Mob a reliable weapon, fake news a trigger
Lynchings are proliferating as lines between communalism and nationalism are blurred
finally went out of sight.
The mob is the most reliable weapon in today’s political scene. Hate is the ammunition. Fake news is the trigger. This is a weapon that can be manufactured, loaded, and fired at any time. It is formed by not just the gau rakshaks, but also angry civilians or even public servants, as happened recently in Rajasthan. It can be wielded anywhere: at a UP polling booth, as I saw, but also in a local train or thickly populated suburb in the heart of the national capital region. It can be aimed at teenagers minding their own business or journalists reporting a story.
Officially, our government does not support the mob, but you can see clearly which parties have tended to keep silent, who backs the accused, and who doesn’t visit the victims. But the lynch mob has its own logic and its own rulebook.
Our culture has changed as a result. For a large section of the majority, the lines between communalism and nationalism have blurred. They feel that hating Muslims means greater love for India. For their confused sense of motherland, brotherhood has no meaning. Gone are the days when patriotism was taught as unity in diversity and respect for each other. Today, nationalism means toeing the line and shutting up.
We shut up out of fear; and what we fear, more than anything, is the mob.
Its authority is rarely challenged. In the murder of 16-year-old Junaid, the police nabbed suspects with the help of CCTV footage. But initially they failed to find a single eyewitness from the crowded railway platform where Junaid lay dying. His brothers, who were on the train with him, said that nobody attempted to help them as they were attacked.
Even members of the majority have been targeted by mobs. In May, Bhup Singh and Jabar Singh of Greater Noida were returning home from a neighbouring village with a cow when a group surrounded and began thrashing them. Their pleas of being dairy farmers and Hindus fell on deaf ears. Since they were being beaten up in the name of the cow, nobody came to their rescue.
Reporting on the Ikhlaq case from the village of Bisada affected me deeply. The most disturbing encounter was with a young man who wanted to click a selfie with me. I got into an argument with him when he justified the murder in the name of ‘sentiment’ and ‘feelings’. I gave up after a while, but it left me deeply troubled how these young minds had been poisoned so completely.
Only once have the victims of this wave of fear stood in revolt. In Gujarat, Dalits protested the flogging of a family in Una by refusing to dispose of the carcasses of dead cows, their job by tradition. “Tumhari mata hai, tum sambhalo (It’s your mother, you take care of it)” chanted locals. This has been the sole act of resistance; every other section of society is busy swallowing their fear.
Indeed, new kinds of mobs are proliferating. Last month a deputy superintendent of police, Mohammad Ayub Pandith, was surrounded outside a Srinagar mosque and killed by his own neighbours. This isn’t going to be the last such attack. The forces directing the mob remain powerful.