New Delhi: A man belonging to a lower caste was beaten to death by a mob on the suspicion of stealing a cow in a case of caste violence in Bihar.
The victim, identified as Bharat Dom, was lynched on Tuesday in Chhapra town, 60 kilometres north-west of the state capital, Patna.
Police said a mob caught the man, who was in his mid-40s, on suspicion of having stolen the cow from the house of an upper-caste man.
'He was beaten to death with bricks and bamboo sticks,' a police officer said. A murder case has been registered, but arrests have yet to be made.
The incident comes a day after an elderly man was lynched in the same state when he intervened to save his grandson in a dispute over a love affair.
Over the past few months, more than a dozen cases of vigilante justice and mob lynchings have been reported in Bihar, which is India's poorest and most lawless state. Atrocities against low castes, also known as Dalits, are also common in the state
In September, 10 men from a Dalit community were beaten to death on the suspicion that they were thieves. Later, an inquiry found the men were innocent.
In August, a policeman in Bihar drowned two low-caste girls by throwing them in a river for stealing firewood from his orchard.
Although caste-based discrimination is banned, upper-caste Hindus still practice all forms of discrimination, including not allowing the low caste to worship at temples and insisting that they drink from separate village wells.
The most menial jobs, including the cleaning of sewers, often manually, are also largely done by Dalit community members, who comprise about 160 million of India's 1.2 billion people.
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