Lynching also known as vigilante violence refers to the hate inspired violence against the minorities. It is an extrajudicial punishment to punish a person alleged to have committed a crime.
Merriam Webster dictionary describes lynching as, “Putting to death by mob action without legal approval”.
Vocabulary.com describes lynching as putting to death of a person through mob action without recourse to the law – “an unlawful murder by an angry mob of people”.
In India, such violence is mostly inflicted upon Muslims accused in bovine related matters or for any other reason (eg. Love jihad), dalits, inter-faith
couples, mentally challenges women accused of stealing or murdering children (Dayan) in order to provide „Instant Justice‟ or to safeguard their traditional and social norms.
In India, cow has been given the status of a sacred and animal and is worshipped at various places and to kill which is considered a sin.
Most of the states have enacted laws to prohibit slaughter of cows.
Lynchings originated in the 19th century America, where white mobs lynched black Americans if they crossed any historically embedded hierarchical boundary and to instill a sense of fear amongst them. In India, one of the first such incidence took place on 10th June 2012 where activists of Vishwa Hindu Parishad(VHP) and gowshala sangh damaged the factory and burnt the houses of its owners when 25 carcass (similar to that of cows) were found near their
factory and were suspected to have killed them.
The next incidence that gathered a lot of attention took place in Dadri on 28th September 2015 when Mohammad Akhlaq and his son were dragged out of
their home and were beaten to death by a mob of around 2000 people on
suspicion that they stole and slaughtered a cow calf.
Reasons
The reason behind commission of an act of mob violence cannot be attributed to one factor as many factors can contribute towards such violence. The most common reason is technology. In the last one year, 28 people across nine Indian states have been lynched in separate incidents, which have been triggered by rumors spread on social media.
Of these, more than 20 people were victims of mob lynching in the last two months alone.
One such incident
occurred on 15 July 2018 in Karnataka when a software engineer was beaten to death on the suspicion of being a kidnapper.
The spate of lynchings
started last May in eastern Jharkhand state after rumours on WhatsApp about child kidnappers led to the killing of seven men.
The rumours have since
resurfaced, with 21 deaths reported in dozens of attacks across the country mostly targeting non-locals.
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While in all the incidents, rumours of child lifting
went viral in a matter of minutes or even seconds, the police were ill - equipped to deal with the situation. It is well known that the ratio of policemen to population in India is one of the lowest in the world.
The unequipped police and misinformed public are responsible for such lynchings. Of the 60 attacks
since 2010, 31 (52%) were based on rumours, according to our analysis of media reports.
Other contributors to such mob violence are the vigilante groups. In dispensing vigilante justice, religiously charged mobs have become active. They are
running throughout the country seeing themselves as moral vigilantes protecting the sacred order.
They assert their muscle power through intimidation and throw caution to the wind. They perpetrate mob violence on vulnerable
individuals with implied exemption from punishment. They can barge into the homes and check the meat in the refrigerator, attack places of worship of
the minorities, protest outside educational campuses and brand people as „anti - national‟.
Undoubtedly, the political outfits and organisations behind aforesaid acts of violence harness the results of such crimes by moulding them into a political and social propaganda to brainwash one particular community against another and subsequently capitalizing the gains out of it in a manner of their choice namely, elections.
According to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, ban on beef legitimises
vigilante activities by the government which supports such vigilante groups (eg. cow protection groups).
The present government has supported many such
groups. For instance, Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) was founded by the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath in 2002 was responsible for lynching of Gulam Mohammad of Bulandshahar on 1st May 2017 although no person was arrested or named in the FIR.
According to a IndiaSpend report of the 60 attacks over eight years, 58 (96.7%) occurred, as we said, after Modi‟sgovernment came to power (2014-2017) and half the cases of cow-related
violence–30 of 60–were from states governed by the BJP at the time and of the 25 Indians who died over the eight-year period, 21 were Muslim, or 84%.
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The
political backing of such groups gives them the courage to commit the acts of violence against the minority or weaker sections of the society as in most cases none of the accused is named and the accused stay „unidentified‟ or no arrest
takes place.Thus, majoritarian political parties along with intolerant vigilantes are also
responsible for mob lynchings by creating anti-minority laws to restrict their rights and anti-minority groups and to tell them that their rights cannot be protected.
Judicial Aspects(law and order)
The Supreme Court in the case of Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India andothers
issued punitive, remedial and deterrent guidelines for dealing with the cases of mob lynching and recommended the parliament to enact a law to deal with this issue.
