Legitimacy of violence

The increasing cases of mob lynching that the country has been witnessing reveal a deeper sociological problem, says Shiv Visvanathan  

Mob lynchings are bestial, brutal, primordial. If it is a case of one killing, it can be dubbed as a scandal. If it occurs in epidemic proportions, it is a moral breakdown whose social roots have to be traced. The Supreme Court has declared that it should be treated as a separate crime. And as a separate crime, it demands a separate sociology. Think of four pictures, along with the text of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The first is a picture of lynchings by a racist Ku Klux Klan. Juxtapose to it a picture of the Akhlaq, Afrazul or Alwar killings. Place next to it a map of the dozen mob lynchings from Chennai to Agartala. How does one read it?

One must begin by defining the phenomenon. In a mob lynching, the crowd is the hero. The scapegoat or victim is a sociological label, a particular category of people which does not fit the overall frame. India provides such scapegoats at two distinct levels. Firstly, such violence appears as part of the logic of elections. The majoritarian domain, not content with victory, wants to emphasise its power in everyday sense. It seeks a moral policing of a minority group on the grounds of monitoring food or dress as moral codes. The cow is declared sacred, and becomes the text and pretext of violence. At the majoritarian level, mob lynchings are a celebration of majoritarian power. The majority becomes the civil society and behaves as an extension of the state assuming the portfolio of law and order.

The second form of lynching occurs not because of the power of mainstream or majority but because of its developmental anxieties. After controlling the minority, it needs to express its anxiety about the stranger. The stranger, in the sociological sense, is an alien person, who is here today but gone tomorrow. There was a reassuring temporariness to his presence. But in India, the stranger as a migrant nomad might be here today, and stay on tomorrow. He is seen as economically and sociologically threatening. He is a vulnerable man, who ironically creates a sense of vulnerability in society. As a stranger and alien, he plays into the deepest and most primordial fears of society, fears about child-lifting or organ-stealing. The body and the imagined body politics both get threatened. The innocent visitor or stranger becomes the focus of these fears while the actual child trafficking anchored on local touts continues as a major industry. Their helplessness in one domain, which is empirically valid, is transformed into brutal power in another domain. Irrationality gets multiplied where rumour takes over law and order. The crowd then becomes the new force of law and order. The violence at both the ends is brutal.

While mob lynchings are a primordial form of violence, reflecting a frontier society like early USA, in India, it has acquired technological trappings. The violence itself is primitive, the weapons everyday — rods and rope, but the sociological prelude is electronic. Rumour and gossip acquire a technological impetus — both in the act of production and consumption. In mob lynching of the first kind, technology is more in the consumption of violence. No act of violence is complete without a selfie or video of the act. There is narcissism here, which is political. The perpetrator sees himself as a force of history, an agent of law and order, a political cleanser of the categories that sustain society. The political support that he later receives confirms his unofficial legitimacy. In mob lynchings of a second kind, the very consumption of violence is through internet, mobile phone and apps. Reports of child lifting going rampant become the fake news of this new informal economy of violence. However, shutting down internet is not the answer. One has to look at the deeper sociology. One has to look at the unconscious of a society, its primordial and historical fears and anxieties. Understanding the unconscious is more complex than defining it as a law and order problem.

The unconscious works at two levels. In the majoritarian case, it feeds into bad history. The lynch squad thinks it is rectifying history, cleansing past pollution and present violation. Only the belief is a fetish, and worse, the amount of innocent people killed is amazing. Smuggling of animals proceeds in a happy way. In both cases of cattle-lifting or child-trafficking, the crimes continue unabated. But the rumour of the two creates a third space of violence, which is deeply pathological. In the developmental case, the fear of the stranger is a fear of change, of the changes development is bringing. What one senses here is not bad history but the absence of myth and the decline of folklore. Development, migration and great urban transformations need myths and folklore to handle them. Coping mechanisms do not come from law and order or the arid abstractness of professional and party politics. A society needs the right kind of story-telling weaving change, the presence of the new and the migrant into a coping myth. Modernity is poor at coping with myths. Law cannot tame the irrational, one needs an understanding of its psychology. The fascination for technology and the myth of IT, the only successful modern myth India has created, distracts. Police get diverted into focusing on cybercrime taking child lifting as a fact of life. 

One has to add that while mob lynchings are seen as a law and order problem, the role of police as spectators raises not merely questions of indifference but of tacit approval. The police seem police of a majoritarian state harassing minorities and migrants. The indifference of the police during the Alwar lynchings is symptomatic of this. 

Violence today, given its instantaneity, its force needs a deep sociology. To handle it as a mere administrative problem becomes a form of denial. Sadly, our social sciences prefer to see themselvesin managerial and rationalist terms. What we need is a language and a sense of the unconscious, the classificatory modes of exclusion and inclusion and a sense of deeper ironies of democracy. Democracy as a caricature can easily degenerate into majoritarianism or populism, both of which thrive on the legitimacy of intolerance. It is this that India is not ready to face.

— The writer is an academic with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination