Kalyan, Maharashtra: A 72-year-old Muslim man, taunted and battered by young Hindu men who found him with meat on a train, said he was never previously afraid of carrying meat, as many Muslims now are, because his family had never faced Islamophobia coming as they did from a village where Hindus and Muslims were friends, their lives interlaced.

Ten days after the attack, a viral video which sparked national outrage, Ashraf Ali Sayyed Hussain, a soft-spoken tin manufacturer, looked gaunt, traumatised and tired and weighed his words carefully in an interview with Article 14, as he lay on a bed in his daughter’s house in Kalyan district, two hours from Mumbai. 

Breathless and in pain from internal injuries from kicks and blows from the young men, some of whom were en route to a police recruitment test, Hussain propped himself up on an elbow and did not refer to the rash of attacks on Muslims over the last decade.

“I want justice for the injustice that has happened to me,” he told Article 14. “The culprits should be punished so that people think 10 times before doing something like this again. I have full faith in the country’s legal system.”

When we asked them many times how Hussain was unafraid of carrying meat on a train after 10 years of lynchings and violent attacks on Muslims in public places, Hussain and his family said bonhomie between Hindus and Muslims in their village, Chalis gaon, in the northern Maharashtra district of Jalgaon, was their lived reality.

In the village, they said, Hindus celebrate a “thanksgiving” festival called Pola, when bulls and oxen are given a rest day, dressed up, feted, and prayed to. The procession ends at a Muslim dargah, where the animals are blessed. 

As he pulled out a video of the celebration, Ashfaq Syed Ali Hussain, Hussain’s 34-year-old son, said, “This day, the bull is given respect for all the other days it is put to work.” 

Ashfaq Hussain spoke of his friend Sumit Sharma, whom he had known since they were children and whose mother, he said, loved him like a son. They celebrated festivals together. 

“We know things have changed, but not in our village,” he said. “We keep watching something or the other that keeps coming on the news, but we ignore it.”

That is why, said Ashraf Hussain, he did not think twice about boarding the train with buffalo meat.

Teach Respect For Elders

For Ashraf Hussain, “justice” meant one more thing. 

“These boys must have parents at home. Parents must teach their children to respect elders whether they are Hindu or Muslim,” he said. “That is the only way to ensure that nothing like this will happen again.” 

We met Ashraf  Hussain the day after he was discharged from the Sion Hospital in Mumbai, where he spent four days in the intensive care unit. 

He was unable to see properly because he had been punched in the right eye. 

As he lay on the bed, Ashraf  Hussain said that he was worn out, not just by his injuries but also by a flood of journalists and politicians for whom he had told and retold how the mob falsely accused him of carrying beef when he was carrying buffalo meat, which is legal in Maharashtra, and beat him while abusing him and the women in his family. 

“I know the people who came for the sake of humanity because of the terrible thing that happened to chacha, to an old man,” he said. “But I have never faced so many public or political people.”

‘I Don’t Think I Will Travel By Train Again’

Mobs of Hindu men attacking Muslims have become routine since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014 and continue even after the Hindu nationalist party had a setback in the general election, winning by far fewer numbers and losing ground in the critical state of Uttar Pradesh, where anti-Muslim atrocities have been particularly evident. 

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an Islamophobic speech during the campaign, of which he later contested the meaning,  the result suggested that Hindu voters were tiring of the BJP’s agenda of humiliating and oppressing India’s largest religious minority and were more concerned about the unemployment crisis upending young lives. 

Ashraf Hussain was set upon by the young men aboard the Dhule-Mumbai CSMT Express on 28 August 2024 by the mob of young men. 

A day earlier, on 27 August, a Muslim man, a migrant worker from West Bengal, was lynched in Haryana on suspicion of consuming beef. 

Instead of registering a case themselves, the Maharashtra police downplayed the ferocity of the attack and turned Ashraf Hussain away, when he reached the railway police station in Thane with the two containers of meat. 

But then a video of the attack in Maharashtra, which was shot and shared by the offenders—evidence of the audacity with which Hindu mobs behave—went viral.

While attacks on Muslims are routine and hardly reported by the pro-establishment media, this video of young men beating an old man and using indecent and misogynistic expletives, which some found hard to watch, triggered outrage. 

Now compelled to act, the Maharashtra police registered a first information report (FIR) but invoked minor sections of the new criminal code—intentional insult, criminal intimidation, mischief, rioting, unlawful assembly, wrongful restraint, and voluntarily causing hurt—for which the first three men who were arrested got bail immediately. 

More outrage followed, and the police invoked two more sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita—dacoity and wounding religious feelings. 

The bail for the first three men was cancelled, but they have not been re-arrested. A fourth man was arrested on 4 September and a fifth on 6 September. 

The video, however, shows at least 15-20 men in their twenties and thirties surrounding Hussain. 

Saif Alam, Ashraf Hussain’s lawyer, who practises in the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court, said that if the police did not add sections relating to attempt to murder and mob lynching, he would move a petition in the Bombay High Court. 

“The initial FIR was absolute garbage. There is gross negligence and bias towards offenders, which is seen in this case,” said Alam. “The case does not deserve to stay with the railway police station, Thane. An offence of such magnitude should be moved to the crime branch in Mumbai.”

