Mohd Asim - When Modi Asked BJP Leaders To Stay Silent, He Left This Out // Aatish Taseer - Anatomy of a Lynching
A lynching is a majority’s way of telling a minority population that the law cannot protect it. That is why in the American South so many African-American men were dragged from jails or hanged outside courthouses
Mr Modi is a master of messaging. So much that his silences, much like his speeches, convey a lot. And there is a pattern to his spells of silence. Mr Modi goes mum when he knows that his words might provide a healing touch to a section of population that is being terrorised and marginalised by elements in the larger Sangh Parivaar. Yes, I mean Muslims. So you will not have a word of condemnation over killings of an Akhlaq or a Pehlu Khan or other Muslims in Jharkhand or Jammu. He prefers silence while his party motormouths send across a clear and unmistakable message that Muslim lives don't matter in the India of today. Events after the public lynching on April 1 of Pehlu Khan in Alwar are chilling to say the least. It was Dadri deja vu. Gau goons attack and kill on the assumption of cow slaughter. The BJP brigade sides with the killers. The usual "killing is wrong, but..." responses follow. The law is secondary. Assumed sentimentalities that are hurt over an assumed act (read cow killing) are paramount. A murder becomes fair game.
मुकेश कुमार - हम क्यों चलें जाएं पाकिस्तान?
After the killing of Pehlu Khan in broad daylight on a highway in Rajasthan, the BJP has sent a clear message that it firmly stands with killers. The state's Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, who is directly responsible for law and order, first underplayed and then sought to justify the medievalism and barbarism of the attack in the name of the holy cow. Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi even went on to say on the floor of the House that "the incident didn't happen on the ground as narrated by the opposition members" who quoted newspaper reports detailing the mob violence. This, to my mind, was a new low in state denialism. Through all this, Vasundhara Raje, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, kept quiet. Not a word of consolation for the family of Pehlu Khan, no assurance of justice. Ditto with the government of Haryana, whose citizen Pehlu Khan was. No word from anyone in power that they cared. .. read more:
Mr Modi is a master of messaging. So much that his silences, much like his speeches, convey a lot. And there is a pattern to his spells of silence. Mr Modi goes mum when he knows that his words might provide a healing touch to a section of population that is being terrorised and marginalised by elements in the larger Sangh Parivaar. Yes, I mean Muslims. So you will not have a word of condemnation over killings of an Akhlaq or a Pehlu Khan or other Muslims in Jharkhand or Jammu. He prefers silence while his party motormouths send across a clear and unmistakable message that Muslim lives don't matter in the India of today. Events after the public lynching on April 1 of Pehlu Khan in Alwar are chilling to say the least. It was Dadri deja vu. Gau goons attack and kill on the assumption of cow slaughter. The BJP brigade sides with the killers. The usual "killing is wrong, but..." responses follow. The law is secondary. Assumed sentimentalities that are hurt over an assumed act (read cow killing) are paramount. A murder becomes fair game.
मुकेश कुमार - हम क्यों चलें जाएं पाकिस्तान?
After the killing of Pehlu Khan in broad daylight on a highway in Rajasthan, the BJP has sent a clear message that it firmly stands with killers. The state's Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, who is directly responsible for law and order, first underplayed and then sought to justify the medievalism and barbarism of the attack in the name of the holy cow. Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi even went on to say on the floor of the House that "the incident didn't happen on the ground as narrated by the opposition members" who quoted newspaper reports detailing the mob violence. This, to my mind, was a new low in state denialism. Through all this, Vasundhara Raje, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, kept quiet. Not a word of consolation for the family of Pehlu Khan, no assurance of justice. Ditto with the government of Haryana, whose citizen Pehlu Khan was. No word from anyone in power that they cared. .. read more:
Aatish Taseer - Anatomy of a Lynching
A lynching is much
more than just a murder. A murder may occur in private. A lynching is a public
spectacle; it demands an audience.
The lynching
of Pehlu Khan, a 55-year-old dairy farmer, in the western Indian state of
Rajasthan at the beginning of this month attracted a live audience of dozens
and a virtual one in the millions. Mr. Khan, a Muslim, stood accused of
smuggling cows, which are sacred to Hindus. A whole nation watched the scene on
its smartphones and televisions: Mr. Khan, a lone hunted figure in white,
lurches and stumbles along the edge of a dusty highway. He is pursued by “cow
vigilantes,” young men in striped T-shirts and jeans, armed with belts and
sticks. Eventually they gain on Mr. Khan, who falls to the ground, clutching
his stomach. A crowd with cameras and smartphones circles. In screen within
screen, we see Mr. Khan brutally beaten by the vigilantes in broad view of
everybody. He died three days later, the sixth fatality since 2015 of a Muslim
man subjected to vigilante justice of this kind.
