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Jun 21, 2022 · And it was released in India at an especially perilous time. Communal violence directed at India’s Muslim minority has risen steeply in recent years.
- Isaac Chotiner
May 2, 2024 · This summer, Johar’s film “Kill” will be released domestically by Lionsgate in cinemas on the July 4 weekend, and is set to be released July 5 in India.
- Jazz Tangcay
Mar 3, 2017 · Don't Kill It: Directed by Mike Mendez. With Dolph Lundgren, Kristina Klebe, Tony Bentley, James Chalke. An ancient demon terrorizes a tiny Mississippi town.
- (4.9K)
- Mike Mendez
- Not Rated
- Action, Horror
By what name was Don't Kill It (2016) officially released in India in English?
- Overview
- ‘They don’t have a right to live’
- A neighborhood under watch and on alert
- ‘Religion is bigger than humanity’
UDAIPUR, India — For 20-year-old Yash Teli, memory is a curse. When he closes his eyes, he can see his father’s bloodied body lying in the street, his throat slit.
Sitting in a room full of mourners on a recent afternoon in Udaipur, India, next to a large photograph of his father that was draped with a garland of roses, he was reminded of the blood.
“I don’t want to remember him like that,” he said as his mother’s wails could be heard from another room. “How will I ever sleep now?”
Udaipur, a city of about 600,000 in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, has been a tinderbox since the gruesome slaying last month of Yash’s father, Kanhaiya Lal Teli, a Hindu tailor. In a video posted online by his attackers, identified by police as two local Muslims, the elder Teli can be seen in his shop measuring a man who then attacks him with a cleaver, joined by the man filming. They later accused the tailor of insulting Islam.
The killing shocked people across India, a majority-Hindu country of 1.4 billion, where religious violence is more often aimed at Muslims amid rising discrimination experts say is fueled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Shamseer Ibrahim, a 36-year-old Muslim activist, said that state endorsement of anti-Muslim violence was damaging the democratic and secular values of India, whose long history of interreligious co-existence has been punctuated by bloody outbreaks of strife.
Yash was in the Udaipur market the evening of June 28 when he got a phone call from his cousin: “They have done it. They killed him.”
India, a regional power growing closer to the United States, had been tense for weeks after two top BJP officials made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, the ancient founder of Islam, and his wife Aisha. The remarks drew protests across the country and diplomatic outrage from the Muslim world, leading Modi and the BJP to distance themselves from the officials.
Days before he was brutally killed, Kanhaiya Lal, 46, was briefly detained by local police who accused him of “hurting religious sentiments” by expressing support online for the anti-Islamic remarks by the BJP officials. In a second video posted after the killing, his attackers cited his social media comments, which the tailor had later deleted. They also threatened a similar attack against Modi.
Police have identified the assailants as Ghaus Mohammad and Riyaz Akhtari, both residents of Udaipur. The two men are in the custody of the National Investigation Agency, India’s premier anti-terrorism task force, and have been charged under the country’s anti-terrorism law. NBC News was unable to reach their attorneys or ascertain whether they had entered any plea.
On Maldas Street in Udaipur’s old city, outside the shop where Kanhaiya Lal had worked as a tailor for 15 years, his body lay in a pool of blood as protesters gathered in huge numbers, taking pictures and expressing outrage. Yash, the older of his two sons, couldn’t bear to look at his father’s body under the cloth that covered it.
After the killing, authorities quickly imposed a round-the-clock curfew across Rajasthan, which with 69 million people has a population almost as big as that of Britain. They also suspended internet services in an effort to stem the spread of the videos, fearing they could further stoke tensions.
Less than a week after the killing, the daytime curfew was lifted and most of Udaipur returned to work. But life was still at a standstill in Khanjipeer, a Muslim area of the city where Mohammad and Akhtari live.
Police maintained a heavy presence, their vehicles blocking intersections. The streets were quiet except for a group of children playing catch in the courtyard of the Gausia Mosque.
Mohammad Salman, 26, who runs a scrap parts shop outside the mosque, said that since the attack the neighborhood is living in fear of retaliation from Hindu nationalists. As soon as he heard about Kanhaiya Lal’s death, he rushed to the house he was renting in a Hindu-dominated area, and left with his mother, wife and daughter for good.
“When I hear them sloganeering, issuing direct threats to us, I feel I can be killed anytime,” he said. “I cannot leave my family behind even in daylight.”
Salman also worries about supporting his family amid a boycott of Muslim-owned businesses that had been gaining strength across India even before the killing.
“Half of my dealings are with Hindus,” said Salman, who hadn’t had a single customer since that morning. “If they decide that Muslims and Hindus will not work together, then this country will collapse.”
The day after curfew was relaxed, cars jammed the streets around the Udaipur market, including Maldas Street, where a small team of state police was still stationed outside Kanhaiya Lal’s shop.
Mahaveer Sethi, a 42-year-old Hindu tailor who runs a shop next door, was repulsed by the sight of a camera, and the mention of the slain man. The initial photographs of the body lying in the street had also captured Sethi’s phone number, painted above his shop.
Since then, Sethi said, his phone has barely stopped buzzing with calls from other Hindus demanding retribution against the alleged killers:
“‘Will they be hanged?’ … ‘I’ll kill them. Can you share their address?’ … ‘We’ll attack the jail they are lodged in. Do you want to help us?’”
“Religion is bigger than humanity in today’s India. For them it is,” Sethi said, referring to the Hindus who had been calling him.
Later in the day, officials restored some internet access. At the Teli home, where he was still greeting mourners, Yash unlocked his phone to a flurry of notifications. He opened Facebook and there it was: the video of his father’s last, dreadful moments.
Thalaikoothal (Tamil: தலைக்கூத்தல், lit. showering) [needs Tamil IPA] is the traditional practice of senicide (killing of the elderly) or involuntary euthanasia, by their own family members, observed in some parts of southern districts of Tamil Nadu state of India.
In Chicory Creek, a demon is unleashed and commits three triple murders. The demon hunter Jebediah Woodley and the FBI Agent Evelyn Pierce arrive in town to investigate the cases and after an initial friction, they team up to catch the demon.
