Two Monks Mistaken for Thieves

During India's 2020 coronavirus lockdown, a WhatsApp rumor warned that child-kidnappers and organ thieves were prowling the villages of Palghar. On the night of April 16, a mob acting on that fear beat two Hindu monks and their driver to death.

The three men were passing through Gadchinchale, a village in the Palghar district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when a crowd stopped their vehicle late on April 16, 2020. Within hours, two monks and the driver taking them to a funeral were dead, beaten by villagers who believed they had caught a gang of thieves. The killings, reconstructed in reporting by the fact-checking outlet BOOM and the news site Newslaundry, became one of India's most closely examined cases of a rumor spread by messaging apps ending in fatal violence.

A funeral trip that ended at a roadblock

The two monks were members of the Juna Akhara, a Hindu monastic order. They and their driver were travelling to attend the funeral of a religious leader when villagers, on watch for outsiders during the nationwide lockdown, blocked the road, according to accounts compiled by Wikipedia from contemporaneous reporting. The strangers arriving after dark were taken for the thieves the villagers had been warned about.

The rumor that primed the mob

In the days before the killing, messages had circulated on WhatsApp and by word of mouth warning that gangs were entering villages to abduct children and, in some versions, harvest their organs, Newslaundry reported. A widely forwarded Marathi message shared with BOOM claimed the supposed intruders “are tall and well built” and “enter homes at night from windows and kidnap young children and also teenage boys and girls,” according to BOOM, which traced the rumor's spread. Newslaundry cited a near-identical message posted by a group member it named as Kamlesh Katela, who wrote that the thieves “peep through the windows of houses and barge in if they see small children or teenagers.” A police officer from the Kasa station told BOOM that “digital literacy is inadequate in Gadchinchale village and its adjoining areas” and that talk of villages “looted by migrant thieves” had “been doing the rounds since the lockdown was announced.”

Police present, but overwhelmed

Officers who reached the scene were unable to stop the crowd and were themselves attacked; several policemen were injured, according to the record of the case. In the days that followed, Maharashtra police arrested about 110 villagers in connection with the killings, including nine juveniles, BOOM and Newslaundry reported.

An official points to social media

As attempts were made to give the killings a religious framing, the state's home minister, Anil Deshmukh, said the attackers and their victims were of the same faith and released the names of those arrested, noting there was “no Muslim in the list.” The Palghar lynching, he said, was “a grotesque incident which happened due to rumours on social media about child kidnappers & thieves prowling in the area,” a statement carried by Indian outlets including Mumbai Live. Researchers who study such incidents note that India has recorded a series of mob killings set off by false abduction warnings shared on messaging apps, in which a single unverified message reaching a fearful audience can turn strangers into suspects.