Singhu lynching: Police get custody of three more Nihangs for six days

A court in Haryana remanded three more accused in the Singhu lynching case to police custody. Narayan Singh, Bhagwant Singh and Govind Preet Singh, all members of the Sikhs’ Nihang order, were produced before the Sonipat Court which sent them to six-day police custody, news agency ANI reported. A fourth Nihang, Sarvjit Singh, had already been sent to seven-day police custody following his arrest on Saturday regarding the lynching of Lakhbir Singh at the farmers protest site in Singhu near the Delhi-Haryana border the previous day.

Lakhbir, 35, was found tied to an overturned police barricade on Friday morning. Videos posted to social media showed a group of Nihangs standing besides Lakhbir’s mutilated body. The arrested Nihangs have told media they feel no remorse for the murder and claimed Lakhbir was punished for allegedly desecrating a holy book of Sikhism. Lakhbir’s family and some residents of his ancestral village Cheema Khurd in Punjab’s Taran Taran district have refuted the Nihangs’ claims.

Farmers have been camped in Singhu for over 10 months as part of an agitation demanding rollback of the three contentious farm laws passed by the Centre. The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), which is spearheading the farmers’ protests across the nation, has distanced itself from the incident.

“The Morcha is against sacrilege of any religious text or symbol, but that does not give anyone the right to take the law into their own hands,” the SKM said in a statement on Saturday. The farmers’ body demanded punishment against the culprits.

On Saturday, around 15 Dalit outfits submitted a memorandum to the National Commission for Scheduled Caste demanding action against the culprits.

The Nihangs were in news April this year when they attacked cops in Punjab’s Patiala district during a COVID-19 curfew, severing the hand of an assistant sub-inspector who tried to stop them at a checkpoint.