Ahmedabad (Gujarat). In Gujarat’s Banaskantha district, a Dalit groom was stopped from sitting on a mare and his procession was pelted with stones. After this incident, the police have registered a case against 28 people including the sarpanch of a village. Officials said on Tuesday that one person was injured in stone pelting.
Deputy Superintendent of Police Kushal Ojha said that the incident took place on Monday in Mota village under Palanpur taluk of the district. A day later, a case under various sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was registered at Garh police station for unlawful assembly (IPC section 143), criminal intimidation (506).
Ojha said, “When the procession was passing through the village, some unidentified persons threw two to three stones, in which a relative of the groom was injured. We have registered an FIR and handed over the investigation of the matter to the Deputy Superintendent of Police of the SC/ST branch.”
He said that no one has been arrested so far. The FIR has been registered on the complaint of Veerabhai Sekhalia, who had fixed the marriage of his younger brother Atul with a girl from a nearby village on February 7. Police said quoting the complaint that when the village sarpanch Bharatsinh Rajput and some other eminent people of Mota came to know that Atul Sekhalia would sit on a mare in the marriage, they called the father of the groom and asked him to face the consequences for doing so.
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When the Sekhalia family did not agree, the sarpanch called a meeting of the villagers on Sunday. Sekhalia alleged in her complaint that at the meeting, Rajput and 27 others publicly told the groom’s family that people from the scheduled community could not sit on a mare at a wedding, as “this has been a tradition for centuries”.
According to the complaint, the Sekhalia family then sought police protection, but when the procession reached near a milk shop on Monday, some of the accused objected to the wedding processions wearing ‘safa’. Some of the accused made casteist remarks and unidentified people pelted stones. With the help of the policemen, the procession immediately left for the bride’s village and returned in the evening after the wedding. (agency)