Before Akhlaq, There Was Mohsin Shaikh: A Journalist's Case Against India's Silence on Lynching

Before Akhlaq, there was Mohsin Shaikh

Every account of mob lynching in Narendra Modi's India begins, almost by reflex, with Mohammad Akhlaq — beaten to death by a mob outside Delhi in Dadri in September 2015 over rumours of beef in his refrigerator. Journalist Dayashankar Mishra's self-published book, titled simply "Akhlaq," insists the timeline is wrong. The first person lynched after Modi's government took office, he told Nous Podcast, was Mohsin Shaikh, a young computer engineer in Pune who was stoned to death barely a week after the prime minister's swearing-in in 2014. Shaikh had stepped out of a mosque to collect his lunch when a mob, primed by a hate speech circulating that day that he had no connection to, beat him for wearing a Pathani suit and a white skullcap. His father died of a heart attack still waiting for justice; the family, Mishra said, has never received it.

Mishra spent nearly two decades in mainstream journalism — at NDTV, Zee News and, most recently, Network18 — before what he describes as a forced exit following an earlier book he wrote on Rahul Gandhi. Neither that book nor "Akhlaq" found a publisher willing to print them; he brought out "Akhlaq" himself, distributing it through a WhatsApp number rather than bookstores, after what he says was a wall of refusals from India's major publishing houses.

A definition of lynching that goes beyond the mob

The book's central intervention is definitional. Mishra argues that Indian public discourse has never properly defined mob lynching, and that the narrow definition — a crowd killing a lone individual — lets the state off the hook. His own definition is deliberately expansive: a bulldozer demolishing a home overnight, a Muslim professional pushed out of a job, an equal opportunity quietly denied — all of it, he argues, belongs under the same heading, because all of it flows from the same source. "Mob lynching is a purely political tool," he said, "one that helps you gain and hold power." He rejects the framing, used by ministers after Akhlaq's killing, that such deaths are unfortunate accidents or the spontaneous fury of an angry crowd. Anger, he says, has to be manufactured, and someone is doing the manufacturing.

Hate speech is the fuel

Mishra's central metaphor is fuel: if lynching is the fire, hate speech is what feeds it. He traces a shift in the register of ruling-party campaigns — from the "development" plank of 2014, already fading by 2019, to speeches by 2024 that routinely folded in some version of hate rhetoric against Muslims. The mechanism, he argues, is reward: a low-level party functionary who spends two minutes attacking Muslims advances faster than one who spends twenty years on constituency work, because television and social media amplify the former and ignore the latter. He points to a chain of examples — a Delhi minister's public call to "shoot the traitors," a West Bengal opposition leader's suggestion that Muslims be given "Gaza-like treatment" before going on to become chief minister — arguing that no institution, court or press has treated these as disqualifying.

Hate speech, in his account, does not stay local. It "travels" — through WhatsApp forwards and clipped videos — reaching a neighbourhood long before the person it targets even knows a rumour exists. Mohsin Shaikh, he said, had no idea any hate speech had circulated that day; by the time he left the mosque, it had already reached the men waiting for him.

The case Uttar Pradesh wants withdrawn

Mishra explains the book's title by pointing to something narrower and, he argues, unprecedented: in November 2025, the Uttar Pradesh government filed a petition in the trial court asking that all murder charges against Akhlaq's killers be withdrawn. A local judge, Saurabh Dwivedi, rejected the plea, though Mishra notes it could resurface once the state moves closer to elections. He calls it the first instance in which a state government has moved, openly and through the courts, to abandon the prosecution of a man's killers rather than merely fail to secure a conviction. "This nation is not for everyone," he said of what the petition signalled. "This nation is not Akhlaq's."

He describes travelling to Akhlaq's village in Dadri a decade after the killing, and finding the family home — cracked plaster, still visibly decayed — standing out against neighbouring houses that have all been renovated. A colleague travelling with him asked to remove the press sticker from their car before entering the village, telling Mishra that a press sticker, once a mark of safety for a journalist in India, was no longer one there. Elders in the village, when asked what went wrong, told him there was nothing to discuss; women told him it was "a matter of religion." Men out on bail for the killing, he said, show no remorse and have faced no social cost — no boycotts, no called-off marriages, nothing resembling the collective consequence a genuinely wounded community might impose.

Killed by childhood friends: the story of Nurul Shikalgar

The book's most wrenching case study, Mishra said, comes from Pusesawali, a village in Satara district, Maharashtra, where Nurul Shikalgar — a Muslim who served as president of the local Ganesh festival committee, a detail Mishra dwells on as evidence of genuine, unforced coexistence — was beaten to death on 10 September 2023. His killers, according to the case now in court, were three of his closest childhood friends: Rahul, Chinmay and Pankaj. Nurul's wife Ayesha, pregnant at the time, told Mishra how one of the three had once driven the wedding car for their marriage when Nurul's own hadn't arrived in time, and how Nurul would open his friend's shop at 2 a.m. to satisfy her pregnancy cravings.

