Parsing murder: Vigilantes and apologists. By Mukul Kesavan
The videos circulated on social media platforms like WhatsApp of lynchings and beatings in various north Indian provinces should remind us that supremacist vigilantism is alive and well in India...
As murderous attacks
on Muslims become more frequent, Hindutva's normalizers have found
new arguments to make violent bigotry seem banal. In the beginning, the
lynchings were dismissed as statistically trivial, random instances of violence
inevitable in a vast and diverse country, unfairly massaged into a pattern by
disgruntled liberals. Once it became
impossible for the Bharatiya Janata Party to dismiss these gory murders as
statistical noise, a new strategy of deflection was grafted on to older
arguments. The wickedness of these killings was acknowledged in passing. All
murders were bad and so were these but the protests against the lynchings
weren't about the lynchings at all. No, the protests against the murders were a
smokescreen for political hostility, a symptom of the inability of a liberal
establishment to come to terms with political defeat and a new national mood. One aspect of this
national mood was a consensus on the prohibition of cow slaughter that
secularists couldn't stomach. These perverse cosmopolitans were so deracinated
that they couldn't stomach the idea that the republic would have to defer to
the broad social sanction, rooted in Hindu sensibilities, against cow
slaughter.
As Mary McCarthy once
said of Lillian Hellman's writing, every word of this argument is a lie,
including 'and' and 'the'. The artful suggestion that the sangh parivar's
campaign against cow slaughter on the one hand, and the lynching of Muslims
involved in the cattle trade on the other, are separable projects, is
grotesque. It was Narendra Modi's political campaign against the so-called
'pink revolution' during the 2014 general election, and the amping up of this
rhetoric by Yogi Adityanath and his vigilante army, that convinced the current
crop of freelance cow gundas that they had a licence to kill.
The campaign against
cow slaughter, abattoirs and the meat business has very little to do with the
implementation of the General Will. The closing of abattoirs, the curtailment
of the killing of cows for meat or hides, the disruption of the transport trade
in cattle are attractive because these policies hurt Muslims materially. Given
the kind of party the BJP is, this is good in itself. More importantly, the
anti-cow-slaughter campaign has become for the BJP and its vision of Bharat
what the anti-blasphemy law used to be for Zia-ul-Haq and his vision of
Pakistan: an occasion for the public enact-ment of the supremacy of a religious
majority and, correspondingly, the subordination of religious minorities.
A majoritarian
nationalism exists to assert that a nation state must be made in the image of
its religious or racial majority and, further, that religious or racial
minorities must acquiesce in their own subordination. In this context, images
of minority citizens begging for their lives, or being casually murdered in
full public view in a railway compartment, or being dragged out of their homes
and lynched on the suspicion of beef eating, are images of violent
subordination that perfectly fit the sangh parivar's supremacist
project. These lynchings then, are lecture-demonstrations, a way of graphically
illustrating dominance.
This would be obvious
to anyone acquainted with the history of lynching in other countries.
Historians are reluctant to derive lessons from the historical experience of
one country and then use them to understand another one. History's interest in
particular narratives sets it apart from the social sciences which are driven
by a need to generalize. Even when historians do compare the story of one time
and place with another, they hedge the comparison about with caveats about the
specificity of historical experience. This caution is
understandable but inhibiting; it stops us from learning from the historical
record of mob violence in modern times. Walking through an exhibit on lynchings
in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, I
realized that lynchings were public performances, designed to strike terror
into minds of black people, specially blacks who had forgotten their
place vis-à-vis their white betters.
The Ku Klux Klan was
founded in the 1860s after the defeat of the confederacy in the American Civil
War and the abolition of slavery. The Klan used violence to intimidate free
blacks, to ritually enact their 'inferiority'. White vigilantes attacked black
men and killed them in the name of protecting white womanhood. Between 1890 and
the middle of the 20th century nearly 3,500 black men were lynched in the name
of white supremacy. Mobs involved in
lynchings took pictures of their handi-work. These photographs were often
published as postcards. Lynchings were a form of white terrorism in America,
specifically designed to intimidate black Americans.
The videos circulated
on social media platforms like WhatsApp of lynchings and beatings in various
north Indian provinces should remind us that supremacist vigilantism is alive
and well in India today. Last year in March, newspapers published chilling
photographs of two Muslim men involved in the cattle trade hanging from a tree
in a village near Ranchi in Jharkhand. A man and a boy, actually, because Azad
Khan was all of 15 years old. They had been systematically tortured before
being hanged. Since that time examples of vigilante violence in the name of cow
protection have multiplied.
More recently, attacks
on Muslims have dispensed with the fig leaf of cow protection. A 16 year old
boy, Junaid Khan, was stabbed to death in a train in Haryana last month. He and
his friends were returning to Mathura after Eid shopping, when a mob some
twenty-five strong tried to evict them from their seats. Four other Muslims
were stabbed in the incident. The injured men told the police that their
assailants repeatedly called them 'anti-nationals' and 'beef-eaters'. This is
what the ruling dispensation's orchestrated campaign against the meat trade and
the communities involved in it has given us: boys murdered in the name of
cow-protection or, worse still, in the name of the Nation.
It was this murderous
vigilantism that the 'Not in my name' demonstrations in several Indian cities
were protesting. Those subtle minds that found these protesters politically
naive or narcissistic or insufficiently attuned to the Nation's ethos, might
want to try a thought experiment. In the protests against the lynchings in the
Cotton Belt - Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana -which side
would they have been on? Would they have been on the side of the men and women
marching, protesting and lobbying the US Congress against lynch mobs? Would
they have written, as many did, earnest refutations of the racist propaganda
that tried to make lynch-mob murder respectable? Or would they, instead, have
been on the side of those who wrote to preserve segregation, who felt
viscerally connected to the prejudices of a politically ascendant racism? It
really is as simple as that.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170709/jsp/opinion/story_160863.jsp
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