Sunday's deadly assault on 54-year-old guitarist Chongtham Vikram Singh at his own apartment in Delhi was symptomatic of three troubling phenomena increasingly rearing their ugly heads—especially in the country’s north. The first is the continuing discrimination against citizens from the Northeast, to address which the Delhi police have even set up a dedicated cell. Second, the increasing tendency of lynch mobs feeling entitled to take the law into their own hands. Such cases have spread so grotesquely that the Supreme Court in 2018 condemned them as “horrendous acts of mobocracy”. Third is the phenomenon protesting which Singh drew his neighbours’ ire—the unthinking loudness that is becoming common at festivals. Quietude should be taught as a virtue in a society unbothered about ear-splitting noise seriously distressing others.
