That being said, you are wrong. It was illegal.
Lynching happened in UP. And sale, transport, and slaughter of beef is illegal there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Dadri_mob_lynching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India#Utta...
The police should take the samples for analysis as they did. It is the procedure I expect from them in this case.
If a bank robber was killed during a bank heist, you would still investigate who planned the robbery wouldn't you?
It seems no different than taking any other piece of crime scene or crime-related evidence to me.
It has the same vibe as checking the skirt length of a rape victim, or checking into the sexual history of someone beaten up for being gay, just to be sure they really were gay.
I do not agree with the laws, but the police should dutifully follow the laws.
> India has a population of more than 1.3 billion and it is severely under-policed. This leads to several miscreants doing all sorts of bad stuff.
So the police is spread thin and you want them to go after dead people for allegedly eating beef? What kind of mental gymnastics do you do?
Is following the law mental gymnastics? Should I curse the police for following procedures and investigating crimes, even if I disagree with them?
What if police decided that it was spread too thin, and did not stop me being lynched?
Additionally, if it was beef, there's a reason to look upstream to where the dead man got the beef and chase down those leads.
What's the external/societal cost to them taking the meat to the lab? It's not like the police not taking the beef to the lab will suddenly summon the cow back to life nor that they took the beef and tested it by eating it.
(I'm assuming from context that beef for consumption is locally illegal. That seems a safe assumption.)