Mob lynching India's shocking war within, a challenge Narendra Modi must confront
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
Kaushik Deka
Kaushik Deka Damayanti Datta
July 14, 2017
ISSUE DATE: July 24, 2017UPDATED: July 14, 2017 16:42 IST
Photo: Somnath Sen
Photo: Somnath Sen
They 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 heart-wrenching 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 Delhi-Kolkata 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."
ADVERTISEMENT
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 anti-social 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 "over-reported and over-hyped" 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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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, resentment, frustration, prejudice, malice. One trigger and things suddenly get out of hand, she explains. "This is not to justify mob lynchings, but to recognise lynchings and riots do not necessarily rely on criminals." It's what Freud described as 'mass psychology' in the wake of World War I.
As India gears up to celebrate big events on the national calendar-from the most radical tax reform to 70 years of Independence-the ordinary citizen seems to be in the throes of an epidemic of anger, points out Kolkata psychiatrist Dr Jai Ranjan Ram: with their incomes, their quality of life, their relationships, their political leaders, the lack of jobs, healthcare, decent education and opportunities. "With all the grave uncertainties of life, the thin crust of civilisation we take for granted slips easily." Rage spills over into collective violence. "People take the law into their own hands when 'fear' takes huge proportions, making it an issue that they feel must be dealt with instantly."
COWS BETWEEN US
Until that evening of April 1, Yadav was just another 19-year-old in small-town India. You could see him anytime around Behror, 60 km from Alwar in Rajasthan, vrooming about on his motorbike, hair slicked back, shirt flapping, with his trusted lieutenant 'Mithun' (so called for his intense admiration for Bollywood hero Mithun Chakravarti) and his pack of friends, most of them college-educated, and working in schools and colleges. Born to well-off, socially-prominent OBC parents, his mother Preeti (alias Babli) is a village sarpanch, he was given wide latitude in whatever he wanted to do. The doting parents even put up giant billboards with Vipin's image in front of their two-storied house, congratulating the first-year BA student of Government PG College, on becoming the student union president.
Yadav also happened to be a junior volunteer cow vigilante, one of the many in the state, who mobilise networks of information-via local WhatsApp groups, shopkeepers and petty traders around the highways and even local constables and then chase down trucks suspected of carrying cattle to slaughter on motorbikes or set up road obstructions. "It's a huge network of young people, who are enrolled as members, given ID cards, responsibilities, mentors to take instructions from and even work in shifts," says one, on condition of anonymity. They also get informed by ex-cow smugglers, whom they have either pardoned or promised reward against a tip-off. "If caught, vigilante justice usually involves some hard slaps, punches and kicks, nothing more." For the unlucky, like Pehlu Khan, a 55-year-old dairy farmer from Nuh in Haryana, it can cost a life.
BJP-ruled Rajasthan has banned eating, selling, possessing, transporting or exporting of cows, with a 10-year jail term or a fine of up to Rs 10,000. Yet, Rajasthan traditionally holds India's biggest cattle fair in Jaipur. It was here that Pehlu Khan had bought a milch cow. Although Yadav has been arrested as the prime accused, none of the six gau rakshaks Pehlu Khan named before his death figure in any video obtained so far. One version is that while the six took away the cattle to a cow shelter, the mob took over, with Yadav chasing Khan with predatory single-mindedness. Another view is that Yadav had chanced upon the incident and led the assault "in the heat of the moment". The "real culprits" were the gau rakshaks, who took away the cattle, instigated others and retreated when the restless crowd turned nasty.
Whatsapp woes
Social media, the Internet and Web 2.0 applications have made mobbing and lynching easier. Take the May 2017 Jharkhand lynchings where 10 people died in and around Seraikela-Kharsawan, Singhbhum, Shobhapur and Sosomouli villages. To BJP state committee member and tribal leader Ramesh Hansda, who visited the affected areas, the violence was the "curse of social media". That's because a WhatsApp message, with pictures of dead children, had been circulating for a month: 'Suspected child lifters are carrying sedatives, injections, spray, cotton and small towels. They speak Hindi, Bangla and Malayalam. If you happen to see any stranger near your house immediately inform local police as he could be a member of the child lifting gang,' the message read.
Many had armed themselves with sticks and rods, and even stopped children from going to school. The unverified message was later traced to a series of people who had created and circulated it to a large number of WhatsApp groups on May 11. A day later, two people died in the first lynching at Jadugora. It left behind the indelible image of Mohammed Naeem, blood-soaked and pleading to villagers with folded hands to spare his life, hours before he was beaten to death. He was a good son to his ageing parents and a good father to his children, said his family members, refusing to accept the compensation of Rs 2 lakh offered by the district administration.