The guidelines directs the state governments to designate a senior police officer in each district for taking measures to prevent incidents of mob violence and lynching, to immediately identify districts, sub divisions and
villages where instances of lynching and mob violence have been reported in the recent past, prepare a lynching/mob violence victim compensation scheme,
for the nodal officers shall bring to the notice of the DGP any inter-district co-ordination issues for devising a strategy to tackle lynching and mob violence
related issues, every police officer to cause a mob to disperse, which, in his opinion, has a tendency to cause violence in the disguise of vigilantism orotherwise, to curb and stop dissemination of irresponsible and explosive
messages, videos and other material on various social media platforms, to register FIR under relevant provisions of law against persons who disseminate
such messages, to ensure that there is no further harassment of the family members of the victims, cases of lynching and mob violence shall be specifically tried by designated court/fast track courts earmarked for that purpose in each district and the trial shall preferably be concluded within six
months and the trial court must ordinarily award maximum sentence upon conviction of the accused person to set an example and if any police officer or an officer of the district administration has failed to fulfil his duty, it will be considered as an act of deliberate negligence and he should pe punished for the As mob lynching is not a separate offence in India, the National Crime Records
Bureau (NCRB) does not in its annual report collect data related to such violence. In order to understand the current condition and coverage of the offence such data is relied upon.
It is also important to understand the motive
and context of these incidents through bias indicators which specifies the reason behind the act and provides a better understanding of the situation.
The victims of these attacks are usually the Muslims and Dalits involved either in transportation or allegedly slaughtering cattle and are economically backward. These attacks have a drastic impact on the victims and their family.
They are usually tortured by vigilante groups, economically deprived and
unaware about their rights. A separate law would provide preventive, punitive and remedial measures for the benefit of victims and their family. Such measures would include measures as suggested by the Supreme Court for instance, appointing a special officer to look into the matters relating to mob violence in every district, filing of FIR without any delay and trial of the case in a Fast Track Courts, providing compensation to the victims or their family, impose maximum sentence for the accused and to take action against any officer who fails to comply with the directions in order to prevent and/or investigate and/or facilitate expeditious trial of any crime of mob violence and lynching
After research on the topic
Of the 60 (reported) attacks over eight years, 58 (96.7%) occurred, as we said, after Modi‟s government came to power in 2014 and since then the frequency of these attacks has escalated sharply and such acts of people taking law into into their hands believing to be correct morally and politically poses a great threat to the rule of law and people of minority groups in the country and steps must be taken to check and deter such violence.
The violence is caused by vigilantes who have some or the other political connection with right wing parties and
such people believe themselves to be politically correct and safe while
punishing anyone they believe to have committed any offence.
These activities result in promoting majoritarianism by propagating the beliefs of the majority by suppressing the rights of the minority. The citizens of a country taking law into their hands is unacceptable and for a country like India where citizens are granted fundamental rights such lynchings are abuse of their right to life, right to a fair trial etc
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For a country that claims to be secular it is very important to ensure that the minority groups are not suppressed to fulfil interests of the majority
Conclusion(results)
Mob violence may happen because of various reasons like, witch hunting because of which more than 2000 mentally challenged women were lynched for rumours that alleged them of stealing and murdering children, communal conflagrations as in the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots or anti-Muslim riots of Gujarat in 2002 or inter-faith relations like the lynching of Ghulam Mohammad in July‟17 by Hindu Yuva Vahini because of his relations with a Hindu girl in the neighbourhood, an individual or a group cannot take the enforcement of laws
into their own hands and gradually become law unto themselves and
punish the violator on their own assumption and in the manner in which they deem fit in their shallow understanding of justice.
Of late, lynchings and vigilante attacks have become the instrument of choice for violence against minorities particularly Muslims. Vigilante attacks and
lynchings are different to „communal riots‟. These are episodic acts of violence,
of a localised kind, not mass; targeting individuals or groups of individuals, led mostly by decentralised groups, acting as vigilantes, affiliated to violent anti-minority groups, in some cases, acting with the authority of the state. Lynchingshave taken place with regularity recently, threatening to grow into a “national
epidemic”. As a result, “Indian Muslims are learning to endure an intense sense of foreboding – a lurking, unnamed, unspoken fear - the persisting danger of imminent violence, of being vulnerable to attack anywhere - on a public road, in a bus or train, in a marketplace, even in their homes - only for looking and being
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