A video showing two young men being lynched, circulated on social media, fanned violence against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar in 2013. The police said it had been recorded at least two years earlier and had no connection to the riots.
This year, post the Ram Navami tensions in West Bengal, another video was viral – it showed an old, blind Muslim couple being humiliated, heckled and asked to chant Jai Shri Ram allegedly by a group of right-wingers.
We have all seen the recordings of the Una violence against Dalits, the lynchings in Alwar and Jharkhand that compete in brutality, and Shambhulal Regar hacking and burning the body of Afrazul, a Muslim labourer, in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand.
Such spectacles of violence and hate are consumed over several social media platforms by a large crowd – a multitude passively participating in them, some even relishing them.
While rumours, false information and half-truths have been behind communal flare-ups and targeted violence over a much longer time, the phenomenal expansion of the public sphere with the advent of social media has had a remarkable impact on the reach and expanse of hate propaganda.
This is what makes these apparently isolated instances more than murder.
It makes them instances of retributive justice wherein the minority or low-caste community is terrorised in the name of “gau raksha” or “love jihad” or “nationalism” and so on.
Borrowing from Hannah Arendt, Kartik Maini says in a piece in Firstpost, that with such mass consumption of hate and bloodlust, “evil becomes as natural as order in the minds of the masses” and this normalisation is what contributes to the banality of evil.
When Regar recorded his brutal killing of Afrazul on December 6 – the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid – it had a chilling effect on every person who had some belief in the rule of law in this country, even though it wasn’t the first act of such murder nor the last.
What made the incident particularly stark was the planning and method deployed to record and circulate the gory act. Udaipur range inspector general of police Anand Srivastav said Regar took his nephew to the crime spot, where the nephew, 15, shot the video while Regar committed the murder.
This was no “spontaneous” action nor a case of bystanders making a video; it was a planned private execution in the form of pure performance – a camera handler, a message in monologue, a gruesome killing followed by public distribution over social media.
The idea was to send a message to the Muslim community, a fear-laden message that Muslims who indulge in ‘love jihad’ would be dealt with in the same way.
Similarly, the thrashing of Dalit youth in Una and the lynching of Pehlu Khan were crimes in full public glare before they were made “viral” on social media. These acts were not just about inflicting physical violence upon a certain individual belonging to a particular community, but about creating a show for the consumption of those who support such actions implicitly (read ideologically) and for the minorities to show them their place.
Many people have termed these incidents as an aberration to an otherwise lawful body-politic. It is true that our Constitution guarantees right to life and equality before law to every citizen of this country. Such incidents then reflect the subversion of such constitutional morality by extremist elements. But if history were to be taken as an indication to assess reality, we would get a different picture.
The public consumption of violence plays a very vital role in defining these acts in both effect and purpose. The lynchings of black Americans, for instance, used to be sights that were relished by the people at hand. Though the public-ness of such acts has changed or expanded manifold over time with technological advancement, the idea of retributive justice has not really been alien to our society.
We don’t really need to go far from home to look for examples. There are plenty in our past. It’s only the extent (as also nature) that has changed with the evolution of the public sphere over time.
Beating to death and public shaming has been a way to deliver retributive justice to those who violate the dominant or established social code.
Caste atrocities and violence against couples who defy caste boundaries to marry are telling examples in India.
Even through medieval times, public executions continued through much of the world as they served a particular purpose. They were used to establish the sovereignty of the ruler as happened in the Seljuq dynasty, as established by Christian Lange in Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination; or by the medieval European church during inquisitions against people accused of heresy.
Such feudal precedents of lynchings continue to inform us about the nature of the socio-political order in India today. Retributive justice is still being used as a tool to establish a particular kind of sovereignty, that of the Hindu Rashtra, an order where the minorities or low castes would not be considered in the same ambit as other citizens. Hence, the unfurling of the saffron flag over the court complex by right-wing groups after Regar’s arrest.
In our fractured modernity, feudal elements have not just been allowed to survive but have also been given legitimacy by the highest institutions of justice. A case in point is the Aadhaar order quoting the Arthashastra. Or the erection of the Manu statue in front of the Rajasthan High Court.
The inflow of new technology has only helped perpetuate such feudal moorings. It has its genesis in the way the public sphere itself has been appropriated by right-wing propaganda in recent times.
The seeds of the same, as described by professor Sandria Freitag, were sown as far back as the colonial times when the national movement, in the shaping of the public sphere, made no effort to distinguish itself from communal and majoritarian impulses. This was to have long-term implications in the decades after Independence.
Through the 1990s, for instance, we witnessed the aggressive use of the medium of television and other mass media with the imagery of serials like Ramayana for political propaganda.
The new public sphere, or the decline of public sphere in Habermasian terms, which started with the airing of television serials for mass consumption, has in fact entered a new phase with the introduction of 4G connectivity.
This has made self-interpretation and criticality even more rare or difficult as the public sphere now is far more personalised. The scope to cross-check information received via WhatsApp and other social media forwards has been reduced to a great degree.
Dedicated IT cells, social bots and WhatsApp groups propel this vast machinery of fake news and hate messages. It is safe to say that while the phenomenon of mob lynchings and hate crimes might appear new to many of us, it isn’t after all so new.
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