LAW AND LYNCHERS
On July 1, when the Jharkhand police picked up Nityanand Mahato, BJP district media-in-charge from Ramgarh's BJP office, dragging him by the collar into a waiting van, it marked a sharp departure in lynching investigations. Mahato, an influential local leader belonging to the socially-predominant Koyri community, was charged with 'premeditated murder' for the lynching of meat trader Asgar Alimuddin, on June 29. Though Mahato denied his involvement, the police team under additional director general of police R.K. Mallik had collected ample evidence, from phone records to mobile tower dumps, to establish that he had instigated a group to drag Asgar out of his van and beat him up, at a place barely 500 metres from his home.
Far too often, however, the accused are booked under milder IPC sections-341 (wrongful confinement), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) or 34 (acts done by several persons with common intention) and get out on bail, if arrested at all. Sometimes, no action is taken for long, or only after public opinion forces a probe. Despite the nationwide furore in September 2015, when Muslim blacksmith Mohammad Akhlaq was dragged out of his home in Uttar Pradesh's Bisada village and bludgeoned to death by a lynch mob, over mere suspicion that he had beef in his fridge, the police filed the chargesheet nearly three months later. What's more, it had no mention of 'beef'. The reason? The police were still awaiting a forensic report on the type of meat found in his house.
Civil society activists are canvassing for a new law, Maanav Suraksha Kanoon or MaSuKa, to deal specifically with the rash of mob lynchings across the country. "There have been almost no convictions or punishments, even in high-profile cases, and perpetrators seem unconcerned about the consequences of their actions," says senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, who has just rolled out a new draft law, for public inputs, comments and review. "Our laws are quite adequate to deal with lynchings," adds senior advocate and co-drafter Rebecca John. "Murder in any form falls under Section 302 of the IPC." But there are loopholes-from provisions for compensation, rehabilitation, speedy justice, witness protection, special courts to holding the local police accountable for any lynching that take place in their jurisdiction, that the draft law seeks to plug.
POLITICS OF SILENCE
What makes this moment unique is the silence of the political leadership. PM Modi has spoken against lynchings only twice thus far. And on both occasions, after a considerable stretch of studied silence: eight days after the Dadri lynching in 2015 and after about 20 mob lynchings this year. That silence has become the hallmark of almost all top NDA leaders and chief ministers of BJP states. That silence has also generated a growing belief that our leaders have no answers for the problems that face us.
It took Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar three days to break his silence over Junaid's killing, although he was active on Twitter. It took the Modi government four days to break its silence on Junaid, with law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad condemning the incident, the first top leader of the BJP to do so. Describing lynchings as "extremely painful and shameful", he said, "Our government will not tolerate this. Our government is very clear that the law will have to do its job." It took six days for Jharkhand CM Raghubar Das to own up to "lapses on the part of the official machinery", despite national outrage over mobs beating innocent men to death over child kidnapping rumours. It took Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje almost a month to react to the Alwar lynching in her state. It was prompted by an open letter to her from 23 former IAS officers, condemning the incident and demanding justice.
The silence from the top is juxtaposed by inflammatory speeches from below: from Sadhvi Prachi's "those who consume beef deserve such actions against them" to BJP MLA Sangeet Som's "UP government will pay price for favouring Muslims", from Hindu Raksha Dal president Bhoopendra Chaudhary's "cases of cow slaughter will be dealt with in the same way as the Hindus did in Bisada" to RSS leader Tarun Vijay's "Hindus should not be responsible for peace and order. Muslim victims should remain mute". The frenzy of hate speeches was leashed somewhat with finance minister and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley saying "their statements (were) not appreciated by the party at all".
Long before the arrest of Mahato in Jharkhand, the activity and network of information, informants, surveillance and muscle power of cow vigilantes across states and their role in lynching had started to unravel. Local vigilante leaders publicly hailed some of the accused in the Alwar lynching as 'heroes'.
