An injured Muntazir.
Uttar Pradesh: A Muslim young man was allegedly assaulted by an inebriated group while travelling in a train from Meerut to Deoband.
Muntazir, a madrasa student, was heading towards Darul Uloom Deoband, a famous school for Islamic studies in Uttar Pradesh.
Narrating the incident, he said that he boarded the train from Meerut and was sitting unbothered in his seat. “Some men were consuming alcohol and offered me some. I ignored them and changed my seat,” the young man said.
Muntazir said the men kept offering him drinks. Vexed, he shifted to the adjacent coach. “After a few stations, they came looking for me and started abusing me. I tried to leave the seat again, and they started hitting me,” he said.
He was forced to get down at Khatauli station. His phone and cash were allegedly stolen.
In April this year, a 30-year-old cleric, Maulana Tousif Raza Mazhari, was killed after he was allegedly beaten and thrown off a moving train near the Bareilly Railway Station in Uttar Pradesh. He was an imam and a madrasa teacher in Siwan, Bihar, and had gone to Bareilly to attend a death anniversary celebration, or ‘Urs’, of Tajusharia.
His wife, Tabassum Khatoon, said he called her on a video call, looking scared. “They were calling him a thief and accusing him of stealing. He tried to show them his books and bag on a video call and said, ‘I am not a thief; I teach at a madrasa’. I also shouted on the call, asking people to help him, but no one listened,” she said.
This post was last modified on August 23, 2026 4:21 pm