One of the worst-ever cases of rioting in London took place in 2011. After the death of Mark Duggan, a black man, in police firing, the city and nearby areas saw massive riots for five days. Other than the damage to property, a total of five deaths were reported during the riots. Within a week the police arrested 3,100 people. Courts were officially advised to ignore existing guidelines and deal with the criminals harshly. Judges sat for extra hours and in less than a year, 1,292 rioters were sent to jail with an average sentence of 16.8 months, totalling 1,800 years of imprisonment.
Cut to India. Our country has seen far worse including riots involving thousands of killings. Have we heard even a few hundred rioters getting punished in any instance? Even in cases where a few dozen Kanwariyas run amok in broad daylight in our capital, we tend to feel satisfied by booking one or two of them and forget about the rest in due course of time. It takes years and decades to even punish a few rioters. No wonder across India, people find it alright to turn into or join a mob and lynch others without any fear of the law.
In fact, as a sovereign nation, we began our journey amidst riots in August 1947. One estimate puts the toll during the Partition riots at one million human lives. But no one tells us who killed them and how many of the rioters were actually booked or punished. In last seven decades thousands of people have been killed in all parts of our country including New Delhi, but from Gujarat to Odisha
and Kashmir to Kerala, no mob has ever been sufficiently punished.
A lynch mob is beyond the law in our country. A person, who is with a crowd, can get away with anything. Even the most efficient officers invariably fail to punish a crowd. Some fail to rein in the mob crimes on streets during the frenzy. Most fail to bring the criminals to book after the crime. Almost all fail in getting them punished in the court of law. A crowd can get away with murders, rapes, arson, etc. It can even step on the toes of the otherwise high and mighty segments of our society like the bureaucracy, judiciary, press or legislature. The lynching of a district magistrate in Bihar’s Gopalganj, attacks on the office of a leading newspaper in Tamil Nadu or storming of courts in Ghaziabad and the Orissa State Assembly in Bhubaneswar are a few examples.
In case of mob crimes, ‘democracy’ has overtaken the rule of law. Arguably, they are complementary to each other. But from the purpose of law and order, the former takes precedence. When confronted with crowd crimes, the Goddess of Justice also favourably considers the will of the mob. Democracy is, after all, of the people, by the people and for the people!
Anonymity is a big motivation for mobs to commit crimes with impunity. Some NGO, human rights group or political party will always argue that the crowd was innocent. The liberal democratic values perhaps call for an unconditional support to mobs, even to the murderous ones. If the police do not take action to control the mob violence, it is termed as ineffective; but if they do then they are branded as cruel and merciless. Due to this hounding of police by civil society, the use of force even against wild crowds is becoming rare. Police officers on the spot know that non-use of force may or may not invite trouble but with the use of force, they are doomed for certain. With human rights groups breathing down their necks, they find that allowing the mob its way is a safer proposition for them. In the bargain, the innocent people ultimately suffer and are left to be lynched.
The police response also depends on the crowd size. The possibility of punishment is inversely proportional to the crowd size. The bigger the crowd involved in a crime, lesser the possibility of punishment. There are provisions in the Indian Penal Code by which a crime committed by a member of an unlawful assembly is sufficient to punish all of them. However, for all the crimes committed by a crowd, not even a few are punished.
A lot of efforts are made to prevent and control riots, but unlike the London riots, very little attention is paid to post-riot efforts. After it is over, both people and police tend or pretend to forget the bitter memories of riots. But this convenient forgetting and forgiving ensure fresh and bigger trouble next time. The law enforcement may not draw lessons but trouble-mongers learn that they can go scot-free under the cover of anonymity.
What is the way out then? In an era of over-vigilant human rights groups, it may be difficult to use force to stop a crowd gone berserk. However, the use of non-lethal weapons, which incapacitate but do not kill, needs to be increased. Unfortunately, even now in most areas, policemen carry rifles when on law and order duties. One bullet from these weapons can kill even more than one, at times, and that too from a long distance.The use of force has obvious limitations. So it is more important to take away the advantage of anonymity.
The use of CCTV, videography and social media feeds were very helpful to the London Police in identifying and prosecuting the culprits. It is vital to make painstaking efforts after the riots to identify culprits and bring them to book. A lynch mob would desist only if we are able to make it a costly affair. At present, the state loses life and property, but crowds lose nothing. There is no need to shoot or hang rioters. The only thing necessary is that each one of them must be punished. It is not the severity, but the certainty of punishment that deters crime. This is truer in case of mob crimes.