6 July 2018
Editorial
Passing the buck: on governments' response to lynchings
Political messaging and administrative alerts are key to stopping the string of lynchings
The Central government has finally moved to react to the lynchings reported
from across the length and breadth of the country, but its line of
action is bafflingly weak. Over the past couple of months, mobs have
materialised to beat to kill people they suspect — almost always without
basis — of plotting to kidnap children to harvest their organs.
Warnings to beware of child kidnappers, sometimes with the rider that
they are likely to hail from other parts of India, are mostly circulated
on WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned encrypted messaging platform. Since a
cluster of such killings in Tamil Nadu in May, deaths have been reported
from States as far apart as Assam, Karnataka and Maharashtra. In one
recent attack, five people were clobbered to death in Maharashtra’s Dhule’s district
on child-lifting rumours; the mob numbering hundreds overpowered the
few policemen present. And ironically, among three people lynched in
Tripura on a single day, June 28, was a man hired by the State
government to spread awareness against precisely such rumours.
Now, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has told WhatsApp
to take “remedial measures… to prevent proliferation of these fake and
at times motivated/sensational messages”. WhatsApp is the communication
platform of choice in the age of cheap smartphones. One of the USPs of
the platform is that the messages are encrypted in a manner that makes
it impossible for them to be read. Given this, it is not clear how such a
platform can take measures to limit the spread of motivated or
sensational messages. Also, whether such checks would amount to
legitimising surveillance and a loss of privacy — a rare commodity in
this digital age. Even if it can do so without compromising privacy, the
problem is not the medium. Rumour has historically found its way around
communication walls, and it can only be effectively blocked through
old-fashioned information campaigns and administrative alertness.
Rumour’s potency predates mobile phones, even if there is no denying
that smartphones, with their ability to instantly transmit text and
images, have a tendency, in this era of fake news, to rapidly spread
panic and anger. This happens in different ways across the world, but in
India the problem has assumed truly distressing proportions. It is
well-known that an unrelated video of an act of violence that went viral
was responsible for fuelling communal hatred in Muzaffarnagar in 2013.
It is puzzling that district administrations and gram panchayats have
not been asked to reach out to locals to persuade them against falling
for rumours, and to come to the authorities if they have any fears. The
messaging needs to be amplified — merely appealing to WhatsApp is hardly
the solution.
