The itch to lynch

Till Pehlu Khan’s videographed lynching, the prevalent wisdom held the plight of Muslims like him, and the many Akhlaqs beaten to death before him, to their association with the cattle trade. It was argued that the lynchings were a result of the new government's attempts to instil a new set of values replacing those that had prevailed since Independence and even before that. Even this veneer of justification does not hide the ugliness and pathos of helpless men in a strange land being beaten to death by enraged mobs on mere suspicion of indulging in an act that went against their belief systems. It also does not camouflage the ugly truth that each of these actions is squarely illegal and the law has been slow to apprehend the culprits. 

But the lynching of the police officer in Srinagar and a Muslim teenager in a train in Haryana are symptoms that the blight has spread. As political parties adopt a muted response to the blood on the streets, mobs of angry men are now raring to settle their societal and political disagreements by lynching the hapless and the outnumbered. The dark undertones and the motive that led to the Srinagar lynching are qualitatively different from the dozen cases of mobs beating Muslims to death in mainland India. But the intent remains the same: to sentence to death someone outside the law without a trial.

As was the case in the US after slavery was abolished, the intention behind lynching is to sow terror. There is no attempt to gather proof. If the mob in Srinagar and on the Mathura train had the inclination to sort out facts from fiction, it would have found neither the police officer nor the Muslim teenager guilty of a crime that deserved a death sentence in the most painful and humiliating manner possible. Prime Minister Modi has publicly spoken just once on this issue but saffron mobs have carried on nevertheless. Helmsmen will come and go. But as the US discovered, the price for state-condoned violence is paid by several generations thereafter.