NEW DELHI — An unarmed Muslim man was savagely battered with a hammer near the Indian capital over suspicion of smuggling cow meat as the police watched the gruesome incident, the local media reported on Saturday. The suspects thrashed the man, identified as Lukman, aged 25, with "impunity", reports said, adding that it gave "chilling echoes of the 2015 Dadri mob lynching in Noida" — a place also very close to New Delhi. On Friday morning, a group of cow vigilantes chased a vehicle for about 8 km and managed to stop it in Mewat, a town in the northern Indian state of Haryana near Delhi. After that, Lukman was pulled out and brutally thrashed on the suspicion that he was smuggling cow meat. The authorities present were faster at sending the meat to a lab for testing than catching any one of the suspects, according to the local media. One of the assailants, identified as Pradeep Yadav, has been arrested so far. Lukman, after being battered severely was loaded into a vehicle and taken back to Gurgaon"s, Badshahpur village, where the men started beating him again. At that point, the police in the area stepped in and attempted to stop the suspects. However, the suspects were bold enough to scuffle with the police as well. The victim was later taken to a hospital, after which police filed a complaint against "unidentified individuals" who had beaten him to a pulp. However, the owner of the vehicles clarified that the meat was of a buffalo and that he has been in the business for "50 years". The police have declined to record a statement and refused to explain the incident, the local media reported. Several vigilante groups have made headlines over the past couple of years in India for taking the law into their own hands and inflicting violence on the marginalized people. In most cases, victims of the mob beatings are Muslims. Opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that such groups have become emboldened since his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power in 2019. — Agencies