Why India needs a Gagandeep Singh to save us from lynch mob
Lynch mobs are on a standby. Driven by psychotic bloodlust, they are waiting for a signal to pounce on their targets they don't regard as humans.
Around 140 years ago, black Americans were widely terrorised by lynchings. They were seized largely over dubious allegations, savagely tortured, hung from trees and set on fire.
In April this year, the Americans confronted their horrific past. They took a first look at a lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama that commemorates 4,400 black people brutally killed between 1877 and 1950.
Borrowing lynchings from 19th-century America
"African-Americans could be lynched for everything to anything that a white person could construe as a threat to white supremacy," said Karlos K Hill, author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory.
"If a black man bumped into a white woman, that could be construed as an affront to white supremacy. If he glanced at her too long, the idea was that he’d violate her, that he’d attempt to rape her. The glance was an affront to white supremacy by looking at a woman he shouldn’t," Hill said, according to an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In 2018, all that sounds familiar to Indians.
Lynch mobs in our country are let loose the same way.
They drag impoverished Muslims out of their homes, vans or from public parks and bludgeon them to death. Accusations to justify these extra-judicial assaults range from cows, child trafficking to love jihad.
A 1930 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer recounted how white Americans embraced the macabre lynchings of black people.
"Whole families came together, mothers and fathers, bringing even their youngest children. It was the show of the countryside — a very popular show," read the editorial as quoted by The Guardian.
That too wouldn't surprise Indians who saw how a man suspected of involvement in a hate crime was treated as a martyr.
In 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was fatally battered by people who knew him in their Bisara village over rumours that he ate beef. When a murder suspect died a year later from an illness, villagers draped his coffin in the national flag.
"My heart broke seeing that picture. It is like celebrating the same madness which killed my father," said Akhlaq's son, Danish, according to The Hindu.
In September, newspapers ran headlines that police in the BJP-ruled Rajasthan closed investigations into six men accused of publicly killing a Muslim dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan.
Nation-state politics plunges India into mob rule
Politics supportive of the concept of nation state — as opposed to a multicultural state — has descended the Asian subcontinent into mob rule on numerous occasions.
The worst catastrophe unfolded in 1947. The Hindu/Sikh-versus-Muslim conflict during Independence was a deadly consequence of such politics.
The attempt to create a nation state — the one with a uniform community as opposed to diverse — triggered the biggest man-made disaster of the last century.
Then prime minister Indira Gandhi turned to the same tactic to re-establish herself as India's supreme leader. Things spilled out of control rapidly.
The massacre of thousands of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in 1984 was an outcome of the ruling Congress party's nation-state politics that was no different from the RSS' Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan vision — one language and one dominant national culture.
The same sinister game played its role when maddening mobs unleashed their fury on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
Authors of nation-state projects have been intrinsically opposed to diversities, world over. Yet, they have been gradually humbled by proponents of unity in diversity.
Officer Gagandeep Singh offers a solution
In May, sub-inspector Gagandeep Singh in Uttarakhand turned himself into a human shield for a Muslim man surrounded by a mob over his suspected affair with a Hindu woman.
Singh, a Sikh, escorted the Muslim man to safety in a rare act of courage in a climate hostile towards minorities and the Dalits.
Social alliances — not just political — hold key
In India, political parties aiming to unseat the Modi brand of nation-state politics are allying together.
But a longer-term deterrence against re-emergence of forces — which are using a variety of techniques to ignite another 1947, 1984 or 2002 — lies in a cohesive majority-minority partnership.
Remaining silent about an evil taking place in front of our eyes is no better than a sin.
Remember, America became a world power only after its white population had rejected primitive attitudes towards fellow dark-skinned citizens.
I identify myself with Gagandeep Singh and have changed my profile image to his as a testimony to this camaraderie.
But I am a Sikh. So is he.
The camaraderie to save the country will only be complete when sane voices from the Hindu majority push the lynch-mob model of governance into India's hall of shame, once and for all.