Stop the Madness
INDIA FIGHTS A SHOCKINGLY VIOLENT WAR WITHIN, AS CITIZENS STAIN THEIR HANDS WITH THE BLOOD OF FELLOW CITIZENS. A CHALLENGE THE NDA GOVERNMENT MUST CONFRONT | BY DAMAYANTI DATTA AND KAUSHIK DEKA |
Why the government must stamp out lynch mobs and cow vigilantes
“Their hands were tied. It appears they were hanged after being beaten to death” ANOOP BIRTHARE, SP, Latehar, recalling the killing of two Muslim cattle traders in 2016 in Jharkhand
“He was stripped naked and violently pummelled. His arms and legs were bent and broken, just as someone breaks a sugarcane before eating it” J&K OFFICIAL, describing the lynching of DSP Ayub Pandith in Srinagar last month
“One of them held my brother from behind, the other stabbed him in the neck, chest, stomach” HASHIM KHAN, brother of Junaid Khan who was killed on a Mathura-bound train last month
“While they were beating my father with rods, people were taking videos. Someone even turned his head towards the camera” SHAMA PERWEEN, daughter of cattle trader Alimuddin, lynched last month in Ramgarh, Jharkhand
“His hand and foot were chopped off. And someone was giving him water to drink…” INSPECTOR J. KUMAR, relating how the mob set upon Vinod Kumar, accused of being a drug dealer, at Talwandi Sabo, Punjab, last month
TThey were no soldiers executed in war, civilians butchered by deadly terror groups, or rebels crushed by state power. They were ‘we’, the people of the world’s largest democracy, who were hunted, beaten and tortured to death by vengeful, bloodthirsty crowds. Bodies desecrated, they died in extreme fear and pain, pleading innocence and begging for mercy. All for a word the Indian Penal Code (IPC) does not even recognise: ‘lynching’.
Narratives of heartwrenching horror have gripped the nation, as Indians kill Indians in some of the most grotesque mob violence ever recorded, in total disregard for the law. Horrific images, reports and video clips of people being tortured or dying terrible deaths are surfacing every week: from Latehar to Srinagar, Ballabhgarh to Ramgarh, Bathinda to Alwar. Yet our leaders remain silent. Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi do anything to stop this madness?
A PARANOID STATE
Aligarh railway station, a major stop along the DelhiKolkata route, was a scene of bedlam on July 1. On high alert ever since a call a month ago threatened to blow up the place, the railway police stopped a woman in burqa, for ‘suspicious’ behaviour. The surprise was total when Nazmul Hasan, 42, emerged from under the veil. An engineer, Hasan confessed to using the garb as a ruse. The lynching of a Muslim boy on a train near Ballabhgarh on June 22, had put the fear of lynching in his heart. He too had faced abuse on a train recently. “I thought no one would target a woman.”
Is this India’s future? The country stands at the crossroads of a furious debate. “As a legal term, lynching does not exist in India, but it’s seen as the extrajudicial punishment and murder of someone by a mob,” says Asha Bajpai, professor, School of Law, Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Lynching does not exist in statistical terms either, because the National Crime Records Bureau only collects and analyses crime data defined
under the Indian Penal Code. But the master narrative, as well as perpetrators, behind the crime is evident: the slaughter of cows is banned, and the consumption of beef restricted, in most Indian states, though millions of Muslims and Dalits depend on the meat and leather industries. Vigilante groups that seize cows from people they accuse of illegally transporting them, or sending for slaughter, have become active across the country. Most of the lynchings are being committed by them in the name of the cow. In August 2016, the PM had indicated as much: “It makes me angry that some people indulge in antisocial activities at night, and in the day masquerade as cow protectors.”
But without official centralised data, the public discourse on lynching is fast spiralling into unknown territory. “Jab raja apna kaam nahin karega, toh praja ko karna padega (When the ruler fails to do his duty, then the public will have to step in),” so declared Acharya Yogendra Arya, head of Haryana’s Gau Raksha Dal, on June 30. Ask Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, and he feels lynchings are being “overreported and overhyped” by television channels. “It’s a feudal form of crime. The only difference is it shakes our conscience much more today than a thousand years ago.” In response, sociologist Shiv Visvanathan calls lynchings a “new phenomenon”. “The Union home secretary,” he says, “must do his homework and look at the paranoia taking hold in the country. What makes these incidents different is the extreme violence and brutality.”
