New Delhi,(The Telegraph): The Dadri lynching was not a heat-of-the-moment act but a "targeted attack with communal overtones", the National Commission for Minorities will say in its report on Monday, a panel member has revealed.

It will also express anguish at the "silence of the political leadership" since a mob murdered Mohammed Akhlaque in Bisara village on September 28 following unsubstantiated suspicions of storing and eating beef, Farida Abdulla Khan told The Telegraph.

The conclusion comes at a time Union culture minister and BJP MP Mahesh Sharma has sought to portray the murder as an "accident" and Prime Minister Narendra Modi confined himself to describing the atrocity as "sad".

"After talking to villagers and the local administration, we found it was a targeted attack with communal overtones. It was not a personal vendetta against one person or a family but a hate crime," Khan, who had also investigated the Muzaffarnagar riots two years ago, said.

"The pattern of events in Bisara reflects a familiar plot of communal polarisation that we saw during the Muzaffarnagar riots and the violence in Haryana's Atali village in May, too."

Khan added: "The local administration told us that some groups had been organising regular meetings in the villages and radicalising Hindus with anti-Muslim propaganda. They could not tell us the background of these groups."

Police had registered an FIR against activists of an outfit called the Hindu Rakshak Dal for allegedly making inflammatory speeches in Bisara a week after the lynching.

Khan had been part of a fact-finding team that commission chairperson Naseem Ahmad, appointed in March 2014, had led to the western Uttar Pradesh village on Thursday. It met the victim's family and spoke to Hindu residents of the Rajput-dominated village, which has 25 Muslim households.

Khan said the elders in the village had expressed regret at the lynching and "told us that those behind the killing should be punished".

On Monday, the commission will send its report, along with its recommendations, to the Prime Minister's Office, Union home ministry and the Uttar Pradesh government, a commission official said.

It will say the Muslims of Bisara want to move to some "safer" location and will recommend security for them at their current homes.

In May, the panel had criticised BJP chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar's administration in Haryana for failing to crack down on attackers who had burnt down 20 Muslim homes in Atali. It had accused the police of abetment.

Khattar was yesterday quoted as saying: "Muslims can continue to live in this country but they will have to give up eating beef."

Khan said it was shocking that a chief minister could make such a statement. "There has been no strong statement from the political leadership condemning the Dadri incident, while some people continue to make hate speeches," she said.

Two years ago, the minority panel had charged the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh with poor handling of the Muzaffarnagar violence, which killed 60-odd people and displaced 60,000.

It had cited inflammatory speeches by local BJP leaders including MLA Sangeet Som, who was arrested.

A commission member today recalled how jurist Fali Nariman had in September last year expressed concern at the Centre's "silence" on the spate in hate speeches and rued that Hinduism was "changing its benign face".

He had urged the commission to move court against the perpetrators and publicise the action to restore the minorities' confidence.

Prodded by him, the commission had written to the Centre seeking legal action against BJP MPs Sakshi Maharaj and Yogi Adityanath for their inflammatory speeches. "But there was no action," a commission member rued.

Photo credit: the Telegraph