Junaid Khan and his brother had gotten into a scuffle with a braggadocio who asked them to vacate their seats for an old man. Such fights and bickering over 'space' are so commonplace on busy train routes that they have a distinct name - ‘seat par ladai' (a fight over seat-sharing). What ensued after this depends on who you ask.

While Hindi dailies described the trigger for the violence as a scuffle over seat-sharing, English daily Hindustan Times put out a report that cited the reason for the scuffle was because Junaid Khan was “carrying beef”. Curiously, the report had no mention of 'beef' at all and instead, quoted an unnamed police officer as saying "...they had an argument over meat with a group of co-passengers, which took an ugly turn and they were attacked with knife".

So, here’s what happened. Some trigger-happy local reporter decided to imagine the fight wasn’t over seat but meat. The copy went to desk for cleaning and editing where the person in-charge decided to spice things up a notch and put “beef” in the headline when the copy only mentioned meat.

The HT modified its earlier report in a few hours, with new byline and content while the slug mentioning 'beef' remained. The revised report blamed "an argument over a seat turned into religious slurs" for the ensuing violence. But the media held on to the 'beef' bit. Follow-up reports by news channels continued with the 'beef' narrative despite initial eye-witnesses offering nothing to support the claim. The police even held a press conference to share their finding that Junaid was not killed for carrying beef but their version was ignored. No amount of clarification would do. The damage had been done.

It was cue for the secular-left outrage brigade (SLOBs) to pounce upon this terrible tragedy and to milk it till the cows come home. They did it to perfection. First came the communists, then joined the politicians, followed by professional activists and so on. Thus began a vilification campaign. Those who usually recoil at the idea of identifying themselves as Hindus readily joined the campaign denouncing the murder, apparently committed for the cause of Hindutva.