In The 'New India' No One Lynched Mohammad Akhlaq

Bisada village, and the BJP government of Uttar Pradesh, are determined to move on — not by healing, but by rewriting. A decade after a mob dragged Mohammad Akhlaq from his home and lynched him, the village on the outskirts of India’s national capital, looks freshly painted, newly prosperous, and oddly triumphant.

Sanjay Rana embodies this new mood. Short, round, and pot-bellied in his early fifties, he is a BJP worker in Bisada, barely fifty kilometres from Delhi. His eldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Vishal Rana, is one of the men accused of killing Akhlaq.

How a Rumor Became a Murder

On a September night in 2015, a rumor spread that Akhlaq, a Muslim ironsmith of the village, had slaughtered a cow. Most Hindus consider cow sacred. According to the police chargesheet, Vishal and nine other young men stormed his home, dragged him to the village square, and lynched him.

The murder led to global outrage. A nation went to shock. How could a rumor drive a mob into killing a human! The Samajwadi Party government arrested them and charged them with murder.

When Sanjay’s party, BJP took power in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, Vishal and the others were quickly out on bail.

But Sanjay’s greatest satisfaction came this August, when the Uttar Pradesh government decided to withdraw all charges — including murder — against his son and the other accused. It is the first such withdrawal in India’s history.

“The government took the decision for social cohesion and communal amity,” Sanjay told me, offering homemade sweets.

A Village That Rewrote a Lynching

Every accused in the village I spoke to insisted they were treated “unfairly” because they believed Akhlak had slaughtered a cow. A state-run lab declared the meat in his fridge to be beef — a finding the government cited while recommending withdrawal of the case.

The recommendation for the withdrawal of the charges came from Governor Anandiben Patel, a senior BJP leader who is also former BJP Chief Minister of Guajrat. She succeeded Modi as Gujarat chief minister in 2014, the year Modi became the Prime Minister.

The withdrawal aligns neatly with Adityanath’s long-standing view. For years, he argued that Akhlaq's family — not the mob — should be punished. Predictably, after becoming chief minister, his government filed a case of alleged cow slaughter against the dead man’s family under the UP Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act. The law mandates prison of ten years.

Most of the accused are still struggling financially. They were unemployed before the lynching and remain so — except Vishal, who now runs a canteen in a nearby factory.

Bisada has changed more in ten years than in the previous fifty. The mud huts have vanished, replaced by concrete houses. The once-broken road is now a gleaming concrete stretch. The highway-side dhaba is now a restaurant. Construction is everywhere. Motorcycles hum in and out of the village. Air-conditioners peep from newly built houses. Saffron flags flutter from rooftops.

It is as if growth reached Bisada not in spite of the lynching, but because of it.

It is tempting — and unsettling — to think the murder accelerated the village’s journey into “New India,” a phrase the villagers repeat with pride.

The place that symbolised India’s descent into communal brutality has recast itself as a success story. And the men once charged with murder have been welcomed back as if nothing happened at all.

Caste as the Invisible Hand

Inside the village high school stands a statue of a Rajput warrior, inaugurated by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh during his tenure as BJP state president decades ago. Locals say Singh visited multiple times.

The reason is not mysterious. Caste binds this triangle of power. Sanjay Rana, Adityanath, and Rajnath Singh are all Thakurs. Thakurs dominate the region and proudly claim descent from Maharana Pratap.

In Bisada, and also in Uttar Pradesh, caste and religion are not just part of identity. They are the defining features. It decides who speaks, who gets justice, whose grief matters, and whose doesn’t.

Opposite the school stands a dilapidated room — once Akhlaq's ironsmith workshop, where he fashioned tools for the Thakur households. Its broken doors and shattered windows are the only part of Bisada that has not been repaired.

The Village That Became “New India”

Cows sit beneath a neem tree as aircondition units are visible in the background. It is the visual grammar of “New India.” But development here is neither neutral nor universal.

It is development that distributes privilege along the lines of caste and religion, leaving the village’s Muslims in a pocket of visible vulnerability.

On the village’s far edge live Bisada’s remaining Muslims — barbers, washermen, carpenters. Their work is essential, their presence tolerated. They are lower caste Muslims. Generations ago they used to be lower caste Hindus. They converted to escape the caste-discrimination. They managed to change their religion but caste and vocation remained attached to their fate.

Rahimu, the village carpenter, first denied being Muslim when he saw my notebook, thinking he would have to talk to a journalist. Later, I saw him slip into the mosque beside his home. He is the muezzin.

When he emerged wearing a skullcap, I asked him why he had hidden his identity.

“What could I tell you? You know the reality.” he said quietly, with an expression which betrayed helplessness.

The House Bisada Cannot Absorb

As I walk away from Sanjay’s house, a narrow lane swallows the last of the afternoon light. Dust hangs like an old memory. And then Akhlak’s house appears — the same blue gate the whole country saw on breaking-news loops. Bleached, locked, and sealed.

The paint has peeled. The plaster has cracked. Weeds choke the narrow path leading to the threshold. The courtyard inside is empty, visible through rusting iron bars.

Around this abandoned house, ambition hums: new porches, new swagger, new money. But the house stands untouched — a quiet refusal in a village eager to forget. Some wounds do not fade. They settle into the landscape and wait.

Two kilometres away, in Dadri town, Akhlaq's younger brother Jan Mohammad speaks softly. A corner of his heart, he says, has gone empty since he heard the news of the charges being withdrawn. He feels a strange heartache which he can not bear.

His grief has no audience in the "new India", no political utility, and has no place in the story the village now tells about itself.

The majoritarian government has crafted a narrative in which no one lynched Mohammad Akhlaq. The courts may soon agree. The village already has. But the locked blue gate still stands — refusing to be repainted, resisting the village’s progress, holding a silence that growth cannot bury. It is the only part of Bisada still telling the truth.