"There is disquiet and concern, not just in the BJP, but also in certain sections of the Sangh parivar, over the lynchings of Muslims and Dalits as well as the cow protection issue," say party insiders. "Will anti-parivar forces embarrass the government and the party by pinning all responsibility on their shoulders?" The worry appears genuine, they say, given the speech RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, the ideological guide of the ruling NDA, delivered in April: "Gau hatya-bandi sarkar ke aadhin hai. Hamari ichha hai ki sampurna Bharat mein gauvansh ki hatya band ho. Is kanoon ko prabhavi banana sarkar ki zimmedari hai (the decision to impose a ban on cow slaughter rests with the government. We want cow slaughter to be banned in the entire country. It is the duty of the government to make this law effective)." In August last year, he had expressed his resentment over PM Modi's speech on 'fake' cow protectors "who wanted to divide the country". "Gau rakshaks cannot be compared with those undesirable elements who are raking up the issue of cow slaughter or spreading unfounded rumours about slaughter. The latter are busy serving their narrow personal or political ends," he had claimed, in an attempt to distance cow protectors from the increasing cow-related violence.
It's not hard to understand why their words have little effect on the ground. While denouncing violence, the RSS brass have not stopped their tirade against Muslims. Former RSS pracharak and Haryana CM Khattar was quoted recently by a newspaper, as saying that Muslims could stay in India but they would have to give up eating beef. The CM later claimed that he was misquoted. Adding to this commotion, the Union government issued a circular, banning sale of cattle for slaughter in cattle markets. The circular was first stayed by the Madras High Court and later by the Supreme Court. Such unprecedented focus on cow protection has made it an easy excuse for lumpen elements to resort to violence in the name of holy cow.
BJP president Amit Shah, meanwhile, is locked in a war of words with the Opposition over non-existent numbers: were there more lynchings under the previous governments or in three years of NDA rule? Shah insists there is "no apprehension or fear" anywhere in the country. He has, apparently, sent out a clear message across party rank and file: "These incidents are most condemnable. As a society, we must contain them and allow the law to take its own course." Says a senior BJP leader, "The only mistake we've made is that our leaders have been slow in condemning the incidents."
AND LIFE GOES ON
Here is someone who nearly hit the headlines. No, he was not beaten to death, his limbs were not chopped off, he was not set on fire, although there was some talk of it, and no onlooker uploaded his video on social media. Instead, he was made to yell 'Jai Shri Ram' at knife point by a dozen men, who blocked his car somewhere on the Palwal-Aligarh road on July 1. They asked him his name, but he was not smart enough to fib his way out of it. Back in his New Friends Colony home now, the 56-year-old Delhi businessman still wakes up to bloodcurdling cries of, "Maans nikaal (bring out the beef)" at night. The thin line between life and death for him that day was a box of kebabs his aunts had packed for him that he had left behind by mistake. What if he had remembered?
with Rohit Parihar, Uday Mahurkar and Amitabh Srivastava
On June 22, aboard a Delhi-Mathura train, three Muslim youth were beaten up after an argument over seats. Later, a private security guard stabbed one of the brothers, 15-year-old Junaid Khan, to death After two weeks, police arrest the main accused, who claims he acted in self-defence.
At around 7.20 pm on June 22, Jalaludin, a taxi driver in Faridabad's Khandawali village, got a call telling him his sons were in trouble at the Ballabhgarh railway station. Rushing there, he found that the Delhi-Mathura Passenger, on which his boys were travelling, had departed. Returning home to break his roza, Jalaludin was flooded with more calls, telling him to rush to the civil hospital at Palwal. There, he found two of his sons, Shaqir and Hashim, covered in bloodied bandages, but not Junaid. "I thought he was in the ICU," Jalaludin later told wife Saira. Hours later, he was informed his son, just 15, had died.
Junaid had accompanied older brother Hashim and friends Moin and Mohsin to Delhi that morning to buy new clothes for Eid. Returning home by train, they got into an altercation over seats. The four were reportedly assaulted by a group of men who pulled their beards and taunted for 'eating beef'. Things escalated, and at some point, someone in the group pulled out a knife. While Hashim, Moin and Mohsin escaped with injuries, Junaid was not so lucky. Thrown out at Asaoti station, he bled to death, head in brother Hashim's lap.
Swinging into action only after the story made the lead headline in every newspaper and TV news broadcast, the Manohar Lal Khattar government constituted a special investigation team to nab the culprits, besides announcing a reward of Rs 2 lakh for information on them. The SIT at first arrested five men, including a Delhi government employee. Two weeks later, police arrested the main accused, Naresh Kumar, who is from Bhamrola in Palwal and worked as a private security guard in Delhi.
