The grotesque public lynching of a man accused of rape in Nagaland is a picture postcard for our judiciary which has spectacularly failed in delivering justice without delay
Given Nagaland’s physical (and psychological) distance from the mainland, events and incidents of that State, indeed anywhere in India’s North-East, rarely if ever find a mention in what is loftily termed as ‘national media’ but in reality are rags and channels servicing lutyens’s Delhi and its obnoxious, self-obsessed elite. So it is that all of India remained blissfully ignorant of mounting anger in the streets of Nagaland’s largest city, Dimapur, no doubt fuelled by rabble-rousing speeches, that led to the public lynching of an Assamese man who, it is now being claimed, was falsely accused of raping a Naga woman.
The flow of information on this grisly incident that occurred last Thursday has been in fits and starts. The initial burst of skewed reportage was exultant in tone — that a rapist had got his just desserts. Syed Farid Khan, the man who was dragged out of jail, stripped and lynched by a mob while thousands bayed for his blood, was described as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. His victim was a 20-year-old college student whom he was accused of having repeatedly raped.
Here are the details of the macabre public execution of a man, charged, tried and punished not by courts of law but crowds clearly in the breach of law. late last month, a complaint was lodged with the police, accusing Syed Farid Khan of raping a Naga woman (of whom few specific details are known at the moment) several times. That was on February 23-24.
In local media reports, Khan was described as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. That further fuelled popular outrage which was tapped into by Naga Students’ Federation and Naga Women Hoho, both of which have a mass base, and other organisations. On Wednesday, these organisations called for a bandh to protest the alleged rape of the Naga woman and press for “stern action” against the accused man.
To drive home their point, the protesters ransacked shops owned by ‘outsiders’. To control the rapidly deteriorating situation, the administration imposed Section 144, prohibiting crowds from gathering. But that had no impact whatsoever in restoring calm.
On Thursday, crowds gathered and marched to the Dimapur Municipal Council, where they demanded that trade licences given to ‘Bengali-speaking Muslims’ should be cancelled. Next, the mob, which had now swollen to several thousand frenzied men and women, young and old, stormed the Central Jail, overcame the token resistance put up by the prison guards (photographs suggest there was no resistance), and dragged Khan out of his cell.
Their intention was to hold a public trial (for which an open truck had been organised to serve as a dais) and then execute the alleged rapist by hanging him from Dimapur’s historic landmark, the Clock Tower. The lynch mob didn’t quite stick to the plan. Khan was stripped, kicked and beaten. By the time he was dragged to the Clock Tower by a motorcyclist, he was dead.
Nevertheless, his limp, bloodied body with the face smashed in, was strung up as the frenzied mob jostled to record the ‘punishment’ on cell phones. Khan, stripped of clothes, life and dignity, was displayed on the Clock Tower like a trophy. His hunters exulted in their deed, convinced they had done the right thing.
By Saturday evening, contrarian details began emerging that added several bitter twists to the tale of savagery that has caused much revulsion among the polite classes of urban India — make that the chattering classes if you wish. It now appears that Khan was not an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh but an Assamese Muslim from Karimganj. Rezaul Hasan laskar of Hindustan Times said on Twitter that Khan’s father worked for the Indian Air Force and three of his brothers joined the Army — one of them died in the Kargil war; the other two are still in uniform.
That’s not all. It is now being said that a senior official in Dimapur is believed to have remarked that Khan was being blackmailed by his alleged victim — she wanted him to pay two lakh rupees but he refused; so she filed a complaint against him, accusing him of raping her. We do not as yet know for a fact whether a medical test was conducted to assess the validity of her allegation. Unverifiable information swirling on the Net says medical tests were conducted but they did not reveal any evidence of rape. Fact and fiction are inseparable at the moment.
This is not the first instance of a rape accused being lynched nor is it the first time that a mob has taken the law in its own hands and meted out primitive justice. Stories of brutality, horrific in details, abound. In September 2005, hundreds of women descended on Nagpur district court and beat an alleged rapist to death. ‘Gono Dholai’ or ‘Dumdum Dawai’ is frequently witnessed in West Bengal. In the badlands of north India, Khaps are known to have killed young men and women for daring to fall in love with each other.
This brazen disregard of the law, and contempt for keepers of the law, essentially stem from the spectacular failure of India’s criminal justices system. Cases drag on for years, years turn into decades. Criminals whose crimes are not in dispute secure bail, commit heinous crimes again.
Unspeakably ghastly crimes that defy depravity as we know it, are termed by judges as not ‘rarest of the rare’ because of which killers and rapists escape the punishment they deserve. It would be stupid to blame the parents of children who were raped and devoured by two monsters in Nithari of not being respectful towards the law of the land. Their tormentors are sitting pretty years after their hideous crimes came to light.
Perception often matters more than reality in shaping popular opinion. And popular opinion for a long while has been heavily weighed against the pathetic, creaky, corrupt system of criminal justice that we have in our country. Surely we can’t expect people to have faith in the legal process and the courts when our judges, in their profound wisdom, give precedence to IPl over IPC. What happened in Nagaland is really a picture postcard from the masses to the judiciary. And the message scrawled on it is stark: When you fail, we the people take over.