Assam Muslim beaten for selling ‘beef’ has one regret — he won’t be able to vote

The mob had questioned Shaukat Ali's nationality and asked him if his name appears in the NRC. It does.

Shaukat Ali | Twitter

Guwahati: Three days after he was brutally assaulted by a mob that suspected him of selling beef, 50-year-old Shaukat Ali continues to remain shaken but says his regret now is that he won’t be able to cast his vote “for the first time ever” in the Lok Sabha elections beginning Thursday.

“I find it too painful and difficult to talk about what happened that day. I have lived here since I was a child, never thought this could happen,” Ali told ThePrint over the phone from the Biswanath Civil Hospital where he has been receiving treatment.

On Sunday, a mob assaulted Ali in Assam’s Biswanath Chariali and forced him to eat pork, alleging he was selling beef. The mob also questioned his nationality and asked if he was a Bangladeshi and whether his name had appeared in the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

A video clip of the incident has since gone viral and the main accused has been arrested.

Ali’s name does appear in the NRC that is currently being updated in the state to identify those who immigrated “illegally” from Bangladesh after March 1971. The 50-year-old runs a small food stall in the town.

‘Don’t know who they were’

Despite the physical and emotional trauma, Ali says his big regret currently is that he will not be able to vote Thursday, 11 April, which is when his Lok Sabha constituency, Tezpur, goes to the polls.

“As a voter, it is my right to vote. I have never missed casting my vote,” Ali said. “I feel very bad I won’t be able to do so this time because of this. This will be the first time ever.”

Ali will soon be shifted to the Guwahati Medical College hospital for treatment as advised by doctors. He, however, says this is not something he was in favour of since he wanted to make an attempt to go and vote but was convinced by his family to get treated in Guwahati.

“I don’t know who those people were. I don’t know where they have come from,” Ali said.

He, however, dismisses shifting elsewhere because of what happened.

“Why should we go from here? There is no question of that,” he says.

The grave faultlines

The NRC, combined with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s dogged push for the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill has altered identity faultlines in the state, moving away from ethnicity to religion.

While the ethnic Assamese have always been opposed to ‘outsiders’, which even led to the six-year Assam agitation from 1979 to 1985, the opposition has been religion-agnostic. With the Citizenship Bill becoming a major issue when the NRC is simultaneously being updated, religion has been brought into the equation.

The mob attack on Ali over beef — in a state where eating meat of any kind has never been a divisive issue enough to lead to such violence — is reflective of that very shift. At a time when the state is set to vote in the big general election, the socio-political polarisation of the state could impact the outcome in Assam.