As the grim threat of lynching casts a terrifying shadow over large swathes of the country, directions from India’s Supreme Court to all governments to take steps to prevent what it described as “horrendous acts of mobocracy” can only be welcomed.
This is what India has become: One more pitiless lynching. This time of two older men, a petty goat trader and a marginal farmer in a village in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh, a two-hour drive from the national capital.
A full year has passed since dairy farmer and cattle trader Pehlu Khan was lynched on a busy Rajasthan highway in April. As this year elapsed, his family and other Muslim dairy farmers have tumbled into bleak times.
I worry that perhaps we have so immersed ourselves in debates about the liberal imperative; that we have lost sight of the bigger questions of what is good, what is kind and what is just, writes Harsh Mander.
On February 28, 15 years would have passed since a gale of violence engulfed 20 out of the 25 districts of Gujarat. This persisted for several weeks, and in some places for months, as state authorities did little to control it.
In the early hours of a midsummer morning, at the outskirts of Ahmedabad near the city’s waterworks, on June 15, 2004, the Gujarat police shot dead four occupants of a car. One of those killed was a young 19-year-old woman. Her name was Ishrat Jahan.
Some events leave a permanent mark on the history of a people. For many in my generation, one such moment of iconic suffering was the felling by a frenzied mob of a medieval mosque on December 6, 1992.
I took Usman Ansari’s one good hand in mine and said that I had come with the message of sharing his pain. I sought his forgiveness, on behalf of all of us.
In India, we have accustomed ourselves to erasing from public memory horrendous injustices and moving on. Moving on without healing, without remorse, without even elementary justice. Moving on as though nothing happened.
On the 10th day of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat, as we met bereaved and grieving families – Muslim families that had lost their loved ones to cow vigilantism or police aggression – in five villages of the Nuh district of Mewat, we got news of anger and hostility to the advance of our peace caravan to Behror in Alwar district.