Miscreants barge inside the workplace of a Dalit woman, rip apart her kurta, declare their intention of making her a Muslim. When her husband intervenes, he is dragged to the street and brutally beaten with iron rods and abused with casteist slurs.

His sister and brother try to intervene but also get beaten up. When the husband becomes unconscious, the miscreants flee.

What is the crime of the victims? Simply that they are Dalits, who dared to run a computer coaching centre in a “Muslim area”.

This unnerving incident from Uttar Pradesh’s Amethi district was reported by this correspondent two weeks ago. More details have emerged since, and they make the picture look even more grim.

When the victims approached the police, the latter chose to side with the accused. While the police did register a case against the attackers, the charges were intentionally kept weak. Half of the accused were never arrested. The victims now remain vulnerable to further assaults.

No less than the chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) has accused the Amethi police of diluting the case and assisting the perpetrators in obtaining a stay on their arrest.

Watch the videos of the assault in this thread: