Don't shoot the messenger

Lynching and mob vigilantism are not just law and order issues

The criticism WhatsApp is attracting for the recent spate of lynching people suspected of being child-lifters amounts to blaming the messenger but ignoring the message. True, the free messaging service provided the platform for the viral dissemination of disinformation. But that does not explain why so many ordinary Indians harbour such a deep sense of insecurity that they felt compelled to take law and order into their hands or, indeed, confident enough to take the lives of fellow citizens in full public view. Nor does this explain why the state’s security apparatus could not have leveraged the same platform to counter the damaging rumours and prevent the horrific mob violence that followed. From Jammu to Bengaluru and from Tripura to Gujarat, lynching and mob vigilantism appear to have acquired a warped acceptability. The popular view that the problem is merely a law-and-order issue that can be addressed by better policing reflects a failure to identify a deeper societal crisis.

 
Over the past three years, starting with the lynching of 60-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq in his home in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, for allegedly slaughtering a calf, the reasons for mob vigilantism have varied. Enforcing the escalating cow slaughter bans in many states provided a handy excuse for anti-social elements to attack Muslims, especially dairy farmers, and Dalits with impunity. The fact that this vigilantism spread to issues of child kidnapping speaks to the hardening intolerance for the Other, which has gripped Indian society. Indeed, from the anaemic reactions from state and central politicians after each incident, it is fair to say that the political establishment bears no small responsibility for this emerging culture.

 
For instance, Akhlaq’s death at the height of electioneering in Bihar, when the issue of cow slaughter was at the forefront of the political campaign, yielded a statement from the prime minister a week later, and it was considered far from satisfactory. Instead of condemning the incident in no uncertain terms, he issued an oblique statement about the need for Indians to fight poverty, not each other. If there was a message against communal vigilantism it appeared to have escaped the perpetrators of the crime and their supporters. When one of them died a year later, the residents of the village wrapped him in the national flag, projecting him as a martyr.

 

In Rajasthan, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje chose to describe the mob murder of a Muslim social activist for trying to stop people photographing women defecating in the open as “unfortunate”. Without any evidence, she went on to suggest that he might not have been murdered, though visuals of the victim being hacked and burnt alive had been trending on social media for days. In Tripura, it was a state minister who, however inadvertently, incited lynching after he stated, without any evidence again, that a child who had been found dead had had his kidneys cut out. The failure of the political establishment to censure such incidents more emphatically has had the effect of signalling a tolerance for lynching, especially when it is minorities, tribals and Dalits who are at the receiving end.