Modi and the mobland

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Two reports have documented an alarming rise in mob violence during the Modi decade, linking it to the spread of Hindutva under BJP rule. The impunity the mobs have enjoyed has helped violence that began as communal vigilantism spread across society.

“It is a denial of Hinduism and ahimsa to kill a human being to protect a cow." - Mahatma Gandhi

In the last few days, two reports have landed on my table that have caused me immense distress. The first is a massive tome of 750 pages, compiled by Zafarul-Islam Khan, that sets out in painful detail as many as 1,743 instances of “mob lynching”, meticulously traced to sources set out in the footnotes, that have defaced the fair name of Hinduism in the Narendra Modi decade stretching from his ascent to the Prime Minister’s position in May 2014 to the election he almost lost in June 2024.

The 1,743 “mob lynchings” over 10 years translate into an average of 174 lynchings every year, or one lynching every two days. That is, of course, a derived average. What exactly has happened is that as the perpetrators have discovered their immunity from state action, there has been an upward trend rising well above a lynching every two days to close to a lynching every day.

Moreover, the evidence reveals that a disproportionate number of these lynchings occur in the States of the Gangetic basin and western India where Hindutva holds sway; the record is far more reassuring in the non-BJP States of the south.

The compiler makes no claim to comprehensiveness, having confined himself to journals in English, Hindi, and Urdu readily available in New Delhi and a thorough scanning of social media. This does not distort the overall picture because these horrifying atrocities are largely confined to Hindi-speaking States.

Second, the incidents mentioned are by no means only of those in which Muslims lost their lives. Also included are numerous cases of Hindus losing life and limb, as well as members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, besides Christian, Sikh, and other religious minorities. But the overwhelming majority are Muslims. The heterogeneity of victims only goes to show that targeted extrajudicial killings affect all. Communities are both perpetrators and victims.

Genesis of violence

How has this happened? Through the unbridled use of hate speech, as demonstrated in the second report I have recently seen, what the author, Harsh Mander, calls “the epidemic of hate speech in New India”. His book of 260 pages is titled It Started with Words, for it is with “words” that violence is caused and the consequences are justified.

Has this always been so, or is there something in the air that accounts for this increasingly vicious societal phenomenon? Obviously, the single biggest change is the pervasiveness of political Hindutva. It takes but the slightest acquaintance with Hindutva writings to discover that violence is at its core and that the Hindu is seen as becoming a true Hindu to the extent to which he celebrates and embodies violence.

Hence the awfulness of it all. In instance after instance, Zafarul-Islam shows that organised vigilantism has been given free rein and the attackers have been shielded by a network of political protection that began with the lynching in Pune of Mohsin Shaikh by 20 activists of the Hindu Rashtra Sena on June 2, 2014, a few days after the Prime Minister’s first swearing-in, as he returned from late-evening prayers wearing a skull cap and sporting a beard.

That was enough to “provoke” the murderous mob attack on him, the word used by Justice Mridula Bhatkar of the Bombay High Court to justify the grant of bail to three of the principal accused. While the Supreme Court did take exception to this outrage, the same High Court judge granted bail again on the grounds that the incident was not “premeditated”. Nine years later, all the accused were acquitted.

This set the tone for what followed. We all have a faint memory of what happened in 2015 to Mohammad Akhlaq of Bisahda village near Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, after rumours spread that he was storing not just beef in his refrigerator but even the head of a cow and its ears and hoofs. Forensic examination showed the meat was not beef, but that could not bring Akhlaq back to life nor heal the wounds inflicted on his son, Danish. The family was forced to move out of the village.

Some 18 persons were arrested, of whom one, Ravi Sisodia, died of renal failure in 2016. His body was wrapped in the national flag and a Union Minister named Mahesh Sharma attended the funeral saying that he had come “on behalf of the Central government” to convey condolences to the bereaved Sisodia family. Akhlaq had been buried with no government honours and no ceremony. Ten years later, at the instance of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and with the prior consent of the Governor, the case, then at the evidentiary stage, was withdrawn and all the accused were freed.

The compiler has helpfully included in the book’s Annexe the “fact-finding” report of a group of six civil society activists who visited the village and spoke, as best as they were permitted to, to the villagers, some of whom were a little remorseful and many who were not.

It is impossible in a short column to cover all the 1,700-plus cases compiled in the report of “mob lynching” in the Modi years. One of the report’s drawbacks is that the compilation includes cases of assault and murder that involve individual rather than “mob” action, which, however horrendous, hardly constitute “mob lynching”. Such cases are easily recognised and, therefore, may be classified as “criminal” rather than as “lynchings”.

Everyone suffers

Significantly, such atrocities have been directed at not only Muslims but also other minority communities, particularly Christians, and, in hundreds of cases itemised by the compiler, Hindus of all castes. Indeed, the charts which introduce the compilation of individual cases show that over the 10 terrible years, the number of Hindus killed and injured (787 and 327 respectively) exceeds by a large margin the number of Muslims killed, even if the number of Muslims injured is almost twice the number of Hindus injured (634 and 327 respectively).

What was initially communal has, by the very impunity that fostered it, spread across communities and infected the entire body politic. Among the most sickening is case no. 640 relating to the gruesome hacking in Udaipur, Rajasthan, of a Hindu tailor named Kanhaiya Lal Teli by Mohammad Riyaz Akhtari and Ghouse Mohammad, associates of the Dawat-e-Islami, whose members hatched the conspiracy and arranged for a 12-year-old boy to shoot on camera the entire episode for later circulation on social media.

That the boy held the camera steady while the cleavers did their job is testimony to the normalisation of deliberate massacre induced by immunity and hate speech by eminent personalities who use hate as the principal instrument for leveraging electoral support, as Mander’s book shows. There is an intimate connection between hate speech and its manifestation in mob violence and individual retribution.

The lesson to be learned by all Indians is this: “The violence started with cow-related vigilantism but is now building up more violent behaviour—from small to big reasons, anything could be the trigger,” as stated by Upneet Lalli, an expert in correctional administration, in a 2018 interview to a media outlet. This is valorised by extrajudicial bulldozer and “encounter” policing and biased mass media reporting, particularly on television.

This new trend has been reinforced by Muslims being targeted not only for possession or transportation of cattle but for merely looking Muslim. Impunity has also been fostered by the absence of a strict law aimed at severely punishing mob lynching. The fact is that such violence is tantamount to “home-bred terrorism”, woven into the warp and woof of everyday life, and, therefore, even more destructive than episodic Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism.

The argument, often trotted out by none other than the Prime Minister himself, that Hindus by definition cannot be “terrorists” and, therefore, those who engage in violence must necessarily belong to other religions, is bogus and communal at its worst. It must be rejected from national discourse if we are to remain a secular nation.

Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. He has published nine books, the latest, A Maverick in Politics, the second part of his memoir.

This article was originally published on frontline.thehindu.com CLICK HERE to read the article on original link