We should have hung our heads in shame as the world’s greatest festival of democracy opened last month. Spared Sri Lanka’s devastating explosions, India returned to its disgraceful description of “Lynchistan” on 10 April, a day before millions of voters trudged to polling booths in 20 states to choose 91 Lok Sabha members. If chests swell with pride at the achievement and imagine we rank with Britain or the United States in modernity, the previous day’s grisly events in a Jharkhand village confirmed India is still grovelling in the Dark Ages.
The event should be seen in the context of Narendra Modi’s claims about transplants and genetics and Pragya Singh Thakur’s boast that her curse has fatal effect to indicate the level of Indian thinking. While Bharatiya Janata Party rule in itself might arguably have something to commend it, the creed attracts the lumpen hordes for whom religion is little more than ancient prejudices and superstitions whose primitive imprint is branded on society.
Atal Behari Vajpayee’s tenure escaped that danger, as much because of the pragmatism of a prime minister who could separate personal inclination from the nation’s needs, as because of the influence of enlightened colleagues like Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh who balanced extremist elements. as the Congress party’s Ghulam Nabi Azad reminded a Karnataka audience the other day, there were no incidents of lynching and atrocities against Dalits under Vajpayee. “His government did not enter our kitchens to see what we were cooking.”
To be fair, neither does Narendra Modi’s government. But his government often seems to be nowhere on the scene when Dalits, Muslims or Adivasis are persecuted, humiliated, beaten up and murdered. The partisanship becomes more than obvious when protection of the sacred cow can be invoked.
Perhaps the most toxic legacy of the last five years is that India has become a more frightening and dangerous place for the poor – the rich are usually able to buy immunity— among its religious and social minorities. I am not talking of the ban on beef or relatively lower socio-economic and educational standard of Muslims. The former can be explained by citing custom while the latter may be attributed to a range of factors including Muslim resistance to change.
I am talking of the basic norms of civilization. In no civilized nation are men belaboured with lathis for cutting up a dead ox and dragged a kilometre to exultant chants of “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Bajrangbali” as happened in Jurmu village in Jharkhand’s Dumri block. In no civilized nation would victims also have been forced to chant the Hindu devotional slogans and beaten even more harshly for doing so half-heartedly.
Readers of this column would not be guilty of either barbarity of course, but, then, readers of this column do not comprise the reality of India. It’s those Indians who live in the rural interior and whose values are those of hundreds of years ago who must change if India is to be considered modern. But how can they when the country’s leaders are immersed in myths about genetic science and plastic surgery that would make a schoolboy laugh.
Returning to the grim events of 10 April, the mob of nearly 40 men from the Sahu community of a neighbouring village dumped their four battered victims outside the Dumri police station at Jairagi chowk around midnight, according to the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha’s fact-finding team. There the four lay for around four hours during which 50-year old Prakash Lakda succumbed to his injuries.
The police then took him and the three severely injured survivors— Peter Kerketta, Belarius Minj and Janerius Minj— to the health centre where the doctor confirmed that Prakash had probably been dead for an hour or so. According to the doctor, the police officer tried to force him to say Prakash had been brought alive to the hospital which he refused to do. To add insult to injury, the police with whom the perpetrators had a chat that night then filed an FIR for cow slaughter against the four Adivasis and some 25 unnamed villagers.
This is not an isolated outrage. Similar mob brutality has been reported from Haryana, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana. Frenzied attacks in other states have been directed against suspected child lifters or prominent rationalists and secular writers.
Communal hatred and violence are on the rise because the authorities do nothing to correct the expectation that they will look the other way if blood is spilt in a cause that is close to the Hindutva heart. On occasion BJP leaders have even been known to felicitate leaders of lynching mobs. The JMM says at least 11 persons (nine Muslims and two Adivasis) have been lynched and eight more beaten in the name of cow protection or some other communal issue in Jharkhand alone in the last five years.
A young man in a TV discussion said the other day that though a student of English, he had never heard the word “lynch” until recently. Now, it’s as much a part of India’s popular political discourse as “boycott” used to be. The original lynchings in the United States were extra-judicial killings by Caucasian mobs whose purpose was to enforce white supremacy and intimidate blacks and other minority ethnicities through racial terrorism. The objective doesn’t seem to have changed despite differences in time and space.
The silver lining is that most abuses provoke a reaction from a small minority of civilised Indians and a demand for justice, even if nothing comes of it. Based on the JJM report, GroundXero which calls itself “a platform for news, dialogue and debate aimed at holding democracy accountable, staying fiercely independent of any kind of corporate funding and/or control of political parties” has demanded that the false cow slaughter charge against the Jurmu Adivasis should be withdrawn, those responsible for the violence arrested,
and action taken against them under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. It also wants the police disciplined for delaying medical treatment to the victims and filing a false cow slaughter case, interim compensation of Rs 15 lakh for the dead Prakash Lakda’s family, and Rs 10 lakh to each of the three injured.
Jharkhand’s chief minister, Raghubar Das, cannot afford to ignore those demands. As an OBC, he is the first non-tribal to hold that position. He is a veteran of Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution) movement and was imprisoned during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. If he wants to look his constituents in the eye and hopes they will look on him with respect, he must demonstrate he abides by the law of the land and a civilized code of conduct.
Sunanda K Datta-Ray is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
