It is now more or less official: at least 35 killings or mob lynchings have taken place in the year since May 2017. The trigger has been either alleged cattle smuggling or child lifting, the victims generally belonging to minority communities or are “outsiders”. They have been conveniently branded “WhatsApp killings” and the government has issued a stern warning to WhatsApp to clean up its act. The can—and the blame—has been conveniently kicked down the road to 2019.
But here are some inconvenient questions: WhatsApp has some 1.5 billion subscribers globally, of which 200 million or nearly 15 per cent are in India; why is it that all the killings are happening only in India? Second, the messaging app has been in this country since 2009; why is it that the mob murders have started only now, in the last couple of years? What has changed so drastically in this period as to justify, finally, Nirad Chaudhuri’s diagnosis that this is the continent of Circe, which turns men into monsters?
It is the changing and deteriorating nature of politics which is primarily responsible for the spurt in vigilantism, not the messaging app. The old culprits remain—shoddy policing, a defunct justice system, social fault lines, an imperfect technological platform that assures anonymity—but these are supplementary emboldening factors, not the primary causative impetus. The latter is provided by the newly created ecosystem of hate and fear whose holy grail is the vote, which has to be grabbed no matter the cost to the individual or the society. The credo of Satan prevails: It is far better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.
There is no shying away from it, and it must be said: Politicians—overwhelmingly those from the ruling party at the Centre, but also from other parties—are sowing the seeds of vigilante violence by their acts and deeds and creating a fertile soil in which they can grow their deadly crops, hoping to harvest them at election time. People will believe what they are conditioned to believe, and if it is drilled into them day in and day out that certain communities are not to be trusted, that cow killers are on the loose, that liberals and intellectuals are anti-national, that all Kashmiris are secessionists, that universities are the breeding ground of traitors, that conversions and ‘love jihad’ are decimating the Hindu numbers, and worse, they will believe it all.
WhatsApp is only the messenger, the message itself comes from elsewhere in the corridors of power, amplified by some channels which have specialised in converting news into ‘fake views’. And very soon hate becomes a badge of honour, bravery and pride. The malady has gone way beyond fake news now, it has metastasised into vigilantism, a natural progression, according to Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.”
The government will of course not accept this thesis, but consider: What other message did a Union minister send when he honoured a dead man accused of killing Akhlaq? The man’s body was in a casket draped in the national flag (he had died in judicial custody). What message did a BJP MP from Jharkhand send when he announced that he would pay the legal expenses of those accused in the mob killing of four people on suspicion of cattle lifting?
What was Union Minister Jayant Sinha, he of the superficial and deceptive veneer of Harvard and McKinsey, conveying earlier this month when he garlanded and felicitated the eight accused in another mob lynching case? Or when Giriraj Singh, unfortunately another minister and a serial offender in such matters, visited a bunch of riot accused in jail in Bihar to offer them his help? Such incendiary and inappropriate behaviour would have led to their sacking in any country where political decency exists, but here there has not been one word of disapproval, let alone admonition, from any party or government leader.
This is not just about hate speech, it’s about a hate ecology that is replacing our tolerant anarchy with inspired mob violence. Many years ago Dr Ambedkar had noted that “democracy in India is only a top-dressing of the Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Even this fragile topsoil is now being blown away by a devil’s wind. When the subconscious of the individual is seeded with caste and communal hatred, Freud’s theory comes into play—in a mob this altered subconscious gets unlocked and unfettered violence results. It helps when the powers that be approve of this vigilantism, and a rotten justice system promises that no one will actually get punished after the dust has settled down.
So let us not pin the entire blame on WhatsApp. Yes, it can do much more to remove anonymity and delete accounts. But it is not responsible for the viciousness that permeates our public and political discourse, the imploding of moral values in our society; it cannot be blamed for the messaging that comes from our political leaders and their sycophantic channels that magnify the hatred and antagonism every day on prime time. That is something our shrinking civil society will have to deal with. The problem is not technological as Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad seems to think, it’s behavioural and intellectual. After all, if you deliberately issue a license to kill, why blame the gun?