Ahmedabad: Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence over increasing cases of mob lynching on June 29 when he asserted that killing people by cow vigilantes is unacceptable.

“Killing people in the name of Gau Bhakti is not acceptable,” he said, stressing, “No person in this nation has the right to take the law in his or her own hands in this country,” the premier said at Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, his home state.

The premier’s remarks came a day after spontaneous protests against mob lynching erupted at various cities in the country.

While saying that protecting cows, sacred for Hindus, is needed, “No one spoke about protecting cows more than Mahatma Gandhi and Acharya Vinoba Bhave,” he said, “this (violence) is not something Mahatma Gandhi would approve of.”

Earlier this week, a group of people on a train killed 16-year-old Junaid Khan, who was traveling home to his village in Haryana with his brother and two cousins after a shopping excursion to Delhi ahead of Eid.

A group of about 20 men accused the teen and his companions of carrying beef in their bags and yelled religious slurs at them before they beat Junaid Khan and stabbed him to death. He was thrown off the train.

Five men, including a Delhi government employee, have been arrested for his murder, but the man who stabbed him has yet to be caught, ndtv.com reported.

Critics had pulled up Modi for not condemning the growing list of attacks by self-declared cow vigilantes, many of them in states governed by his party, the BJP. In one of them, Rajasthan, a 55-year-old named Pehlu Khan, was beaten relentlessly in April for transporting cows for his dairy farm after his assaulters accused him of smuggling the cows illegally, although he had legally valid papers. He died of his wounds.

Some steps taken by the center and its state governments – like the introduction of new rules that restrict the sale of cattle for slaughter and the crackdown on abattoirs in Uttar Pradesh – seem to have encouraged Hindu radicals to target Muslims, who dominate the meat trade.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said earlier this week that the death of Junaid Khan was “extremely shameful and painful” and that such attacks would not be tolerated.

In August last year, the prime minister lashed out at those who he said “use the mask” of cow protecting to attack others.