-By Asit Jolly
Photo: Abid BhatPhoto: Abid Bhat
On June 23, outside the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, a mob bludgeoned Mohammed Ayub Pandith, a deputy superintendent (DSP) in the Jammu & Kashmir Police, to death.
Five of the 12 suspects in custody are believed to be local youths
Minutes past midnight on June 23, the night of Shab-e-Qadr (pious night), a mob gathered outside the Jamia Masjid in Nowhatta, Srinagar. The target of its anger was a 57-year-old deputy superintendent of the Jammu & Kashmir police, Mohammed Ayub Pandith. On access control duty at the grand mosque, reports say Pandith was taking photos of worshippers leaving after prayers, which allegedly caused the mob to turn on him. When the mob grew violent, Pandith reportedly defended himself by opening fire with his service pistol. Eyewitnesses later told police that Pandith was identified as a policeman before he was surrounded, stripped and killed. His body was then dumped in a drain beside the mosque. This was the first lynching of a policeman by a civilian mob in the three decades of unrest in the Kashmir Valley, symptomatic of the intense anger that they feel against the police. State police are often called upon to quell the stone-pelting protests that have become the norm since 2008, when riots erupted over the decision to transfer land in the Valley to the Amarnath shrine board. Officers say that the continuing use of state police to subdue protesting mobs, causing thousands of youngsters to sustain bullet or pellet injuries, has resulted in a deep-seated resentment against the force. Five people have been arrested. Inspector general for Kashmir Muneer Khan tells India Today that the SIT constituted to investigate the lynching is very close to cracking the case, a number of recoveries have been made and several suspects are being interrogated.
- By Asit Jolly
On June 29, self-styled 'cow protectors' beat a meat trader, Asgar Ali, to death in Ramgarh, Jharkhand Police have arrested 12 persons, including a local BJP leader.
On June 29, the very day Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat that murder in the name of 'gau bhakti (cow worship)' was unacceptable, Jharkhand witnessed yet another murder. Asgar Ali, alias Alimuddin, who was 42 and a meat trader by profession, was driving his Maruti van from Chitarpur to Ramgarh, two companions in tow, a journey he took routinely to transport meat to his customers in Ramgarh. As he reached a crowded market 2.5 km from Ramgarh police station, a group of 30 men stopped his car, pulled him out, threw out the three bags of meat in his van on the road and began to beat Ali. They also torched his van.
Police say they managed to rescue Ali from the mob, and he died later at a hospital. They also say they suspect it to be premeditated murder, Ali had a criminal record, according to Jharkhand police spokesperson R.K. Mallick, and was an accused in a case involving a child's kidnapping and murder.
So far, the police have arrested 12 of the 13 accused, including local BJP leader Nityanand Mahato. The police have also identified Deepak Mishra and Chhotu Rana, both members of the local gau raksha samiti, as the main accused, based on videos captured by passersby. One chilling video shows Rana, a local carpenter, thrashing a bloodied Ali with a polycarbonate stick Mishra gave him after he had tired of hitting Ali. Rana surrendered at a local court on July 1, followed by Mishra and Verma on July 3.
- By Amitabh Srivastava
On May 18 night, amid WhatsApp-fuelled rumours of child-lifters, an angry mob in a Jharkhand village set upon three Muslim cattle traders, beating them to death and also attacking policemen who tried to intervene.
Eighteen people have been arrested; officers in charge of Bagbera and Rajnagar suspended
It was late at night on May 18, when a village patrolling team of 100 men in Bagmeda, a backwater locality in Jharkhand's Seraikela-Kharsawan district, spotted a car coming towards them. With rumours of child lifters doing the rounds on social media, the men thought it was a good enough reason to stop the car. Fearing trouble, the car did not stop. Provoked, the crowd chased the car, pelted stones at it and forced it to stop. The three men, from Haldipokhar village in adjoining East Singhbhum district, tried explaining that they were going to Rajnagar to buy cattle to sell at the Saturday haat at Haldipokhar. Refusing to believe them, the mob pulled the three men, Sheikh Naim, 35, Sheikh Sajju, 25, and Sheikh Siraj, 26, out. Two of them managed to escape, but the villagers tied the third, Naim, to an electric pole and beat him to death. They burnt the car and then started looking for the other two. Within an hour, they traced Sajju and Siraj, whom Sunil Mahto of Shosomauli village had given shelter, and lynched them. A police team, which tried to stop the mob, was also assaulted, and their jeep torched. The same night, the bloodthirsty mob lynched another four people.
