Film Maker Anand Patwardhan Calls ‘Akhlaq’ a Must-Read in Hard-Hitting Foreword on Mob Lynching

Noted filmmaker Anand Patwardhan has written the foreword for Dayashankar Mishra’s book Akhlaq: Bharat Mein Mob Lynching Ki Vistrit Zameeni Padtaal (Akhlaq: Mob Lynching in India – Citizens Testimonies and Ground Investigation). In it, Patwardhan describes the 256-page work as “very close to my heart” and calls it a meticulously documented examination of lynching as an identity-based majoritarian attack on minorities including Muslims, Dalits and Christians.

Patwardhan opens by recalling the killing of Mohsin Shaikh, a young computer technician, near Pune on 2 June 2014, one week after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. A mob, allegedly incited by Dhananjay Desai of the Hindu Rashtra Sena after a speech claiming Muslims had insulted Shivaji, attacked Shaikh with hockey sticks and rocks simply for looking and dressing like a Muslim. Patwardhan met and interviewed Mohsin’s father, Mohammed Sadiq Shaikh, in Mumbai while the family pursued legal justice. Sadiq Shaikh opposed any violent retaliation by his community, warning it would only claim more innocent lives. Four years later, with the case unresolved and the accused on bail or acquitted, Sadiq Shaikh died of a heart attack. Patwardhan notes that Mohsin became the first Muslim lynched to death under the Modi government.

He then turns to the September 2015 killing of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri, on the outskirts of Delhi. Akhlaq was beaten to death and his son Danish left in a coma over allegations of cow slaughter and beef consumption. Patwardhan visited the Air Force colony in New Delhi where the surviving family had been given shelter. Akhlaq’s elder son Sartaj told him of his father’s pride on joining the Air Force and said that, despite everything, he remained proud to be an Indian. The filmmaker also travelled to Dadri and spoke to Hindu neighbours who attested to decades-long close ties with the Muslim family and to Akhlaq’s character. The rumour of cow killing had been announced at 10 pm by a temple priest who later disappeared; a mob assembled rapidly.

Patwardhan filmed the aftermath of both cases. The material later formed chapters in his four-hour documentary Vivek/Reason, which began as an investigation into the murders of rationalists Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Comrade Govind Pansare before expanding to examine the wider rise of majoritarian hatred. He acknowledges that constraints of time and the film’s broader focus on the “murder of rationality” prevented him from fully addressing these two lynchings or the many others that followed, or those that had occurred earlier.

Mishra’s book, he writes, fills that gap. It presents case studies from multiple states, analyses the pattern of lynching, and draws historical parallels with the lynching of Black people in the United States. From this emerges an understanding of lynching not only as a heinous crime in itself but as a direct assault on the body of any multi-cultural democracy.

“But as it is,” Patwardhan concludes, “the book is already a must read.”