May the silent be damned
A big riot would concentrate the mind, make a damning headline. A protracted riot in slow motion, individual victims across different states, simply makes this appear another daily routine. This makes opposing it harder; it makes holding onto the outrage nearly impossible.
Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Updated: June 27, 2017Junaid Khan, Mohammad Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Zahid Rasool Bhat, Abu Hanifa, Riazuddin Ali, Zafar Hussain, Ayub Pandit. the list can go on, will tragically go on, in a republic whose only near certain headline these days is a lynching. The protests will come, hesitant and muted. But even the tag line of the protest, “Not In My Name”, will, unconsciously, betray a sense of numb helplessness. All we can do is distance ourselves, deny our culpability. But whether we can prevent this atrocity from being repeated is another matter. A monstrous new moral order is unfolding, irrigated by the blood of our citizens. But this monstrosity is also wickedly clever. It is unfolding slowly, picking on individual victims, manifesting through a thousand cuts, rather than through a big cataclysm.
A big riot would concentrate the mind, make a damning headline. A protracted riot in slow motion, individual victims across different states, simply makes this appear another daily routine. This makes opposing it harder; it makes holding onto the outrage nearly impossible. We can keep repeating our outrage till our words are exhausted; each expression of outrage loses its power simply by being made to be repeated over and over. What began as a loud voice over Akhlaq is now a fading echo over Junaid. It is evil telling language: “I am more inexhaustible than you.” Every repetition of condemnation seems to diminish its power. After Dadri, the critics are made to sound like broken records, each protest less effective than another. Meanwhile, every act of violence emboldens another.
But if evil is already patiently wearing down protest, there is a deeper reason why this kind of violence represents a new benchmark in Indian politics. There are, of course, the usual defence mechanisms to deny the gravity of this violence. It is an irony that in an age defined by hype, the only hype that is condemned is one that tries to bring this violence to the centre of our attention. Pointing out that violence has happened before, in other political regimes, that it is an endemic part of the way vulnerable groups, Dalits, Adivasis, increasingly minorities, are put in their place is also no longer an enabling moral insight. Instead of using this history to behove us to take this violence seriously, we use it simply as a way of deflecting attention.
The sins of the past become the perfect excuse for destroying the moral community of the future. The third mechanism is to quarter justice into partisan hues till it disappears from sight. Since X did not condemn violence against Y, their protest on violence against Z must be in bad faith. This argument itself now has become a weapon of psychic warfare to disable any confronting of violence. It is often not even a true description of people’s position, but more a tool to shut them down. Indeed, it is a strange corrosion of the moral order which is focussed on condemnation of each and every act of evil individually; no citizen can possibly deal with every single act of evil in this country. It deflects attention from the underlying institutions and moral principles at work.
These lynchings are fiendishly redefining citizenship. The significance of this violence is not just the number: Whether it is 15 incidents or 50. It is to spread the fear that it can happen at any moment, anywhere. This violence establishes a new political dispensation, where a group of people claim direct sovereignty: They act above formal law and order institutions, they feel entitled to enforce the morality, and their impunity comes from the fact that they can now stand in for the “authentic people.” Although the violence is different in many respects, there is this commonality in those who lynch in the name of cows and those lynching in the name of azadi in Kashmir. Since I speak in the name of the authentic Hindu or the authentic Kashmiri, my violence now has this imprimatur of what I take to be a people’s sovereignty.
Let us make no mistake about this. There will be a lot of mendacious evasions. It will be said that this violence is not over beef. It has to do with some other disputes. Lynchings and vigilante violence have happened before, even under Congress rule. Violence happens across political regimes. But its placement in a normative order also matters. These obvious facts cannot take away one large feature of the current wave. What makes this violence chilling is not what’s in the statistic. It is that it is acquiring an atmosphere of a religious communion about it. It is violence to establish the power of the majority, and to redefine that majority as a political dispensation sees fit. This violence is now united by one single thread, of showing minorities their place. All of us are innocent till proven guilty; minorities, whether on a train, driving a truck, transporting cattle, distributing sweets, are guilty until proven innocent. This violence seeks to alter the fundamental moral and constitutional order: The victim of the lynching is presented as the criminal, while the ideologies that justify this killing enjoy the patronage of the state. This is what makes it induce so much fear. A fear exacerbated by the fact that our public conscience seems to have been all but dismantled.
The metaphysical invocation of India’s diversity, or the examples of personal virtue here and there, should not blind us to the core ideological, institutional and human rights problem this new wave of lynching represents. Narendra Modi may loudly proclaim that he is defending our borders. But his cowardly silences, or abstract gestures, are emboldening the barbarians within. What political dispensation will be able to prevent this list from Akhlaq to Ayub from growing is an open question. But at least we should say, “May the silent be damned.”