- By Amitabh Srivastava
Lynch Nation
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
Kaushik Deka
Kaushik Deka Damayanti Datta
July 14, 2017
ISSUE DATE: July 24, 2017UPDATED: July 14, 2017 16:42 IST
Photo: Somnath Sen
Photo: Somnath Sen
They 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 heart-wrenching 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 Delhi-Kolkata 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."
ADVERTISEMENT
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 anti-social 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 "over-reported and over-hyped" 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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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, resentment, frustration, prejudice, malice. One trigger and things suddenly get out of hand, she explains. "This is not to justify mob lynchings, but to recognise lynchings and riots do not necessarily rely on criminals." It's what Freud described as 'mass psychology' in the wake of World War I.
As India gears up to celebrate big events on the national calendar-from the most radical tax reform to 70 years of Independence-the ordinary citizen seems to be in the throes of an epidemic of anger, points out Kolkata psychiatrist Dr Jai Ranjan Ram: with their incomes, their quality of life, their relationships, their political leaders, the lack of jobs, healthcare, decent education and opportunities. "With all the grave uncertainties of life, the thin crust of civilisation we take for granted slips easily." Rage spills over into collective violence. "People take the law into their own hands when 'fear' takes huge proportions, making it an issue that they feel must be dealt with instantly."
COWS BETWEEN US
Until that evening of April 1, Yadav was just another 19-year-old in small-town India. You could see him anytime around Behror, 60 km from Alwar in Rajasthan, vrooming about on his motorbike, hair slicked back, shirt flapping, with his trusted lieutenant 'Mithun' (so called for his intense admiration for Bollywood hero Mithun Chakravarti) and his pack of friends, most of them college-educated, and working in schools and colleges. Born to well-off, socially-prominent OBC parents, his mother Preeti (alias Babli) is a village sarpanch, he was given wide latitude in whatever he wanted to do. The doting parents even put up giant billboards with Vipin's image in front of their two-storied house, congratulating the first-year BA student of Government PG College, on becoming the student union president.
Yadav also happened to be a junior volunteer cow vigilante, one of the many in the state, who mobilise networks of information-via local WhatsApp groups, shopkeepers and petty traders around the highways and even local constables and then chase down trucks suspected of carrying cattle to slaughter on motorbikes or set up road obstructions. "It's a huge network of young people, who are enrolled as members, given ID cards, responsibilities, mentors to take instructions from and even work in shifts," says one, on condition of anonymity. They also get informed by ex-cow smugglers, whom they have either pardoned or promised reward against a tip-off. "If caught, vigilante justice usually involves some hard slaps, punches and kicks, nothing more." For the unlucky, like Pehlu Khan, a 55-year-old dairy farmer from Nuh in Haryana, it can cost a life.
BJP-ruled Rajasthan has banned eating, selling, possessing, transporting or exporting of cows, with a 10-year jail term or a fine of up to Rs 10,000. Yet, Rajasthan traditionally holds India's biggest cattle fair in Jaipur. It was here that Pehlu Khan had bought a milch cow. Although Yadav has been arrested as the prime accused, none of the six gau rakshaks Pehlu Khan named before his death figure in any video obtained so far. One version is that while the six took away the cattle to a cow shelter, the mob took over, with Yadav chasing Khan with predatory single-mindedness. Another view is that Yadav had chanced upon the incident and led the assault "in the heat of the moment". The "real culprits" were the gau rakshaks, who took away the cattle, instigated others and retreated when the restless crowd turned nasty.
Whatsapp woes
Social media, the Internet and Web 2.0 applications have made mobbing and lynching easier. Take the May 2017 Jharkhand lynchings where 10 people died in and around Seraikela-Kharsawan, Singhbhum, Shobhapur and Sosomouli villages. To BJP state committee member and tribal leader Ramesh Hansda, who visited the affected areas, the violence was the "curse of social media". That's because a WhatsApp message, with pictures of dead children, had been circulating for a month: 'Suspected child lifters are carrying sedatives, injections, spray, cotton and small towels. They speak Hindi, Bangla and Malayalam. If you happen to see any stranger near your house immediately inform local police as he could be a member of the child lifting gang,' the message read.
Many had armed themselves with sticks and rods, and even stopped children from going to school. The unverified message was later traced to a series of people who had created and circulated it to a large number of WhatsApp groups on May 11. A day later, two people died in the first lynching at Jadugora. It left behind the indelible image of Mohammed Naeem, blood-soaked and pleading to villagers with folded hands to spare his life, hours before he was beaten to death. He was a good son to his ageing parents and a good father to his children, said his family members, refusing to accept the compensation of Rs 2 lakh offered by the district administration.
