New Delhi: Four persons, including two women, have been arrested for beating a man to death with sticks near a highway in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district. Preliminary information released by police suggested that the crime occurred over an old dispute between the two sides.The deceased was identified as Manoj Gautam, who belongs to the Dalit community. Nagina Member of Parliament Chandra Shekhar Aazad, whose colleagues visited Manoj’s family following the murder, alleged that the assailants also hurled casteist abuses while hitting him with lathis.Police said that Manoj was returning from a market on Thursday evening when he was surrounded and attacked with lathis. He fell on the ground and was critically injured after being struck on the head, said Ankur Aggarwal, Sitapur Superintendent of Police.Manoj was taken to a hospital where he was declared dead. Images of him lying seriously injured in a pool of blood were widely shared on social media.FIR lodged at Kamlapur police stationAggarwal said that a minor physical altercation had taken place between the two parties in 2019, following which both sides lodged criminal complaints against each other. The cases are pending. The exact trigger for the murder and the circumstances leading up to it are being investigated, the police said.Sitapur police said an FIR was lodged over Manoj’s murder at the Kamlapur police station. Aggarwal said the police would try to complete the investigation as soon as possible and file a chargesheet in court so that the guilty receive the most severe punishment possible.Taking to X, Aazad said the incident was “extremely heartbreaking, shameful, and concerning.”He demanded that the police arrest all of the six accused persons in the matter and urged the state government to conduct a fair investigation.“Even after this grave incident, the failure to arrest all the accused so far raises serious questions about the police’s conduct,” said Aazad.According to a report in the Times of India, the accused persons were identified as Dhirendra Singh, Narendra Singh, Shubham Singh, Kalpana Singh (wife of Dhirendra Singh) and Sunita Singh. The identity of the sixth was not clear.2019 altercationSpeaking to The Wire on phone, Gudiya Bharti, wife of the deceased, said, “They [referring to the accused] had entered our house and physically assaulted my husband earlier. A case related to this incident under the ‘Harijan Act’ had been filed back then.”The ‘Harijan Act’ here refers to the case filed in 2019 under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, when Manoj was allegedly subjected to verbal abuse and physical assault simply for telling the accused not to play game of cards [jua in Hindi or gamble] outside his house. Recalling the tragic incident of October 15, 2026, Bharti who had rushed along with her daughter, Sandhya to the spot of incident, further told The Wire, “They were beating him [Manoj] with a haansi (a bamboo pole with an iron sickle mounted at the other end) like a kasai (butcher). My daughter tried to intervene and pleaded with them [accused] not to kill her father; she was dragged and dumped on the road. When I reached there and tried to stop them, I got hurt as well.”Manoj used to earn a living by working as a labourer. He is survived by wife and four kids along with his parents.