The Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, has been given the responsibility to head the Group of Ministers (GoM) that was formed last year to counter an increased number of mob lynching cases in India. According to a senior government official, the committee will not be reconstituted once again and will keep on functioning it has been until now.
As per reports, the members of GoM are external affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, Law Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, and social justice and empowerment minister Thawar Chand Gehlot.
On Friday, the Supreme Court of India handed a notice to the centre and ten state governments and draw their response regarding allegations of non-implementation of directives issued by them last year.
In September 2018, a high-level committee headed by Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba presented its report to the GoM. The report contained measures to reduce the magnitude of mob lynchings in the country. According to it, the insertion of clauses in the IPC and CrPC via parliamentary approvals will help in strengthening the laws. Following this report submitted to the centre, government held a sequence of meetings with various social media platforms. Reports suggest that the centre asked these platforms to take necessary steps to curb the content that causes rumors and instigate the lynchings.
In June last year, around 20 people were lynched because of false rumors of child kidnapping gangs that got spread on social media platforms like WhatsApp.
In the last few months, incidents of Muslim men being assaulted by the mob and forced to say ‘Jai Shree Ram’ has surfaced in the public. The most recent news regarding this topic is the lynching of Tabrez Ansari, 24-year-old man who was beaten to death after he was forced to chant ‘Jai Shree Ram’ and ‘Jai Hanuman’.
In the wake of this, several celebrities wrote an open letter to PM Narendra Modi to take actions in order to stop such heinous crimes.