That closeness dissolved, Mishra said, after months of rising hate speech in Maharashtra through 2021–23 and a wave of provocative religious processions linked to hardline Hindu outfits through the area, including one on the day Nurul died. When a procession passed through a tense, mixed neighbourhood and clashes broke out, Nurul — trying to protect visiting members of a religious gathering from harm, worried it would tarnish his village's name — was told by the crowd to step aside. He didn't recognise the danger even as his own friends approached; he assumed, until the end, that they were "his own people." Ayesha learned only the next day, from relatives, that the men who killed her husband were the same three friends he had trusted completely. None of the three has expressed remorse, Mishra said; the case remains in court.

When the doctor is the mob: the Udgir case

A second case, from Udgir in Maharashtra during the brutal second wave of Covid-19 in April 2021, unsettled Mishra more than any other in the book, he said. Dayem Azimuddin Gaisuddin's wife was critically ill on 14 litres of oxygen; the treating doctor, also infected with Covid himself, was on the phone with a senior colleague — coincidentally sharing the same first name — arranging supplies. The senior doctor, on hearing there were no beds or oxygen cylinders left, told his colleague, on a call Dayem overheard on speaker, to let the Muslim patient die, adding a slur about "sympathy for Muslims." Mishra records Dayem's account of the moment almost breaking down describing it. The episode, Mishra argues, complicates the standard picture of lynching as a street phenomenon carried out by an inflamed crowd: here the mob's logic had lodged itself inside a hospital, inside a profession whose entire purpose is the opposite of what it produced that night. He recounts a separate conversation with a doctor in Delhi who admitted he still avoids a particular Muslim-majority lane out of an inherited, unexamined caution passed down from his father and grandfather — a lynching of the mind, in Mishra's phrase, that never needs a crowd to gather at all.

Cinema's villains and the manufacture of an enemy

Mishra draws a historical parallel to the American Jim Crow era, when travelling minstrel performances built and normalised caricatures of Black Americans decades before the Ku Klux Klan's violence peaked — arguing that culture manufactures the permission structures that later violence merely acts on. He applies the same logic to Hindi cinema, noting how consistently the on-screen villain in recent big-budget films carries a Muslim name, while intelligence and espionage cases exposed in real life — DRDO leaks, RAW moles, honey-trap scandals — disproportionately involve upper-caste Hindu surnames that never make it to the screen. He cites Naseeruddin Shah's later public regret over "A Wednesday," a film in which every terrorist character is written as Muslim, as evidence that even acclaimed actors have, in his view, failed to interrogate scripts they helped make iconic.

A judiciary that has stopped insisting

Turning to the courts, Mishra points to the Supreme Court's 2018 guidelines on lynching, which allowed contempt proceedings against state governments that failed to implement anti-lynching safeguards. In 2026, he said, the Court dismissed a fresh contempt petition seeking to enforce those very guidelines, warning that pursuing it risked "anarchy" — a ruling only one major newspaper, The Hindu, criticised in print as a capitulation to majoritarian politics. He links this to the prolonged incarceration of activist Umar Khalid, held without trial for years on sedition-adjacent charges while other, more prominent political figures moved in and out of jail on bail; he argues Khalid's real offence, in the state's eyes, is that his speeches invoke the Constitution, Nehru, Ambedkar and Gandhi with a fluency that undercuts caricatures of Muslim politics his prosecutors need to sustain.

Remorse, and its absence

The book's account of the 1999 killing of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, burned alive in their car outside a church in Odisha, offers Mishra a rare counterpoint. Of the men convicted, one — Chinmay Hansda, a minor at the time — later converted to Christianity and told Mishra, through a translator, that he now lives with lasting remorse for having been drawn, as a child, into a mob controlled by the main convict, Dara Singh. Mishra contrasts this with the total absence of remorse he found among those out on bail in the Akhlaq case and the Shikalgar case, arguing the difference is instructive: without social or legal consequence, there is no mechanism by which perpetrators are made to reckon with what they did.

A collective responsibility, not a Muslim problem

Mishra is candid that the book asks a question he cannot fully answer: what should Muslims themselves do in this environment. His clearer argument is aimed elsewhere — at opposition politicians, including Rahul Gandhi, whom he credits with real ideological courage on other fronts but faults for stopping short of naming mob lynching as a central, sustained campaign issue. Silence, he notes, hasn't even been politically rewarded: opposition parties that avoid the subject have not thereby won elections. His closing argument is that lynching is not a Muslim problem to be managed but a collective one, since the same machinery that targets Muslims today has, in Odisha and elsewhere, already turned on Christians, and could turn on anyone the state finds it useful to make an example of next. Documentation, he insists, remains the single largest gap — no reliable national count exists of how many people have been killed this way since 2014, in large part, he argues, because the government has never allowed the National Crime Records Bureau to define or record lynching as a distinct category in the first place.