The Mamata Banerjee government will offer a job to the wife of Sabir Mallik, a migrant worker allegedly lynched in Haryana by members of a cow vigilante group on August 27.
“Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has announced that a government job will be provided to a family member of the victim. The state government has promised to stand by the bereaved family,” said Samirul Islam, the chairperson of the West Bengal Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board.
According to a source, the government has requested Sabir’s wife, Sakila Sardar, to accept the job offer. Sabir, 25, leaves behind a two-year-old daughter.
Samirul met with Sabir’s family members at their village in Basanti, South 24-Parganas, on Sunday.
“We want the BJP-ruled state to ensure strict punishment for the members of the Gau-Raksha Vahini who brutally lynched a poor migrant worker from our state under suspicion of being a Bangladeshi,” he added.
Sabir, a migrant worker from Bengal who gathered scrap materials for a living in Haryana, was lynched on August 27 by the alleged cow vigilante group, which had, according to sources close to him, previously threatened him for possessing meat.
A family member recounted that on August 27, two youths came to their house in Haryana and asked Sabir to accompany them to buy scrap.
“He went missing that afternoon itself. The police contacted me the next day to inform me that his body had been found in a remote area within the jurisdiction of Badhra police station. Later, we learned that Sabir was one of three people lynched by the cow vigilante group,” said a relative of the deceased youth.
Several cow vigilante groups are highly active in BJP-ruled states such as Haryana and Odisha, Trinamool leaders have said.
Recently, several complaints came from Odisha, where hundreds of migrant workers from Bengal were allegedly tortured by people who accused them of being Bangladeshis. Mamata spoke with her Odisha counterpart, Mohan Charan Majhi, on August 11, urging him to probe the alleged incidents of violence against workers from her state.
