Indian liberal intelligentsia and media is gearing for yet another mourning over the murder of a 16 years old boy Junaid, who was beaten to death by group of people when argument related to seats took nasty turn in a train near Mathura-Delhi stretch. Being the vanguard of liberal values and individual freedom, the intelligentsia must be concerned but their concern is representative of selective amnesia and exaggeration of certain incidents by perpetrating falsehood, in order to demonize Hindus and present government.
Quartz and Scroll declared India to be a “lynchistan” as a 16 years old boy was beaten to death in a country of more than 1.25 billion people. Before someone starts wondering about the meaning of lynchistan, let me quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb (A polymath specializing in Probability, Randomness and Decision Theory), “A mathematician thinks in terms of numbers, a lawyer thinks in terms of laws but an idiot thinks in terms of ‘words’.” This quote of Taleb precisely sums up the meaning of terms like lynchistan but I’ll take the pain of refuting the thesis advanced by certain media houses that Hindus have started lynching Muslims suddenly and turning India into a lynchistan.
When I was growing up in not so urban India, Hindi newspapers being my only source of information, there used to be one headline which kept on surfacing now and then which was: “भीड़ ने पीट पीट कर की हत्या…” which can be translated as “the mob beat the person to death.” I can’t recall any incidence of media raising the alarm that country is turning into a lynchistan or anything of such sort as these news either didn’t reach in English mainstream media or they found it too rustic to cover.
However, when I suddenly see the sudden interest of English media and academia about lynching incidents, I grow suspicious as it can’t be their natural reaction devoid of ideological and political implications. In the aforementioned article of Quartz, the author quotes murder of Junaid and another one from Rajasthan to establish the fact that Hindus have become the brutal community killing Muslims. One can wonder that how half dozen killings occurring in three years period can determine the predatory nature of Hindus. Interestingly, lynching of DSP Ayub Pandit by Muslims in Kashmir was insufficient to deliver verdict about nature of Muslims but the author has the audacity to lecture Hindus.
In order to find their outrage over India turning into lynchistan was justified or not, I did a google search with “भीड़ ने पीट-पीट कर की हत्या…” for the simple reason that English media seldom cover the scores of lynching taking place in rural India as they don’t fit in their narrative of demonizing Hindus. Google search results indicate that within three months, there have been more than a dozen lynchings which wasn’t enough to shake the conscience of our enlightened liberals. On May, 6 people were killed near Jamshedpur in Jharkhand by mob as they were suspected to be child traffickers. Our liberal media had falsely reported it to be another killing by cow vigilantes but quickly backtracked when truth emerged.
Some other incidents of lynching were: A person alleged of murdering a BJP leader named Nathuram Verma, being killed by mob in Agra on 5 June, 2017; A rapist being killed by local people in Aligarh four days ago; An E-Rickshaw driver killed by a group of students in Delhi on 27th May, 2017; A man who killed the husband of his girlfriend was subsequently killed by mob in Ashoknagar in MP. Anyone can easily wonder that why these grotesque killings by mob couldn’t jolt the conscience of Indian liberals.
It doesn’t take much effort to get the simple truth that media become interested in lynching only when the victim is either Muslim or Dalit and criminal is Hindu. There is a further hierarchy of importance of victims in which if a Dalit has been killed by Muslims then it must be ignored as it will not fit in the narrative. In India, it’s undeniable truth that law and order problem persists despite all the efforts applied by government. When people don’t find police when any crime happens, the patience of people seriously deteriorates and often they resort to delivering justice in their own way. In any sane society, such kind of people can’t be tolerated.
However, when media and intelligentsia start finding political and ideological gains in such serious issue, the narrative takes an ugly turn. When a Muslim is killed by Muslim mob, it’s alright in their worldview, but the moment the victim is Muslim, the crime becomes religious in nature, but when victim is Hindu as was the case with a Pune boy burnt alive after a group of Muslims asked his religion, the nature of crime is secular!
The narrative of branding India as intolerant country for religious minorities, fake incidents of attacks on churches, some lone incidents of attacking Africans as racist ones etc have achieved a prominence since the day Modi became the PM of India. Narrative is a story with purpose, and the purpose behind such stories isn’t hard to guess. Earlier, the Colonialists, Orientalists, and Christian missionaries were propagating the narrative of India being a country of savage barbarians, this narrative was continued by Marxists and Left-liberals after independence, who continue to dominate the media and academia today.
Due to this sinister motive, Hindustan Times ran a campaign of #Let’s Talk About Racism after four Nigerians were attacked in Greater Noida as if Indians have become racists after one incident. Founding father and also the Third President of USA, Thomas Jefferson was quite apt on target when he said, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Perhaps, the emergence of social media is changing the scenario but this remark is sufficient to sum up the whole story.