Two Kashmiri traders Bilal Wani (35) and Sabir Batt (36) were beaten up and forced to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘Pakistan Murdabad’ by a man in Hathikhana colony in Ranchi.
The traders, Bilal Wani and Sabir Batt, complained to the police about the attack, after which the accused person, Raj Kishore, was arrested.
As he and Batt were attending to a customer on Thursday, the accused person came to them and demanded that they shout “Jai Shri Ram” and “Pakistan Murdabad” if they wanted to stay in Ranchi. But the traders refused to comply.
“He [the accused person] started hitting us with his fist and leg while asking his brother for a gun to shoot me,” Wani told The Times of India.
The trader claimed that the man’s parents and cousins supported him instead of stopping him, The Telegraph reported.
Wani has been visiting Ranchi for the past 20 years to sell woolen clothes.
Meanwhile, the police said that Kishore is a drug addict. “He has been arrested,” Surindra Jha, Ranchi’s senior superintendent of police, told The Times of India. “The police are sensitive towards safety of all residents, including people visiting this place.”
Wani and some other Kashmiri traders had also been beaten up last week by a group of people who called them “anti-nationals” and demanded that they leave Ranchi, The Telegraph reported.
Ramesh Kumar Singh, who is in-charge of the Doranda police station, said they are looking into the case and no one will be allowed to take the law into their hands.