Civil forum to set up hate tracker, chronicle mob lynchings

Hate crimes such as mob lynchings, which produced an "all pervasive sense of fear" among minorities, will be chronicled and a cell will be set up to track such violence, a civil rights platform said today.
Members of the Karwan e Mohabbat (caravan of love), after travelling through eight states, said the "rise of hate and fear" they bore witness to during their nearly month-long journey would be recorded through books, films, photo exhibitions and talks.
"Such is the sense of resignation, that there are minority families who do not even want to move court or knock the administration's door for justice. Fear for them has turned into an everyday aspect of life," former IAS officer Harsh Mander, who led the initiative, told reporters today at the culmination of KeM's journey.

Social activists, lawyers, students, filmmakers and others were a part of KeM and met 50 families.
Mander said they witnessed an "all pervasive sense of fear" and "the lack of remorse" at the community level.
"What stunned me is the absence of remorse at the local level," he said.

Film-maker Natasha Badhwar, one of the participants in the campaign, described the karwan, which rolled out from Assam on September 4 and ended in Gujarat on September 21, as an attempt to create new ways of communication and solidarity, "at a time when victims of violence were being treated as perpetrators".

Dushyant, a Mumbai-based lawyer and columnist, said he hopped on to the karwan aiming to diminish despair, nothwithstanding taunts from a few that it was nothing but "distress tourism".
"We will assist them (victims' families) legally and put in place local hate crime response systems for immediate assistance. We will also create a a national dedicated cell to track hate crimes across the country," Mander told PTI.
Referring to a recent IT notice served on the Centre for Equity Studies, an organisation run by Mander, he said he had received such notices in the past but never talked to the media about them.

"But let them (the State) not feel that they can use the power of the State to intimidate and silence dissent," he said.