LAW AND LYNCHERS
On July 1, when the Jharkhand police picked up Nityanand Mahato, BJP district media-in-charge from Ramgarh's BJP office, dragging him by the collar into a waiting van, it marked a sharp departure in lynching investigations. Mahato, an influential local leader belonging to the socially-predominant Koyri community, was charged with 'premeditated murder' for the lynching of meat trader Asgar Alimuddin, on June 29. Though Mahato denied his involvement, the police team under additional director general of police R.K. Mallik had collected ample evidence, from phone records to mobile tower dumps, to establish that he had instigated a group to drag Asgar out of his van and beat him up, at a place barely 500 metres from his home.
Far too often, however, the accused are booked under milder IPC sections-341 (wrongful confinement), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) or 34 (acts done by several persons with common intention) and get out on bail, if arrested at all. Sometimes, no action is taken for long, or only after public opinion forces a probe. Despite the nationwide furore in September 2015, when Muslim blacksmith Mohammad Akhlaq was dragged out of his home in Uttar Pradesh's Bisada village and bludgeoned to death by a lynch mob, over mere suspicion that he had beef in his fridge, the police filed the chargesheet nearly three months later. What's more, it had no mention of 'beef'. The reason? The police were still awaiting a forensic report on the type of meat found in his house.
Civil society activists are canvassing for a new law, Maanav Suraksha Kanoon or MaSuKa, to deal specifically with the rash of mob lynchings across the country. "There have been almost no convictions or punishments, even in high-profile cases, and perpetrators seem unconcerned about the consequences of their actions," says senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, who has just rolled out a new draft law, for public inputs, comments and review. "Our laws are quite adequate to deal with lynchings," adds senior advocate and co-drafter Rebecca John. "Murder in any form falls under Section 302 of the IPC." But there are loopholes-from provisions for compensation, rehabilitation, speedy justice, witness protection, special courts to holding the local police accountable for any lynching that take place in their jurisdiction, that the draft law seeks to plug.
POLITICS OF SILENCE
What makes this moment unique is the silence of the political leadership. PM Modi has spoken against lynchings only twice thus far. And on both occasions, after a considerable stretch of studied silence: eight days after the Dadri lynching in 2015 and after about 20 mob lynchings this year. That silence has become the hallmark of almost all top NDA leaders and chief ministers of BJP states. That silence has also generated a growing belief that our leaders have no answers for the problems that face us.
It took Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar three days to break his silence over Junaid's killing, although he was active on Twitter. It took the Modi government four days to break its silence on Junaid, with law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad condemning the incident, the first top leader of the BJP to do so. Describing lynchings as "extremely painful and shameful", he said, "Our government will not tolerate this. Our government is very clear that the law will have to do its job." It took six days for Jharkhand CM Raghubar Das to own up to "lapses on the part of the official machinery", despite national outrage over mobs beating innocent men to death over child kidnapping rumours. It took Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje almost a month to react to the Alwar lynching in her state. It was prompted by an open letter to her from 23 former IAS officers, condemning the incident and demanding justice.
The silence from the top is juxtaposed by inflammatory speeches from below: from Sadhvi Prachi's "those who consume beef deserve such actions against them" to BJP MLA Sangeet Som's "UP government will pay price for favouring Muslims", from Hindu Raksha Dal president Bhoopendra Chaudhary's "cases of cow slaughter will be dealt with in the same way as the Hindus did in Bisada" to RSS leader Tarun Vijay's "Hindus should not be responsible for peace and order. Muslim victims should remain mute". The frenzy of hate speeches was leashed somewhat with finance minister and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley saying "their statements (were) not appreciated by the party at all".
Long before the arrest of Mahato in Jharkhand, the activity and network of information, informants, surveillance and muscle power of cow vigilantes across states and their role in lynching had started to unravel. Local vigilante leaders publicly hailed some of the accused in the Alwar lynching as 'heroes'.
