Trending Violence : Lynching over rumours
Last Saturday, I was on my way back home, when I saw an uproar in my locality. Careless of getting late, I heeded to my eagerness to have a glimpse of what was going on. As I made my way through the crowd, I saw a frail boy, probably under aged, leaning unconscious and tied against an electric pole. Further asking to a localite, I was briefed that the boy has been thrashed for alleged child-abduction. I looked at the boy’s face. He appeared too innocent to be accused of the case. The weals on his body were articulating the merciless attack of the mob. Meanwhile the police arrived, as usual after the crime is committed, to intervene and retrieve the body ( Yes! Body, by that time he had died). The day after, I saw news in a local daily that read “Boy lynched over child-lifting”. Further inquiring, I found out that the boy was actually an migrant who sells Panipuri and other street-snacks near the Collectorate and had nothing to do with the case he was accused of. For the last few days, there was a rumour spreading in the social media about child lifting and the child fell prey to that rumour. The mob, provoked by the hearsay, lynched the boy without knowing the genuineness of the news. His only fault was that he could not give satisfactory answer about his address. How could he when he had traveled all the way from Bihar to Odisha to earn his bread and didn’t know our language.
This is not the only of such heart-wrenching incidents. Every day, we see lynching and thrashing cases from across the country hit the headlines of newspapers, be it child-lifting, cow-slaughtering or some other religious issues. But the fact is that innocents are falling prey to this. And the victims of these attacks are mostly outsiders, migrant labourers, beggars or mentally challenged persons. Not knowing the language of the territory only adds woe to these victims. It is apparent that such hate crime is stretching its hand. The frequency is alarmingly mounting up and the police have failed to control it. And the abysmal delivery of law and order is somehow responsible for this. The surging violence that gets triggered by some rumours has become a migraine for the police. Yet no adequate measure is seen on the part of police to check these wide spreading rumours and the police officials think that calling upon the public to refrain from such heinous acts will do the job.
The probes to some cases in the last few days show that behind every incident is invariably a rumour in facebok or FB-owned Whatsapp. Rumours spread like a wildfire in the instant messaging platforms like FB and Whatsapp and instead of tracing the credibility of the news, people resort to violence that leads to the cold blooded murders of the innocents. And the victims are not even given chance to prove their story. In the social media market, with around 200 million users only in India, hatred costs nothing. Some miscreants for no reason spread religious hatred and other rumours and it eventually erupt into violence. And mobs of foul mouthed Young men, often under aged are ready to kill the vulnerable. And there are some people, who instead of refraining them from this brutality, film the scene and share it in social media which adds fuel to the fire. Recently, there is a rumour of child-lifting in Odisha that has cost many lives. No state seems immune to these atrocities. The crime has reached its extreme and there seems to be no end to this. Though cyber-cell tries to control the crime but it seems impossible in the instant messaging platform to intercept a message from circulating. The end-to-end encryption makes it harder even to trace the root of the rumour and so the cyber-cell has been unable to tackle the issue. And people, blind-folded by such provoking rumours, make full use of the "Share" option to escalate the violence.
Soumyakanta Senapati
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