India descending into mob rule: International media

Just a day after The New York Times warned that India is fast descending into a state of mobocracy, another lynching of a Muslim man happened in Alwar district of Rajasthan. The mob intercepted the man on foot who had bought two cows in the cattle fair and was taking them to his village. He was beaten to death “by unknown criminals”, going by the police report. His death was reported on 21st July.

On July 20, 2018, The New York Times (NYT) had carried an opinion piece headlined: “Seduced by Hate, Indian Politician Embraces a Lynch Mob”. This piece featured Union Minister Jayant Sinha, who – to quote NYT – “feted and garlanded eight men who were part of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an unarmed and terrified Muslim man to death. His embrace of the attackers, who were convicted of murder, has become the political stunt that Indians can’t stop talking about.”

The article went on to say: “Across the country, the images of Mr Sinha draping wreaths of marigolds around the men’s necks have started a conversation about whether the state of Indian politics has become so poisoned by sectarian hatred and extremism that even an ostensibly worldly and successful politician can’t resist its pull.”

The NYT article wonders as to why someone like Jayant Sinha is acting in such a regressive manner. It says: “Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey. Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston area.”

Why is such a well-educated cosmopolitan man behaving in the same way as a semi-literate local politician like Giriraj Singh, a fellow minister? Both have backgrounds as different as chalk and cheese. Why are they practising the same atavistic politics?

The year of the lynch mob

The New York Times finds an answer in the current environment. “It has become the year of the lynch mob in India. Dozens of people have been beaten to death, often in cold blood, by crowds of bored (unemployed) young men who alternate between booting someone in the head and taking a selfie. Suggestions of whom to kill rip so fast through villages via social media, especially WhatsApp, that no one seems able to stop them.”

The NYT concludes that in this atmosphere the likes of Sinha (and Singh) might actually win votes by resorting to such retrograde politics.

That explains why politicians in most BJP-ruled states (BJP now rules in 21 of the 29 states in the country) are out to show their support for the lynch mob that masquerades as cow protectors.

Well, the defenders of the BJP government may dismiss the New York Times as “prejudiced against India because of its global success in many fronts.” But then the NYT is not just one-off foreign journal that has expressed concern about the state of India’s democracy.

Not just the NYT

In the last three years, such concerns have been raised again and again by varied foreign agencies. Just sample a few of them.

The Economist – a celebrated conservative, right-of-the-centre British weekly that should ordinarily applaud a right-wing government in India – wrote earlier this year (February 2018): “In the “cow belt” of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (and Rajasthan), “cow protectors” armed with bats, swords and guns look for vehicles that are transporting cows across state borders. They have been known to extort money from drivers without verifying whether the cows they carry are being sent to slaughter, or in the case of meat, whether it is indeed beef.”

According to this version, the cow vigilantes are just mercenaries; where they do not succeed in extorting money, they turn into the lynch mob.

The Economist goes on to say: “According to IndiaSpend, a data-journalism website, 97% of all cow-vigilante attacks reported since 2010 took place after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, with Narendra Modi as prime minister. Most have targeted Muslims and Dalits (formerly known as untouchables), who traditionally skin the carcasses of cows.”

The indictment by the Economist does not end there. It further writes: “In a report published in January, Human Rights Watch, a global campaigning group, wrote that the Indian government has failed to investigate the attacks in credible fashion while “many senior BJP leaders publicly promoted Hindu supremacy and ultra-nationalism, which encouraged further violence.”

The Economist was rather mild in its criticism; but The Washington Post was much more pungent when it carried a piece about a year ago, just after the brutal killing of Junaid Khan by a group of young men who in a train mocked his skullcap and taunted him for eating beef, before stabbing him.

The Post wrote: “While the list (of killings like Junaid’s) grows longer every day, the violence against Muslims … have not elicited a single tweet of condemnation from India’s social media savvy prime minister, who is quick to condemn atrocities all over the world. Modi’s silence, in fact, is beginning to feel like a redux of the Gujarat riots in 2002 which killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. For years he stayed silent, and when he spoke finally, he had compared the riots to a puppy being run over.”

The Post concludes that this stance by the tallest leader of the party and the country has emboldened the extremist lynch mob.

Why has a Prime Minister, so conscious of his international persona, chosen to ignore the indictment of the international media? They all trot out one answer: it helps Mr Modi’s Hindutva brand of politics.

Jayant Sinha followed his leader’s instincts and went a step further – instead of condemning the cow vigilante murderers, he garlanded them. One can very well understand why and what the likes of Giriraj Singh are doing with impunity.

Is it surprising that the authoritative BBC News also recently headlined a report: Is India descending into mob rule?