"There is disquiet and concern, not just in the BJP, but also in certain sections of the Sangh parivar, over the lynchings of Muslims and Dalits as well as the cow protection issue," say party insiders. "Will anti-parivar forces embarrass the government and the party by pinning all responsibility on their shoulders?" The worry appears genuine, they say, given the speech RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, the ideological guide of the ruling NDA, delivered in April: "Gau hatya-bandi sarkar ke aadhin hai. Hamari ichha hai ki sampurna Bharat mein gauvansh ki hatya band ho. Is kanoon ko prabhavi banana sarkar ki zimmedari hai (the decision to impose a ban on cow slaughter rests with the government. We want cow slaughter to be banned in the entire country. It is the duty of the government to make this law effective)." In August last year, he had expressed his resentment over PM Modi's speech on 'fake' cow protectors "who wanted to divide the country". "Gau rakshaks cannot be compared with those undesirable elements who are raking up the issue of cow slaughter or spreading unfounded rumours about slaughter. The latter are busy serving their narrow personal or political ends," he had claimed, in an attempt to distance cow protectors from the increasing cow-related violence.
It's not hard to understand why their words have little effect on the ground. While denouncing violence, the RSS brass have not stopped their tirade against Muslims. Former RSS pracharak and Haryana CM Khattar was quoted recently by a newspaper, as saying that Muslims could stay in India but they would have to give up eating beef. The CM later claimed that he was misquoted. Adding to this commotion, the Union government issued a circular, banning sale of cattle for slaughter in cattle markets. The circular was first stayed by the Madras High Court and later by the Supreme Court. Such unprecedented focus on cow protection has made it an easy excuse for lumpen elements to resort to violence in the name of holy cow.
BJP president Amit Shah, meanwhile, is locked in a war of words with the Opposition over non-existent numbers: were there more lynchings under the previous governments or in three years of NDA rule? Shah insists there is "no apprehension or fear" anywhere in the country. He has, apparently, sent out a clear message across party rank and file: "These incidents are most condemnable. As a society, we must contain them and allow the law to take its own course." Says a senior BJP leader, "The only mistake we've made is that our leaders have been slow in condemning the incidents."
AND LIFE GOES ON
Here is someone who nearly hit the headlines. No, he was not beaten to death, his limbs were not chopped off, he was not set on fire, although there was some talk of it, and no onlooker uploaded his video on social media. Instead, he was made to yell 'Jai Shri Ram' at knife point by a dozen men, who blocked his car somewhere on the Palwal-Aligarh road on July 1. They asked him his name, but he was not smart enough to fib his way out of it. Back in his New Friends Colony home now, the 56-year-old Delhi businessman still wakes up to bloodcurdling cries of, "Maans nikaal (bring out the beef)" at night. The thin line between life and death for him that day was a box of kebabs his aunts had packed for him that he had left behind by mistake. What if he had remembered?
with Rohit Parihar, Uday Mahurkar and Amitabh Srivastava
On June 22, aboard a Delhi-Mathura train, three Muslim youth were beaten up after an argument over seats. Later, a private security guard stabbed one of the brothers, 15-year-old Junaid Khan, to death After two weeks, police arrest the main accused, who claims he acted in self-defence.
At around 7.20 pm on June 22, Jalaludin, a taxi driver in Faridabad's Khandawali village, got a call telling him his sons were in trouble at the Ballabhgarh railway station. Rushing there, he found that the Delhi-Mathura Passenger, on which his boys were travelling, had departed. Returning home to break his roza, Jalaludin was flooded with more calls, telling him to rush to the civil hospital at Palwal. There, he found two of his sons, Shaqir and Hashim, covered in bloodied bandages, but not Junaid. "I thought he was in the ICU," Jalaludin later told wife Saira. Hours later, he was informed his son, just 15, had died.
Junaid had accompanied older brother Hashim and friends Moin and Mohsin to Delhi that morning to buy new clothes for Eid. Returning home by train, they got into an altercation over seats. The four were reportedly assaulted by a group of men who pulled their beards and taunted for 'eating beef'. Things escalated, and at some point, someone in the group pulled out a knife. While Hashim, Moin and Mohsin escaped with injuries, Junaid was not so lucky. Thrown out at Asaoti station, he bled to death, head in brother Hashim's lap.
Swinging into action only after the story made the lead headline in every newspaper and TV news broadcast, the Manohar Lal Khattar government constituted a special investigation team to nab the culprits, besides announcing a reward of Rs 2 lakh for information on them. The SIT at first arrested five men, including a Delhi government employee. Two weeks later, police arrested the main accused, Naresh Kumar, who is from Bhamrola in Palwal and worked as a private security guard in Delhi.
-By Asit Jolly
Photo: Abid BhatPhoto: Abid Bhat
On June 23, outside the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, a mob bludgeoned Mohammed Ayub Pandith, a deputy superintendent (DSP) in the Jammu & Kashmir Police, to death.