A lynching, unlike,
say, a terrorist attack, does not depend on maximizing the loss of life. What
matters - whether in the American South a century ago or in India today - are
not numbers, but the public, almost orgiastic character of the violence. The
crowd surrounding Mr. Khan was baying for him to be doused in gas and set
alight. A lynching is a majority’s way of telling a minority population that the
law cannot protect it. That is why in the American South so many
African-American men were dragged from jails or hanged outside courthouses - unmistakable symbolism of the law’s paralysis. In Mr. Khan’s case,
the law was not merely paralyzed; it actively served the killers. In the first
hours after Mr. Khan was attacked, 11 people were rounded up and arrested for
cow smuggling — but not one for murder. Three people were arrested for Mr.
Khan’s lynching, but only days later, after he died. But the effect of the
arrests was minimized by the role played by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
Bharatiya Janata Party.
The home minister of
Rajasthan, the official in charge of the state’s law enforcement, went on
national television a few hours after Mr. Khan died to make clear where his
sympathies lay. First, he played down the incident, describing it as
“manhandling,” then he seemed to urge the public to show understanding to the
killers’ motives: “There are two sides to this,” he said. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Mr. Modi’s minister of
state for parliamentary affairs, went even further: He said the incident never
took place at all. Mr. Modi and Vasundhara Raje, the chief minister of
Rajasthan, have yet to offer one word of either condemnation or condolence.
The active ingredient
in a lynching is silence. Like all forms of theater, a lynching depends on what
is left unsaid; it creates a mood, an atmosphere. The silence that settles in
after the euphoric act of violence, which all have witnessed, tells a minority
group that it has been forsaken. It is this element of a suggestive and
creeping threat, in which the state apparatus and a silent majority are
complicit, that has the power to demoralize a community as much as the physical
acts of violence. The hysteria that now
surrounds the cow in India has been engineered. It was Mr. Modi who, during his
election campaign in 2014, whipped crowds into frenzy over “a pink revolution,”
an alleged conspiracy by his political opponents to promote cow slaughter and
beef export. “We’ve heard of the Green Revolution,” he
thundered, “we’ve heard of the White Revolution, but today’s Delhi
government wants neither; they’ve taken up arms for a Pink Revolution,” he
said, presumably evoking the pink color of beef. “Do you want to support people
who want to bring about a Pink Revolution?”
It took Mr. Modi
almost a year after the first lynching, in September 2015, to clearly and
firmly denounce the cow vigilantes. But the prime minister is a master at
looking both ways when it comes to mob violence. Last month, after a
landslide electoral victory in the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh - where almost a quarter of India’s roughly 170 million Muslims live - he
appointed a vicious priest, in full saffron robes, to be the state’s chief
minister. That man, Yogi
Adityanath, has called for the family of the first lynching victim to be tried
for illegally storing beef in their home. He has exhorted his followers to kill
10 Muslims for every Hindu killed. No sooner did he become chief minister than
Mr. Adityanath led
a crackdown against unlicensed butchers and abattoirs. Uttar Pradesh
abounds in unlicensed businesses, but in singling out the meat industry - invariably run by Muslims - the politician-priest knew that he was in effect
leading an attack on Muslim business with shades of Kristallnacht.
B.J.P. chief ministers
across India are now falling over themselves in a quest to outdo one another in
showing their love of the Indian cow, which, as Mr. Khan’s killing
demonstrates, is animated partly by a hatred of Muslims. Last month, in Mr.
Modi’s home state of Gujarat, cow slaughter was made punishable with life in
jail; and in Chattisgarh, another B.J.P.-run state, the
chief minister announced, “We will hang those who kill cows.” Almost 60 percent of
India now lives in B.J.P.-controlled states; there is no opposition left to
speak of. What voices of moderation and reason there used to be within the
B.J.P. are either too cowed to speak or feel that it is politically inexpedient
to do so.
Vasundhara Raje, the
chief minister of Rajasthan, is someone I grew up around in Delhi and have
known all my life. She is aristocratic and is educated. She had many Muslim
friends and even a Muslim boyfriend. She was a single mother, like mine. She
smoked, she drank; she is well read and widely traveled. She certainly seemed
the beneficiary of liberal values. That someone like her would now refuse to
speak up for a poor Muslim farmer with small children who was lynched in her
state is an indication of how poisoned the air has become in three short years
since the B.J.P. came to power.
India is slipping
beyond the pale. It is unfathomable that the ancient Hindu horror at the taking
of life, any life — the very same doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence, that
governed the beliefs of men like Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. — should in our time be used as a justification for murder. And not
merely a murder in which one man is implicated, but rather a great televised
spectacle in which a whole nation, through its silence, is complicit.