The writer is president, CPR Delhi and contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’
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The Indian Express
We, the Cows
All cows are created equal, but cows born in Karnal or Kanpur or Alwar are more equal than cows born in Kochi or Kohima or Imphal. Every week mobs are lynching, torturing and humiliating innocent Muslims and Dalits in the name and under the pretext of cow protection.
Written by Basant Rath
| New Delhi |
Updated: June 27, 2017 7:40 am
From Jhajjar to Jharkhand, from Dadri to Latehar and from Una to Alwar,
a reign of terror in the name of cow protection has spread in some
states in the country. (Representational photo)
From Jhajjar to Jharkhand, from Dadri to Latehar and from Una to Alwar, a reign of terror in the name of cow protection has spread in some states in the country. Irrespective of the veracity of the claims – real, rumoured or WhatsApped – of the criminal mobs bent on taking law into their politically protected hands, the moment an Akhlaq in Dadri or a Naeem in Shobhapur is justified in dettol-sanitised TV studios, the cause for lynching becomes arbitrary.
Any alleged harm to the cause of cow protection has suddenly become reason enough to justify street-level mafia-style instant justice at the hands of a mob baying for human blood and bones. No proof needs to be provided and no legal procedures to be followed. If a mob suddenly decides one fine morning that the cow is being wronged, it can chase anyone, drag them out of their houses and kill them.
As organised criminal squads roam India’s highways inspecting livestock trucks for any trace of the animal and terrorise citizens of this country, the Supreme Court has issued notices to Rajasthan along with five other Indian states namely Gujarat, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka and to the central government asking for a ban on such groups.
Every week mobs are lynching, torturing and humiliating innocent Muslims and Dalits in the name and under the pretext of cow protection. They have unleashed a reign of terror. And the police have turned inaction into an art form. Their ability and willingness to turn a blind eye to the organised criminal activities of the so-called cow protectors has ended up making the organised gangs and their leaders confident enough to commit crimes in full public view and film their heinous acts with their smartphones for publicity.
This criminal behaviour is not an offspring of an unanticipated emotional hour, the abrupt outburst of uncontrolled anger, or the irrational brutality of an insane mob. It represents the contrived, cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent criminals who know that they’ll get away with their inhuman deeds and that they have enough political and police protectors to take care of the legal consequences.
Talking about the law, let’s remember this.
All cows are created equal, but cows born in Karnal or Kanpur or Alwar are more equal than cows born in Kochi or Kohima or Imphal.
In Haryana, the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist is three years less than for a cow-slaughtering offence. As many as 67 cases per day of crimes against women are being recorded these days, but the truth is that molesting a woman is a smaller offence than being in possession of beef.
Haryana, second only to Uttar Pradesh, in the number of complaints against the police, can take credit for another indicator. Over the last 15 years, crimes against Scheduled Castes in Haryana have shown a seven-fold increase, second only to Rajasthan in absolute numbers.
Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are in good company. Jharkhand is fast catching up. Perhaps the police leaders in these states believe that silence is not only golden, it leads to a goldmine for their careers as well.
As a member of the Indian Police Service myself, I have, in fact, a few questions for my fellow officers in these states:
How many of you saw that photograph of the young man from East Singhbhum, Jharkhand – blood trickling down his head and drenching his white vest, hands together in supplication and eyes filled with fear — pleading for mercy and struggling to convince those hunting him that he is innocent?
Did you avert your gaze? Did you look at his eyes? Did you look and not feel sick with bile that rose in your mouth? Did you look and argue What, If, What If and But? Did you feel his indignities in your bones? Did he remind you of Qutubuddin Ansari, whose pleading image in front of a rioting mob in Gujarat in 2002 became the face of one of independent India’s worst communal episodes?
His name was Mohammed Naeem and he was the father of three children. He cried like a helpless infant about to be mauled by a group of mad dogs. They lynched him anyway, in Shobhapur, less than an hour’s drive from Jamshedpur. Another group of three men were killed less than 20 kms away in a string of raids triggered by rumours about child kidnapping gangs. The police reached the spot before the last of the fatal blows landed on him. Their inaction follows a familiar pattern.
Question is, what makes men kill other men even if they don’t like what they eat ? When did the mob start meting out morality, trashing the Constitution which refuses to distinguish between citizens on the basis of identity? And why are these lynch-mobs, masquerading as cow-protection groups, growing by the day?
As we celebrate the 70th year of independence a few weeks from now, let us recall the nature of the freedom struggle that became the bedrock of the Constitution. We swore to become a sovereign, secular, democratic republic and have tried to keep the faith for decades. Until now. Today the sanctity accorded to the most precious right of all, the fundamental right to life, under Article 21, is under grave threat.
But We, the People, are and must remain sovereign. The cows, on the other hand, must go back to where they belong, in a ‘gaushala.’
Basant Rath is a 2000-batch IPS officer who belongs to the Jammu & Kashmir cadre.
