The protesting farmer who died at ITO during Indian Republic day’s tractor parade has been identified as Navreet Singh Hundal from the Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh.
As per media reports he had recently returned from Australia. He was camping at ‘Ghazipur border’ for around a week to participate in the tractor parade.
A senior Delhi Police official told The Indian Express, “The family told us they didn’t know Navreet was in Delhi and protesting in Delhi. They had said Navreet had left home to meet a relative at Bajpur (located in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district).” The 27-year old protestor from Uttar Pradesh’s Bilaspur, who came to the Ghazipur border a week before the parade, was living in Australia with his wife and parents and was studying agriculture.
Video footage of the incident was circulated on social media, it shows a blue tractor crashing through yellow Delhi Police barricades at high speed before rolling over twice and coming to rest by the side of the road.
After the crash protestors draped the body in ‘Tricolour’ and kept it at the ITO crossing, not allowing the police to send it for post-mortem. The farmers kept insisting on taking back the body to the village at the earliest.
Delhi Police has detained 200 people in connection with the violence that broke out in various parts of the national capital during the farmers’ tractor rally in the city on Tuesday.
In a statement, the Delhi Police on Wednesday said that the “detained persons will be arrested soon.” A total of 22 FIRs have been registered regarding the violence in which over 300 police personnel were injured.
