Image matters. Saudi Arabia has enough petrodollars to stay the darling of capitalism, but its medievally regressive reputation is a public relations disaster. Women are jailed for driving; pro-democracy bloggers are jailed; criminals are executed publicly, and women stoned and whipped for adultery even without real evidence. Such barbarism has provoked partially successful calls for reform both within and outside the kingdom. Sharia depends on mobocracy led by mullahs afraid of losing their power.
The same Saudi Arabia, by piping in millions of petrodollars into India, aims to spread its religiously claustrophobic version of Islam, Wahhabism. This has led to a profusion of loudspeaker mosques and maulvis, spreading their dark message of intolerance. Islam in the country is under attack—both from within and outside. Its intellectually and socially syncretic image, mapped by its Sufi past, is being endangered.
The Indian government is leading the modernisation drive in Islam, to ban triple talaq as unconstitutional and a despicable law promoting polygamy, violating the rights of women. This dovetails with the administration’s modernistic policy of sponsoring digital equality in spite of panchayats imposing `20,000 fines on girls using mobile phones.
However, the random acts of mobocracy, led by self-appointed cowboys and defenders of the ‘virtue’ of women, are sullying this progressive perception. Mobocracy is the enemy of democracy since it seeks to promote violence through moral panic. Mob justice does not require proof, only hearsay and hysteria.
Historically it transcends religion. The bloodshed of the French Revolution was inspired by mob rule. In 1572, Catholic mobs massacred 60,000 Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day. Witch-hunters murdered thousands in the Salem Witch Trials. The Ku Klux Klan lynched Negroes. The bloodlust of Roman mobs in gladiatorial arenas exposed the contradiction between ancient Rome as the birthplace of justice and mobocracy.
Greek historian Polybius coined the word ochlocracy (mob rule) to typify the “pathological” version of popular rule viz democracy. While democracy requires the energy of leaders to succeed, ochlocracy needs just a few agent provocateurs with agendas to whip up mass hysteria—today all they require is the word ‘Hindu’ in obscure organisations to be seen as leaders of the future. The 1984 Sikh riots were engineered by local goons at the behest of the Congress.
Now butchers are assaulted and killed based on filamental rumours of cow-slaughter. Legitimate traders transporting cattle, both Hindus and Muslims, have been beaten within an inch of their lives. Mobs have murdered men on the ‘suspicion’ of encouraging interfaith couples to elope. These actions do not represent the will of the government, but end up staining its image as a regime whose stringent warnings are ignored by criminals with political aspirations.
The media is trapped between news and conviction, forced to report on sword-holding thugs mocking the law of the land, giving them publicity. Rioters on TV warn of assaults in the name of gau raksha. In the age of globalisation, mob rule has to be punished severely by banishing it to where it rightfully belongs—the Dark Ages.