In her early seventies, Meena Devi heaved a sigh of relief after a special NIA court pronounced the death sentence for Atif Muzaffar and Mohammed Faisal. The two men, allegedly linked to the Islamic State terror group, killed Devi’s husband and retired school principal Ramesh Babu Shukla for sporting a ‘tilak’ and a ‘kalava’ (sacred thread) while he was on his way home in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur district.
Devi, who couldn’t control her emotions as the death sentence was pronounced, said her seven-year-long battle for justice has finally ended. “I can die peacefully now,” she said.
While pronouncing the sentence, the court observed that “the motive of this murder was to spread terror among non-Muslims”.
The incident was reported in October 2016 near Jajmau Chowki, Kanpur under Chakeri Police Station when Babu, a Hindi-Sanskrit teacher at Swami Atmaprakash Bahmchari Junior High School, was returning home on his bicycle.
Akshay Shukla, the eldest of Babu’s children, remembers like it was yesterday. “I was attending a lecture in the college when I received my mother’s call who broke the news that left us all shattered. ‘Baba is no more, he was shot dead’.”
“We kept the police asking why he was killed, but they had no answer to our query. It was tough to understand why anybody would kill my simple living father, who was a retired school principal and was a teacher of Hindi and Sanskrit in a school,” said Shukla.
The family got an answer seven months later when the Kanpur Police clinched a major breakthrough and arrested one of the murderers who allegedly confessed to killing Ramesh Babu for sporting the ‘tilak’ and ‘Kalava’.
Kaushal Kishore Sharma, NIA special public prosecutor, said: “Ramesh Babu was targeted for his religious identity. The fact has come to light during investigation that the assailants who were inspired by ISIS ideology killed the retired principal after seeing Kalava on his hand and tilak on his forehead”.
Mohammed Saifullah, who was the third accused in the case, died in an exchange of fire with the UP Anti-Terrorist Squad on March 7, 2017.
NIA prosecutor Sharma further said that the convicts had revealed in the interrogation that they wanted to detonate a bomb at Lucknow’s Ramleela Ground during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit in 2016.
After the convicts were sentenced to death, Meena Devi said: “I can die peacefully now. I still can’t understand that my husband was killed just for a Kalava or tilak,” she added.
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