Five of the 12 suspects in custody are believed to be local youths
Minutes past midnight on June 23, the night of Shab-e-Qadr (pious night), a mob gathered outside the Jamia Masjid in Nowhatta, Srinagar. The target of its anger was a 57-year-old deputy superintendent of the Jammu & Kashmir police, Mohammed Ayub Pandith. On access control duty at the grand mosque, reports say Pandith was taking photos of worshippers leaving after prayers, which allegedly caused the mob to turn on him. When the mob grew violent, Pandith reportedly defended himself by opening fire with his service pistol. Eyewitnesses later told police that Pandith was identified as a policeman before he was surrounded, stripped and killed. His body was then dumped in a drain beside the mosque. This was the first lynching of a policeman by a civilian mob in the three decades of unrest in the Kashmir Valley, symptomatic of the intense anger that they feel against the police. State police are often called upon to quell the stone-pelting protests that have become the norm since 2008, when riots erupted over the decision to transfer land in the Valley to the Amarnath shrine board. Officers say that the continuing use of state police to subdue protesting mobs, causing thousands of youngsters to sustain bullet or pellet injuries, has resulted in a deep-seated resentment against the force. Five people have been arrested. Inspector general for Kashmir Muneer Khan tells India Today that the SIT constituted to investigate the lynching is very close to cracking the case, a number of recoveries have been made and several suspects are being interrogated.
- By Asit Jolly
On June 29, self-styled 'cow protectors' beat a meat trader, Asgar Ali, to death in Ramgarh, Jharkhand Police have arrested 12 persons, including a local BJP leader.
On June 29, the very day Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat that murder in the name of 'gau bhakti (cow worship)' was unacceptable, Jharkhand witnessed yet another murder. Asgar Ali, alias Alimuddin, who was 42 and a meat trader by profession, was driving his Maruti van from Chitarpur to Ramgarh, two companions in tow, a journey he took routinely to transport meat to his customers in Ramgarh. As he reached a crowded market 2.5 km from Ramgarh police station, a group of 30 men stopped his car, pulled him out, threw out the three bags of meat in his van on the road and began to beat Ali. They also torched his van.
Police say they managed to rescue Ali from the mob, and he died later at a hospital. They also say they suspect it to be premeditated murder, Ali had a criminal record, according to Jharkhand police spokesperson R.K. Mallick, and was an accused in a case involving a child's kidnapping and murder.
So far, the police have arrested 12 of the 13 accused, including local BJP leader Nityanand Mahato. The police have also identified Deepak Mishra and Chhotu Rana, both members of the local gau raksha samiti, as the main accused, based on videos captured by passersby. One chilling video shows Rana, a local carpenter, thrashing a bloodied Ali with a polycarbonate stick Mishra gave him after he had tired of hitting Ali. Rana surrendered at a local court on July 1, followed by Mishra and Verma on July 3.
- By Amitabh Srivastava
On May 18 night, amid WhatsApp-fuelled rumours of child-lifters, an angry mob in a Jharkhand village set upon three Muslim cattle traders, beating them to death and also attacking policemen who tried to intervene.
Eighteen people have been arrested; officers in charge of Bagbera and Rajnagar suspended
It was late at night on May 18, when a village patrolling team of 100 men in Bagmeda, a backwater locality in Jharkhand's Seraikela-Kharsawan district, spotted a car coming towards them. With rumours of child lifters doing the rounds on social media, the men thought it was a good enough reason to stop the car. Fearing trouble, the car did not stop. Provoked, the crowd chased the car, pelted stones at it and forced it to stop. The three men, from Haldipokhar village in adjoining East Singhbhum district, tried explaining that they were going to Rajnagar to buy cattle to sell at the Saturday haat at Haldipokhar. Refusing to believe them, the mob pulled the three men, Sheikh Naim, 35, Sheikh Sajju, 25, and Sheikh Siraj, 26, out. Two of them managed to escape, but the villagers tied the third, Naim, to an electric pole and beat him to death. They burnt the car and then started looking for the other two. Within an hour, they traced Sajju and Siraj, whom Sunil Mahto of Shosomauli village had given shelter, and lynched them. A police team, which tried to stop the mob, was also assaulted, and their jeep torched. The same night, the bloodthirsty mob lynched another four people.
- By Amitabh Srivastava
Lynch Nation
No comments:
Post a Comment