Another lynching case

The gruesome incident of lynching of a youth inside a tea garden in Jorhat district last Friday has not only sent shockwaves across the state, but has also reminded the people about three similar incidents that had taken place in the past few years. The first such incident in recent years had occurred on June 25, 2013, when a group of autorickshaw drivers had beaten an 18-year-old college student called Jhankar Saikia in the heart of Diphu town in Karbi Anglong district. Incidentally, the second such murder had also taken place in the same district, this one on June 8, 2018, in which two youths Abhijit Nath (Abhi) and Nilotpal Das (Neel) lost their lives in the hands of a mob in Dokmoka. The third one was the murder of a 73-year-old doctor called Deben Dutta was killed by a mob inside the Teok tea estate in Jorhat. The latest incident is also from Jorhat, in which a 23-year-old youth called Debasish Gogoi was killed in a similar manner inside the Gabroo Purbat tea estate. Though there is no connection whatsoever among the four incidents which have taken place in a span of seven years, there is definitely some kind of a pattern behind the mob psychology that led to the ghastly killings. What is most common in all the four incidents is that the victims – whether he is an 18-year-old boy or a 73-year-old doctor – were all innocent people. On the other hand there is also something similar among the people who constituted the mobs, barring the one which occurred in Diphu town; that is – the mobs consisted of illiterate and semi-literate people. In the first incident, the Diphu district and sessions court in February this year convicted 12 persons of the murder of Jhankar Saikia and awarded life imprisonment to them. What was most disturbing in the Jhankar Saikia case is that even as the 18-year-old youth was fisted and kicked to death by a group of people in the heart of Diphu town in the presence of his father, not even one 'citizen' among many who stood watching the incident came forward to save the youth. In the Dokmoka incident, two youths from Guwahati who had gone there sight-seeing were killed after a message spread that they were child-lifters. One of the perpetrators even went to the extent of recording the incident on his mobile phone and then sharing it on social media. It is exactly two years now and the mob lynching case of Abhijit Nath and Nilotpal Das, and their families are still crying for justice despite tall promises by the government. The allegedly slow judicial proceedings have made it painful for the families and loved ones of the two. In the Teok Tea Estate case of September 2019, the police have named 32 persons in its first chargesheet, but nothing much has happened beyond that despite the government's tall claims of fast-tracking the probe. The latest incident appears to be peculiar and raises several questions, the most important being why did the victim and a few of his friends go through the tea estate despite refusal by the security guards during the on-going lockdown? There are several other questions that come to the mind, like – Why did the tea garden management never tried to stop the tea workers and save the youth from being done to death? Are the allegations of the particular tea estate encroaching upon government and forest land true? Yet another common thread that has appeared to pass through all the four incidents is a growing tendency in the society to blame an entire community by its ethnicity. One thing the society must understand – violent mobs have no caste, creed, religion, ethnicity or religion. While there is a tendency in the society to forget, but then the truth is that a young Adivasi woman was stripped naked, molested and assaulted in the heart of Guwahati – hardly a kilometre away from the Chief Minister's office – in broad daylight by educated people who lived in one of the posh localities of the Assam capital in 2007. Three years later, a Mizo woman was assaulted by local citizens, again in the heart of Guwahati. Something is seriously wrong somewhere. Neither should these incidents be seen through a prism of ethnicity, nor should these be looked at as isolated incidents. Probably, a former top cop now heading the region's largest socio-cultural and literary body can try to find the root causes and possible solutions to them. Or probably the Assam Police top boss, another socially very active officer, can try to find the causes and the possible remedies.