The Gujarat Police have said a 17-year-old Dalit, who claimed he was attacked on October 3 by bike-borne miscreants for sporting a moustache, had staged the act to gain media attention.
Digant Maheria had claimed that two miscreants on a bike stabbed him for sporting a moustache in the Limbodara village in Gujarat's Gandhinagar district when he was returning from school after finishing his examination.
The police now say the youth has confessed he staged the attack "because he wanted media attention" and the two miscreants who attacked him were his school friends.
The boy's parents have said they feared their son was attacked because he was with his cousin Piyush Parmer. They had claimed they were attacked by upper caste Rajput men for sporting a moustache.
The attack on Digant came soon after a youth was mudered for a similar reason in the same district in Gujarat. Protesting against the murder of the youth, several Dalit men from other villages kept a WhatsApp display picture which showed a twirled-up moustache with a crown and "Mr Dalit" written below it.
During a social media campaign, Dalit men had also posted photographs of themselves twirling their moustaches. The protests reached state capital Gandhinagar after the apparent blade attack on Digant made headlines.
"We had registered a complaint and began an investigation. Our suspicion grew when the forensic team visited the spot where the boy claimed to have been stabbed," police officer Virendra Yadav was quoted by NDTV as saying.
"The team didn't find any blood marks. Neither did we, on examination of the boys clothes, find them soiled, despite the attack allegedly having taken place in a muddy patch," he added.
It was then that the boy was taken in for questioning, and admitted that he had staged the entire incident.
Gujarat has not had a good track record of treatment of Dalits in recent times. A Dalit man from the Anand district was on Sunday, October 7, killed allegedly by upper-caste Patel men who had objected to him watching Garba outside a temple.
One of the most serious protests in Gujarat was triggered in July last year when four Dalit men in Una were tied to a car and beaten with a whip for allegedly killing a cow. It was later revealed that they were just removing the carcass of the cow, which had died of natural causes.
However, the Una flogging showed got the state's Dalit people — who account for 7 percent of the electorate of Gujarat — all up in arms against the ruling BJP government.
Meanwhile, when BJP president Amit Shah was visiting Ahmedabad last month, he had said Gujarat was one of those states where Dalit atrocities were minimum.
