Who lives if India dies and who dies if India lives — these words of Jawaharlal Nehru spoken decades ago echo even today as communities are being targeted for selective lynching.
If the recent incidents of mob violence are any symptoms, all is not well with the country’s health. From Delhi to Jharkhand, from Kashmir to Kerala we are witnessing violent outbursts of mobs against select individuals and groups on flimsy and sometimes false pretexts. The day the young teenager Junaid was brutally murdered in the train between Delhi and Mathura, another incident happened in Giridih of Jharkhand. These do not seem to be stray incidents of spontaneous mob violence. They may well be part of large devious designs aimed to destroy the social fabric of this great country where different communities, castes, classes and religions had learned to co-exist after bitter experiences. The incidents are pointers that indicate a trend and need to be viewed in a larger perspective. Dismissing them as hate crimes localised to certain regions may be a naïve conclusion.
The point that can be ignored at our own peril is that some sinister forces are working to pit one community against another. It was mob lynching in Jharkhand sometime back and the trigger was that the victims were alleged child lifters. It was mob lynching in Uttar Pradesh and the victims were accused of carrying beef. The list is endless. Pitting community against community, class against class, caste against caste appears to be a diabolic design. It has to be understood that the incidents are not just spontaneous reactions to some provocation. Rather they seem to be a dangerous game plan with oblique motives and executed by those forces who plant agent provocateurs among masses. Inciting people to violence and murder appear to be well orchestrated actions. Why are we not looking at this angle is rather surprising given the fact that ‘foreign hand’ has a known history in India.
Of course, sometimes these acts are also carried out to settle personal scores. It has happened in the past too. The attack on the police and army personnel in Jammu and Kashmir can also be acts of planned and calculated behaviour camouflaged as mob violence. We can be reminded of what happened some three decades ago in Kolkata when DCP Vinod Mehta was brutally lynched at Garden Reach. A similar incident took place in Bihar in which a mob incited by a scheming Parliamentarian lynched the Gopalganj DMG Krishnaiyyah some two decades ago. Whether it is for personal score or the part of a larger anti-India campaign, the fact remains that these lynchings are not simple acts of mob violence. They are carefully planned acts of murder. It is time to go deep into such incidents and look at them with the critical lens. Sleeper cells can be planted for these acts too. It is time our intelligence agencies examine these seemingly improbable theories because anything that happens occasionally is an accident, but if frequency is beyond reasonable degree it may be a part of a larger conspiracy. These ominous portends are not to be winked over.
We may be reminded of a famous couplet from Iqbal paraphrased below:
Think of the nation o' ignorant, the trouble is lurking; indications of impending disaster are there is the skies. If you do not take guard you may well perish and your tale may get erased from the books of history.
The writer is a professor of management and a public speaker; he can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com