On 17 July the supreme court of India condemned the epidemic of mob lynching in India, and asked the Indian parliament to draft legislation that would stop people from taking the law into their own hands.
Within
hours of the judgment, in the provincial state of Jharkhand, Swami
Agnivesh, a spiritual leader and former minister known for promoting
communal harmony in the country, was brutally attacked.
The assailants were allegedly members of the youth wing of the ruling
Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Most
Indians see the 78-year-old Agnivesh as an elegant and soft-spoken seer
in saffron robes, his head wrapped in a turban; yet on Tuesday
afternoon, the Swami was kicked and punched by young men chanting “Jai
shree Ram” (victory to Lord Ram) – his bare head on the ground, his
turban flung at a distance as he pleaded with them to show mercy.
In an interview with a news agency,
CP Singh, a minister from the same BJP-ruled state, justified the
attack. “He talks against Hindus,” he said, “makes anti-national
comments, supports Kashmiri separatists and Naxals.” Singh speaks the
language of the mob, a mob that has been given the responsibility of
creating a new order in India, where the minority – Muslims, Dalits and
anybody who speaks on their behalf – are attacked with impunity.
In India,
killing cows and the consumption of beef is banned in most states.
Since Modi and his party assumed power in 2014, this beef ban has been
used by Hindu nationalists to justify their attacks on innocent Muslims
in public..
Barely
a month ago in the city of Hapur, an hour’s drive from the capital,
Delhi, two Muslim men were attacked on the street while police stood by
guarding the mob. One of the two was kicked and dragged along as he lay
unconscious and later died of his injuries. The other, an elderly man,
was pulled by his beard and dragged through a field, blood dripping from
his face as he begged for mercy while they kept thrashing him with
wooden planks. The emboldened crowd recorded a video of this inhuman act and shared it across WhatsApp and social media, a common practice associated with these acts of mob violence.
A report by the data-based news organisation India Spend found
that “Muslims were the target of 51% of violence centred on bovine
issues over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017) – and they comprised 84%
of 25 Indians killed in 60 incidents. As many as 97% of these attacks
were reported after Narendra Modi’s government came to power in May
2014.”
One
would have expected the prime minister to call for an end to this
violence. Yet a week after the attacks in Hapur, Jayant Sinha, one of
the most important ministers in Modi’s cabinet, honoured eight convicts accused of lynching and killing a Muslim man.
This is not an isolated incident. In 2015, soon after the conservative
BJP came to power, a legislator from the party honoured the body of
someone accused of a similar assault with the national flag.
This
is encouraged by Modi’s government, which routinely disseminates fake
news, targeting and demonising Indian Muslims. Modi is creating a
dangerous precedent before the next general election, setting the tone
for an India whose syncretic values and democratic principles are under
threat.
Modi was head of the state of Gujarat when hundreds of Muslims were killed with impunity in the riots of 2002. As he gears up for re-election, that legacy looms large over the whole country.
• Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and writer. She is the author of Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.