METHOD IN THE MADNESS
Collate the isolated incidents and a pattern emerges. It may not be complete, but there is a message. Between the time a young IT professional was bludgeoned to death for ‘derogatory’ Facebook posts in June 2014 and now, at least 50 cases of mob lynchings have been reported in 11 states, according to an estimation of reported cases computed by india today. And the incidents are rising at an alarming rate:
between April and June 2017, there have been at least four lynchings a month (see graphic: Lynch Nation).
Thirty-two people have been killed in 20 cases in the past three years; of 50 cases examined overall, almost all victims were Muslim or Dalit; 70 per cent were suspected of killing or smuggling cows, both a part of the NDA’s Hindu nationalist project. No surprise, then, that the accused in almost every case of killing were linked to ‘gau rakshak’ or cow vigilante groups. Even in cases triggered by rumours of rape or child-lifting, the victims were Muslims or Dalits.
Most lynchings occurred in areas of sparse population, habitation or law enforcement—mostly highways rather than local roads; in most cases, law enforcers witnessed the lynchings but could not/ did not do anything (at times they collaborated); in most cases, no politician visited the families of the victims or made immediate public statements; in most cases, the charges against the accused were based on flimsy selection arrested on flimsy charges and given bail (if arrested), the victims (even if dead) were often slapped with charges of cattle smuggling and trading.
CLOSER AND CLOSER
“The country that never killed an ant.
The country that fed stray dogs roaming around. The country that fed fish in the ocean.
The country in which a man like Bapu taught us the lesson of ahimsa.
What has happened to us ?”
On June 29, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an appeal, his second in three years, during a speech at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. It came a day after thousands of citizens in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and other cities came together through social media and protested under the banner, ‘Not in My Name’, decrying the government’s inability to protect citizens in the face of the rising number of lynchings and random violence. Within hours of PM Modi’s condemnation, mob India reacted by unleashing a new spate of lynchings: Alimuddin alias Asgar Ansari was beaten to death on suspicion of carrying beef in Jharkhand’s Ramgarh district. In the week that followed, at least three more people were lynched.
The extraordinary frequency of lynchings, especially around beef and cattle trade, shows that the storyline has changed, explains sociologist Vinod K. Jairath of the University of Hyderabad. “The culture of collective murders as a social phenomenon is moving from the margins to the mainstream,” he says. For long, such incidents happened to the large numbers of ‘invisible people’ living in obscure corners of the country amidst lawlessness, natural disaster, deprivation and poverty. Writer-activist Mahasweta Devi had fought for the rights of the “hunted, hated, butchered” and lynched tribals since the 1970s.
The lynchings from the ’80s and ’90s, largely concentrated in Jharkhand, Bihar and Odisha, were built around greed for property, robbery and theft, neighbourly or family disputes, local politics, superstition and disease, which often developed into allegations of witchcraft. They had no ethnic or religious core, Jairath explains. The infamous Khairlanji massacre of 2006, where four members of a Dalit family were lynched, mutilated and murdered in a tiny Maharashtra village
by members of ‘upper’ castes, was an act of retaliation linked to land. “With the new issue of beef and cattle trade, lynching is becoming ubiquitous. It can happen anywhere, anytime,” he adds.
PERFECTLY NORMAL BEASTS
His face covered in a white cloth bag, with two black holes for eyes, he stood meekly at the Faridabad district court on July 9. In T-shirt and jeans, it was hard to imagine he had led the marauding mob that stabbed 15-year-old Junaid Khan to death on board a Delhi-Mathura train on June 22. But Naresh Kumar, 30, of Palwal, Haryana, once a security guard in Delhi, had ‘confessed’ to his crime. He had nothing to do with the fight over seats, but got involved, even though he did not know anyone on the train. And it was he who stabbed Junaid with a knife bought for kitchen use that morning.
It’s strange how normal people turn beasts when part of a crowd. “A crowd can affect an individual’s behaviour, especially, a raging crowd,” says Dr Manju Mehta, clinical psychologist and former professor at AIIMS in Delhi. “It’s now believed aggression is contagious. Experiments have shown how children become aggressive when exposed to violent programmes on TV for a prolonged period.” A mob also provides cover for the release of deep-seated emotions: anger, fear, suspicion,