‘I Will Not Take The Train Again’

In the interviews he has given since the attack, Ashraf Hussain has spoken matter-of-factly and earnestly recounting what had occurred, but he has said little about his feelings. 

He spoke in a measured tone, weighing his words, vigilant that nothing he said was critical of the government or could be misconstrued as “political,” which could hurt him, his family, and his case. 

Ashraf Hussain said little about the Islamophobia of the past 10 years and the many hate crimes that had preceded the one that he survived. 

His only seemingly veiled rebuke was when he said he would not take the train again. 

“I’m not so aware of what is happening in the world because I travel out rarely,” said Ashraf Hussain. “But I don't think I will travel by train again. I don’t think I want to leave the house again.”

When we asked him if he would feel safe travelling with someone, he said, “No, I don’t think so.”

A young male member of his family added, “I don’t think any of us will travel in a train again.”

Another young man said, “We will always be scared. We’ll always have to keep a lookout, scanning the area for danger, as women do now.”

His mother was numb after seeing the video, Ashraf Hussain said.

“She has not been able to speak for many days,” he said. “Even now, it is too painful to watch, to think about. We are all traumatised.”  

No Fear Carrying Meat

The lynching and violent attacks over eating and storing beef and transporting cattle over the past 10 years have caused many Muslims to change how they dress and what they eat in public.

Some studiously avoid carrying meat on the train. 

But Hussain, who makes galvanised tin boxes to store and transport rice, had no such fear when he boarded the train on the morning of 28 August. 

“I didn’t think I was doing anything working. I was 1 kg, well packed,” he said. “It was for my daughter and my grandchildren.”

Hussain traced his family history in the villages of the northern districts of Jalgaon and Dhule to 1894. 

A close-knit family, Hussain has two sons with university degrees, but they chose village life and working with their father instead of moving to the city. 

They used to make lanterns. Now, they make galvanised tin containers. But with the demand for these containers going down, Ashfaq Hussain said they were planning to switch to making almirahs. 

‘I Clung To The Rails’

The viral video clip was just two or three minutes of the attack, which Ashraf Hussain said lasted about 15 minutes. 

Even before the violence, Ashraf Hussain said, the Hindu men had been staring at him menacingly; with his kufi cap and white beard, he was identifiably Muslim. 

The trouble began after a verbal spat about space to sit. Ashraf Hussain was old and tired and had been standing for a while. The men had also spotted his containers of meat. 

When he tried getting off at his stop in Kalyan, Ashraf Hussain said the men stopped him and asked him what he was carrying. 

“From Kalyan to Thane, they just kept beating and abusing me,” he said. “They showed me a knife and said if you tell the police, we will kill you.”

Since the train mostly emptied at Kalyan, Hussain said there were few people left to call out to, and his attackers briefly covered his mouth when they stopped him from leaving. 

And even if he had called for help, Ashraf Hussain, who is soft-spoken, said no one would have heard him because the men had encircled him, and his voice would not have reached anyone over the sound of the train. 

Ashraf Hussain said he kept telling them it was buffalo meat, but they kept accusing him of carrying the meat of say a bull or cow.

Ashraf Hussain said he did not have the words to describe what was going through his mind, but the worst moment came when they dragged him to the door of the train and tried throwing him out. 

“I clung to the handle to save myself,” he said. “I don’t know how I survived it. After the first punch,  I could not think, speak, or see anything clearly. I just wanted to come out of it alive.”

‘No Food Politics’

Fahad Ahmed, a 40-year-old activist in Kalyan, said while these incidents were not commonplace, the cruelty and intensity of this attack had shaken people. 

Calling it “food politics”, Ahmed recalled the lynching of ironsmith Mohammad Akhlaq in September 2015—a year after the BJP came to power, during which Hindu extremist groups came to the fore and an intense campaign of anti-Muslim radicalisation was underway.

Ahmed said he was thrown out of the WhatsApp group of his school alumni because he protested the attack on Akhlaq in Bisada village in western Uttar Pradesh. 

More than traumatised, Ahmed said he was “annoyed” by the attack on Ashraf Hussain. 

“What is this going on?” he said. 

Ahmed said it was common for Muslims in northern Maharashtra to eat buffalo, more common than in Mumbai, where they ate chicken and fish because, away from the pollution and plastic the animals consumed closer to the city, the meat was of a better quality in the countryside.

“So many people’s livelihood depends on this,” he said. “It is also a source of protein for poor people.” 

‘Shame’ & ‘Peace’

Ashraf Hussain threw the meat he was bringing for his daughter and grandchildren in a creek while making his way from the railway police station in Thane to her house in Kalyan. He did not tell anyone in his family what happened, telling them he had fallen from the train. 

“He is a kind-hearted man, and he did not want his family to suffer like he had,” said his son, Ashfaq Hussain. “I also think he didn’t know what to say to us. He felt some shame in saying that a bunch of young men had beaten him up.”

The Hussain family found out when the video went viral. 

Hussain said all he wanted was to recover from his injuries, go back to his village, and spend his time offering namaz at the mosque close to his house. 

“I want some peace,” he said. 

(Betwa Sharma is the managing editor of Article 14.)

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