Dimapur mob lynching: Local media playing a dangerous game
When the Nirbhaya case brought Delhi to the streets, the nation was faced with a severe divide between people who wanted the rapist to be hung or castrated (instead of a life imprisonment) and those who warned against a vindictive reaction to the whole affair. It is true that jail boards have numerous records of rapists roaming free; a reflection on the country's judiciary system and the police. Many writers and activists signed petitions stating that capital punishments or inflicting more violence on the rapist's body is not the solution. According to this school of thought, we had to be better than those that we professed to punish.
Last week, we saw the nation debating the ethics of the Dimapur lynching. No doubt, what the mob did was out of line. But looking at the reactions on social media, a Martian would presume that justice had been served. A friend on Facebook gleefully shared the news of the lynching, along with the caption, "THIS. We need this, right now, in Delhi. #Nagaland". Another colleague shared the story of a lynching he witnessed in Jharkhand - not in a hamlet at the back of beyond, but at the heart of Ranchi, at a chowk that saw pretty heavy traffic by the city's standards. Interestingly, even in the Ranchi case, the provocation was the violation of a woman's body: the victim had, apparently, molested a girl from the tribe the mob belonged to.
What do these events and attitudes tell us?
For a clear picture of the "appropriation game" going on right now, one only needs to turn one's gaze towards the Assamese language media's coverage of the incident. For the better part of the year, Assamese media - TV in particular - relishes the otherising of the Bangladeshi immigrants. This should warn us about the many "mainstreams" present in the states of the Northeast even as they continue to be the other of the mainland India. The power dynamic that locates and labels all Bengali Muslims as the "miyan" populace is one that is percolating since the times of the Assam Andolan. A Hyderabad university student talks about how even sensitive intellectuals like Hiren Gohain (whose essays are a treasure to Assamese literature) was thrashed upon criticising elements of chauvinism of the Assamese mainstream. Ironically, this is the same media that ran stories as ghastly as the 2012 Guwahati "live" molestation case, where Amar Jyoti Kalita was accused of provoking a mob to strip a young girl as she was exiting a nightclub.
Self-reflexivity and constructive criticism is quickly understood as "anti-regional/anti-nationalist" to say the least. It is unfortunate that news items from time to time, portray a conspicuous fear against the "outsiders". They are blamed of robbing the Assamese people of their identity, their jobs and especially their land and women. (Note the parallels with the Punjabi dictum of jar-joru-jaydaat; the three things associated with an abstract notion of "honour", the three things which the Punjabi people fight for; gold, women and land.) But when it came to Syed Farid Khan, these same TV anchor were quick to claim this person as "one of our own". Why? Because such a rebranding fits the story angle that suits their ends currently; namely, the narrative of the Nagas as a "barbaric", "crude" people. All of this smacks of the lack of a clear and nuanced understanding of the Assamese history and culture.
It would be convenient to call the attitude of the Assamese-language media "conservative", since that word at least indicates a willingness to protect what we have. It is not conservatism but Machiavellian politics that is at play here. Indeed, the words of the journalist and commentator Sanjoy Hazarika are very relevant here: "The social, demographic and political tensions spawned by this problem are too deep to gloss over or to seek quick-fix solutions like 'throwing' foreigners out. Some extreme, parochial groups take refuge in the Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, without knowing that it is him they quote. Many ideologues of the extreme right-wing who accuse Bangladesh of trying to swamp the Northeast and take it over demographically, and thence politically (not to speak of economically), indirectly quote Machiavelli when they raise these fears."
Today when the entire nation is watching the live broadcast of the curfew in Nagaland, one of the biggest fears remains the very stereotypes this will help cement further. In our blame game of which one is more barbaric than the other, we are all committing the same act of savagery. It is this savagery which is perhaps the only thing, (tragically so) uniting the rest of the nation with the Northeast.