By Amulya Ganguli
The BJP intends to bring a law which will equate stone-pelting with lynching. Although the original idea about a fresh look at mob violence only concerned lynching, the government appears to be thinking of widening its ambit. Hence, a ministerial reference to the stone-pelters in case anyone dies as a result of their lawless acts.
Lynching in common parlance stands for the targeted killing of an individual by a group or causing grievous injury. The person who is attacked is generally unarmed or is unable to protect himself when four or five of the assailants pounce on him. In the case of the stone-pelters, a phenomenon associated with Kashmir, it is the other way around. The pelters themselves carry no weapons other than the stones while those whom they “attack” are usually heavily armed.
The latter, therefore, are not as defenceless as the victim of a lynching elsewhere in the country. It is the vulnerability of the person who is lynched which is of importance. Historically, wherever lynching has taken place – whether of the blacks in the US by the Ku Klux Klan or the Jews in Nazi Germany by the fascists or the Muslims in India by saffron groups – the sufferers are always weak and at the mercy of the attackers.
The tying of a man to the bonnet of an army jeep as it drove into a trouble-prone area in Kashmir can be compared with lynching since the person, who may not have been physically harmed, was held hostage by those who immobilized him and must have been terrified during the humiliating and degrading experience.
The so-called custodial deaths are another example of lynching where the suspects, who may or may not have faced a magistrate, are sometimes beaten to death inside a police station. Similar treatments are also meted out to the accused when they are subjected to what is known as third-degree methods which is another name for torture. It is a barbaric practice which goes back to the colonial era and which independent India has now made it the country’s own.
If the government wanted the committee probing the menace of lynching to bring other forms of mob violence under its purview apart from the beating to death of alleged cow smugglers or beef-eaters, it could have thought of custodial deaths rather than of stone pelting.
The reason is that as Justice A.N. Mulla of the Allahabad High Court memorably observed in 1960: “I say with all sense of responsibility that there is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crimes comes anywhere near the record of that organized unit which is known as the Indian police force”. The focus on stone pelting, which involves mainly Muslims, rather than on deaths in police custody says much about the government’s outlook.
Besides, the very act of setting up a high-level committee to examine lynching is an implicit admission of the government’s failure to deal with the crime although there are laws aplenty for tackling the outrageous incidents, especially when the perpetrators are usually no more than four of five in number while the rest who are caught on camera are onlookers.
While arrests have been made, the subsequent pursuit of the cases has left a lot to be desired since the police haven’t always been able to ensure that the guilty are sentenced by the courts. Lack of evidence is one reason for this “failure”, but the suspicion remains that the police have been tardy in their investigations because of the political connections of the assailants, which were evident when a Union minister garlanded some of the convicts.
Against this background of a mixture crime and politics, only an incorrigible optimist will believe that the committee will be able to come out with a foolproof solution. A new law will only make the statute books bulkier without providing any remedy because the nexus between the police and the politicians is unlikely to be broken.
The lynching of Muslims has seemingly replaced the widespread communal riots which were seen earlier. The last such a major outbreak was in Gujarat in 2002. However, the effects of lynching are more insidious and longer-lasting as they can make the targeted community feel more vulnerable at all times even in public spaces and in broad daylight, for no one knows when an attack can take place. This was what the teenager, Junaid Khan, found out when he was killed inside a train compartment following a dispute over seat sharing.
A volatile atmosphere conducive to lynching has been building up ever since the Muslims were specifically targeted by the Sangh Parivar from the 1990s, reminding them of being the children of invaders – Babur ki aulad – of being destroyers of temples in medieval times and of being responsible for the country’s partition. The venom which the saffron brotherhood injected into the minds of its followers then is now yielding its poisonous fruit.
(IPA Service)
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