Man pushes Dalit employee into boiling oil

By IANS

Lucknow : A sweets shop owner pushed his Dalit employee into a large pot of boiling oil, resulting in his death, after the man refused to work for him in Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district.


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The employer, Anup Gupta, is absconding. The other employees reported the matter to the police after they noticed the body of Satvir Singh hanging out of the kadahi, the large pot used for frying, late Friday night in Bhartana town of Etawah.

Initially the police tried to hush up the matter as a case of accident. They tried to say that Singh was an epilepsy patient and had slipped into the boiling oil during an epileptic fit when he was he alone in the shop.

However, after the employees held angry protests and Gupta went into hiding, the truth behind the death became more apparent.

Singh’s post-mortem examination put the cause for death as more than 90 percent burns.

A case against Gupta was registered only after senior officials cracked the whip from Lucknow.

According to local news reports from Bhartana, Satvir Singh had not shown up for work for the last several days on account of illness, following which Gupta drove down to his house and demanded he return some payment that was made to him.

“He persuaded Satvir to join him at the shop, where the poor employee was beaten up and eventually thrown into a ‘kadhai’ with boiling hot oil,” an official for Bhartana said.

“We have directed the Bhartana police to register a case of murder against the employer, whom we were trying to track down,” principal home secretary J.N. Chamber told IANS.

“We have arrested Gupta’s key man Balbir, from whom the local police have got some important leads about his whereabouts. They should be able to get him soon,” he added.

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