Crime and context: 

Crime and context


Context:

  • It is high time that the country should understand the context of lynching and how it had come into existence.

Introduction:

  • There are countries where lynching, as a form of collective violence, is common  but retrospectively, India was not one of them.
  • In India, after 1993, though small incidents continued, big riots declined.
  • The pattern broken only twice, first in 2002 in Gujarat and next in September, 2013 in Muzaffarnagar.
  • Because of its size and destruction, the latter (September, 2013) raised alarms in 2013-14.
  • Big riots like lynching might have come to the Indian scenario because of two reasons:
  • Firstly, worldwide data show that at higher levels of income, which India has relative to 1993, rioting becomes highly episodic, as opposed to occurring repeatedly.
  • Secondly because while majorty-minority polarisation would be in the political interest of the ruling party but widespread rioting was not.
  •  It is to be noted that the minorities of the country are not the only target of lynching but they are at the spotlight.
  •  Because the new reason for lynching is beef and cattle trade, both explicitly connected to the majority’s nationalist project.

Two categories of lynching:

  • The first aims at restoring routine order via mob violence.
  • Instead of using the police, mob violence is used as a disciplining mechanism.
  • The second category of lynching aims at enforcing a majoritarian ethnic/racial/religious political order.
  • As for example, During 1880-1930, white mobs lynched black Americans if they crossed a certain historically embedded hierarchical boundary.

Who are the actual criminals?

  • The routine criminals are the instigators, not nationalists of the country’s majority.
  • Moreover, in routine criminality, calculations and jealousies have often been inserted into the master narrative of riots and civil wars.
  •  Thus, if the master narrative of cow protection were not so systematically promoted by the current Indian political elite then the regular criminals would not have that narrative to plug into.
Print Friendly and PDF
Blog
Academy
Community