It was a gut-wrenching two days. Between March 29 and March 30, the Karwan e Mohabbat team met nine families in Haryana’s Mewat region who had lost loved ones to hate murders of another kind.
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.
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.
I have never known the disdain of my teachers who believe I am undeserving of a future because I was born to be without merit. To be beaten because I aspire to worship in a temple that people say will be defiled by my step or touch or veneration.
“Is there a problem if we are good-looking?” a young Dalit man, who was thrashed by Rajput men of his village for sporting a moustache, asks a reporter.
The masks have been thrown to the winds. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his most trusted aide and Bhartiya Janata Party President Amit Shah have audaciously signalled to both national and global public opinion that they feel no need for masks and fig-leafs any longer.
I worry that, if allowed to go unchecked, lynching could become a national epidemic. More and more people feel emboldened to join or incite mobs. There is an enabling climate for hate speech and violence that is fostered by a majoritarian social climate.
On September 11, Karwan e Mohabbat regrouped in Tilak Vihar, Delhi, where widows of the 1984 Sikh massacre were settled more than three decades ago, and set off to its next destination. We reached Kandla in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district past midnight.
A darkness is rising in India. Mobs are violently acting out visceral hatred, targeting people because of their faith and caste. These assaults are characterised by bystanders who actively support the killing, or do nothing to stop it.
The journey of the Karwan e Mohabbat into Rajasthan on September 15 was overcast by the violent opposition to our resolve to place flowers on the dusty kerb of the highway in Behror where dairy farmer Pehlu Khan was lynched by a vigilante mob in April. I have already recounted this story earlier, and will not repeat it.