Samar Halarnkar - Empowered, emboldened and weaponised, India’s roving mobs flourish under state patronage

It is that time of the year when millions of saffron-clad kanwariyas, devotees of Shiva the destroyer, fill pots of water from the holy Ganga and carry it on foot to shrines across the plains of northern India. From stray pilgrims walking alongside roads in the 1980s, the kanwar yatra – the journey of the kanwars, named after a pole they carry with pots on its ends – has grown into a heaving, pulsing mass of humanity that slows or shuts down India’s highways.

With a year to go for general elections that are likely to be a much closer affair than the Bharatiya Janata Party’s facile victory in 2014, the ruling party is making sure it does not impede or offend this walking, swaggering vote bank. The swagger of this massive pilgrimage, as events of this month have shown, has increased because the police and other administrative arms of the state have made their approach clear. While many are peaceful, a substantial number of kanwariyas are not. This week, they wrecked a car, attacked trucks, beat a cyclist with canes and sledgehammers and vandalised a police vehicle, forcing officers to flee... see more:
https://scroll.in/article/890034/empowered-emboldened-and-weaponised-indias-roving-mobs-flourish-under-state-patronage

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