Two cows of a cattle owner were found dead near east Delhi’s Sanjay Lake on Wednesday morning, leading to tension and rumour-mongering in Trilokpuri, where communal clashes erupted in 2014.

The incident comes four days before polling in the national Capital for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections. To prevent tension from escalating, the Delhi Police deployed scores of uniformed personnel in the area before replacing them with personnel in plainclothes to keep a tab on mischief makers.

While members of some right-wing organisations saw the incident as a deliberate act to offend Hindus, some Muslim residents felt it was a ploy to whip up communal passions ahead of polling.

But the owner of the dead cows set aside such theories and said she suspected his Hindu neighbour of killing the cattle.

“Our neighbour has been targeting us for months because we keep our cows on a DDA-owned land. We told the police that this could be his doing,” Rajesh Devi, who lives in Kotla village next to Trilokpuri, said.

The police have responded by initiating probe after registering a case against unknown persons at Pandav Nagar police station. “We have registered a case under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, the Delhi Cattle Preservation Act and IPC Section 429 (mischief by killing cattle),” DCP (East) Jasmeet Singh said.

Police said Rajesh Devi and husband Rai Singh have been rearing cattle for past 40 years.

“Earlier, our neighbour had earlier got the DDA land sealed to force our cattle out. He even got the water supply cut. He had vowed to send us and our cattle elsewhere,” Rajesh Devi alleged.

When Praveen Choudhary, a member of Sanathan Hindu Yuva Vahini, which has been camping near Devi’s home, said there was no way a Hindu would kill cows, she rebutted, “It could be possible that my neighbour used someone else to carry out the killing”.

HT’s attempts to meet the neighbour to seek his response to the allegations failed.

“It is too early to say who killed the cows. We are probing the possibility that they were killed for commercial purpose and looking into the suspicions posed by cattle owners,” a senior police officer investigating the case said.

Devi’s husband Rai Singh found that two of their cows were missing when he was feeding the cattle around 3.30am Wednesday. “Around 5.30am, one of our neighbours saw them lying near the Sanjay Lake across the road,” Singh said.

The police have sent the carcass for an autopsy.

First Published: May 09, 2019 03:54 IST