Arvind Kala: As flies to wanton boys

The lynching of ten alleged thieves in Bihar has two dangerous aspects. One is that the lynchings are partly recreational. British thinker Bertrand Russell ascribed witch burnings in Europe 300 years ago to a craving among people to liven up cold dreary evenings in a pre-electricity age. The same craving for excitement is probably turning poor Bihari villagers into blood-thirsty lynch-mobs. Mob fury is exhilarating, and when poor village males spend their lives sitting around on sagging cots in a dark village then chasing and bludgeoning thieves to death can produce a frenzy of excitement.

The same frenzy has characterised the seven or eight sati immolations that have occurred in India in the last 30 years. In each case, nobody knows if any of the new widows wanted to burn themselves. Perhaps some diabolical family or neighbour dropped a hint which spread so fast that thousands of excited villagers descended on the widow's house impatient to see a spectacle. It was their irresistible pressure which took the widow to a quickly-prepared funeral pyre. The second dangerous aspect of the Bihar lynchings is that they are infectious. Each lynching prepares the climate for another.

The Bihar lynchings and two atrocities worse than lynching followed in quick succession. First there was the televised sight of a tied-up half-naked thief roped to a policeman's moving motorcycle, his body scraping and bumping on the ground. This was followed by a village mob gouging out the eyes of three motorcycle thieves. Then came the lynching of 10 alleged thieves. And now another thief has been beaten to death. The same thing happens in Haryana and Western UP where relatives and villagers kill a boy and girl if they marry across castes.

Each such killing encourages another. The student self-immolations during the anti-Mandal agitation were similarly contagious. When Rajiv Goswami set himself ablaze he prompted a series of copycat self-burnings in the weeks that followed. America is no different. When Marilyn Monroe killed herself, her suicide was followed by a wave of imitative deaths. The human mind is fragile. In 1990, a teenage boy in the US shot himself in front of a girl who had spurned him. The same evening his friend shot himself and next day another classmate did.

Dramatic incidents of violence or suicide inspire imitation. When Gandhian Vinoba Bhave embraced a slow death by giving up all food and water in his ashram at Wardha in Maharashtra, his fast to death prompted another Gandhian to do the same. Even today whenever an old Jain muni chooses to die by giving up food his example is followed by some other muni.

Coming back to Bihar: In lynchings or sati immolations, the entire village participates. The blood-lust stirred up is so strong that anybody who opposes it can easily end up dead. Three years ago, a frenzied village crowd in a UP village nearly lynched two men who wanted to stop their mother from committing sati.

When a convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was to be executed by a firing squad in Utah, in the United States 25 years ago, his prison chief asked for volunteers willing to pull the trigger. He was swamped with requests. What else can sharpen the senses than killing a man "" legally? All through history and even today public executions in Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia are carnivals that attract huge crowds. The same atmosphere of celebration settles over a village where a lynching takes place.