A dangerous trend

VIGILANTISM ON RISE

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unambiguous condemnation of cow vigilantism should dampen the hurly-burly over the issue of cow protection though his statement has also heated up politics, as is quite natural, with the opposition parties targeting him dubbing him a weak prime minister for saying that cow protectors should kill him, not his Dalit brethren. The VHP and some other Hindu organisations are also up in arms.

The Union Cabinet has clarified in its advisory to states that cow vigilantism is illegal and so is cow slaughter. The plain speaking by the prime minister should dispel all doubt from the minds of officers responsible to enforce law and maintain order who might have been iffy about taking action against the cow vigilantes so far.

 However, the issue of vigilantism is not confined to cow protection but is growing at a fast pace and has acquired a hideous shape. Some self-styled dispensers of justice hand out instant justice which results in lynching and killing by the mob. It reflects on the dwindling faith of the people in the administrative-judicial system.
The apex court itself took cognisance of this tendency of vigilante justice when on September 20, 2007, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court dispose of a 60-year- old case (Moses Wilson and Others and Kasturiba and Others) with a terse warning: “Because of delay in disposal of cases, people in this country are fast losing faith in the judiciary. We saw in the media news of lynching of suspected thieves in Bihar’s Vaishali District, the gunning down of an undertrial prisoner outside Patna City Civil Court, and other incidents where people have taken the law into their own hands.

This is obviously because many people have started thinking that justice will not be done in the courts due to the delays in court proceedings. This is indeed an alarming state of affairs, and we once again request the authorities concerned to do the needful in the matter urgently.” Sometime later, then President Pratibha Patil also expressed the same concern while inaugurating a seminar on judicial reforms in New Delhi that the judiciary could not escape blame for delayed justice that was fraught with the risk of promoting the lynch mob phenomenon. Then CJI K G Balakrishnan, sharing the dais with the President, countered the charge that the judiciary was the main culprit for the snail-paced justice and said that the root of the malaise lay in governance deficit.

The incidents of mob lynching are on the increase. In one of the most macabre incidents, Syed Sarifuddin Khan, a 35-year- old man from Assam, accused of rape, was dragged and beaten to death in Dimapur, Nagaland, by a mob of thousands. He was accused of rape by a Naga woman, the cousin of his wife. He was arrested and had been in jail for 10 days when a strong mob of several thousand people, including a large number of young women, on March 5, 2015, stormed Dimapur Central Jail.

Barbarism was on its full display as he was dragged out, beaten and pelted with stones, stripped naked, tied to a motorcycle and dragged for about 7 km when he succumbed to injuries.

Not satisfied, the mob strung his body up on a fence for the perverted onlookers to see and jeer. The allegation of rape could never be established. Khan was initially misrepresented to be a Bangladeshi which made the barbarism justifiable. His father and brothers served in the Indian Army, and he was living in Dimapur with his Naga wife and daughter.

Vigilante justice is definitely the result of the breaking down of the system. People now appear to be convinced that if an accused is handed over to the police, it will take decades to bring him to justice and s/he may not be convicted at all. So, they prefer to appropriate the powers of the police as well as of the judiciary.

Sociologists use the term ‘moral panic’ which these vigilantes create to garner public support. They are able to convince a large number of people that a particular person is a serious threat to the society and must be eliminated at the earliest.

A serious question
But it raises a serious question about the role of the civil society and that of people’s power. A vibrant civil society is the life breath of a democracy. We witnessed its charming face recently during the Anna Hazare movement and during the protests over the Nirbhaya gang-rape. But handing out instant justice is a grotesque face of people’s power and the incidents of mob lynching and vigilante justice reinforce the need to rein in people’s power. It will be far better for the civil society to put pressure on the government to ensure that due process of law does not take inordinate time.

These vigilante groups have never brought any inveterate criminals to justice. They target weaklings. Notorious criminals have not only been spared but they are being elected.Where is the civil society? What about people’s power? Vigilante justice does not believe in the due process of law. If an innocent person is being hit by some people on some grave allegation, the mob will not inquire whether the allegations are true and join the group beating him. Vigilantism as a concept is very old.

Some people trace it to Genesis 34 of the Bible which gives the account of the abduction and rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob in the Canaanite city of Schechem by the eponymous son of the ruler.

Her brothers Simeon and Levy killed all males of the city, rescued their sister and plundered Schenchem. In 1800s, groups of vigilantes dispensed “frontier justice” by holding trial of accused horse-thieves, rustlers and shooters. If convicted, they were immediately executed. In India, Maoists have their parallel courts. But vigilante groups nowadays are not holding even customary trials and only pronounce guilty and hand out sentence. This is a dangerous trend.