The Indian home ministry said that it has set up a committee to tackle the issue of lynching and, based on its recommendations, criminal laws will be amended.
“We are working to bring changes in CrPC (Code of Criminal Procedure) and IPC (Indian Penal Code). The central government has already written to state governments and Union Territories. We have also formed a committee to look into changes required in CrPC and IPC. Once the suggestions come in, we will look into it to make the changes,” Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said in Parliament on Wednesday.
Over the last five years, India has seen a rise in reports of mob lynching, particularly in the name of cow slaughtering. Many of them have drawn mass protests, social media outrage, hashtags and even a response from the government.
However, when the data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2017 was released earlier this year, information on mob lynching was redacted.
The Indian ministry of home affairs explained the reasons behind the government not mentioning mob lynching deaths in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, saying that data on such deaths were collected but were found to be “unreliable and prone to misinterpretation”.
Among many incidents of mob lynching was that of a physically challenged man, who was killed in an Indian village on suspicion of slaughtering a cow.
