote, “Everyone in the Karwan e Mohabbat delegation was badly shaken and moved by our encounter with Rudhi Devi, her children and her husband’s father. People who had joined the Karwan quietly made a spontaneous fund-collection of money we carried in our pockets, which they silently pressed this into Rudhi Devi’s hands. She did not resist. But we knew that this would only help the family survive through a few more weeks. What would happen after that?”

Read: Harsh Mander’s article shows how ‘seculars’ are the real bigots and believers of the 2-nation theory

He continued, “Two senior volunteers in the Karwan e Mohabbat – Anwar ul Haque who heads our work with homeless people, and Ibrahami, a retired IAS officer from Bihar – decided that they would do nothing until they were able to extract some promise from the state administration for action to sustain the survival with dignity of Rudhi Devi, her children and her father-in-law.”

Mander concluded with the following words, “But the whole day, I could not forget the faces of Rudhi Devi and her children, the faces which Gandhiji had advised us to recall in times of uncertainty and confusion. I thought also of the talisman which the Mahatma had given us in his last months among us before he fell to the forces of hate. It is evident that we, his people, have lost his talisman somewhere in the blinding glitter of our wealth and the heady intoxication of our hate. How many generations will pass, I wondered, before we find his talisman again?”

The only good thing that has emerged from the entire fracas, it appears, is that the poor family received some monetary assistance from Harsh Mander, hopefully.

OpIndia Staff: Staff reporter at OpIndia