When people smiled and clicked selfies next to a man they 'thrashed to death' in Kerala
Madhu was beaten up by a mob for stealing rice and other provisions.
In a chilling incident reported from Kerala, a 27-year-old man died on Thursday after a mob beat him up for allegedly stealing rice and other provisions. As they tied him up and thrashed him, the tribal man’s assailants also took selfies with him which have since gone viral on social media.
The brutality of the crime, and, going by the photos, the perverse pleasure the attackers seemed to draw from it, have led to outrage, with many demanding strict punishment for the perpetrators.
The police are working on it, and on February 23, identified seven suspects and arrested three. However, while this particular case has to be tackled by the police, the fact that people felt the need to smile and pose while beating a man to death shows a larger malaise that the society as a whole needs to confront.
According to reports, Madhu would allegedly steal regularly from shops in this Attapady locality, and then go live in the forests for a few days. The News Minute quoted a policeman as saying: “Madhu has previously been accused of robbing shops and we were trying to nab him for quite sometime. He has three cases registered against him. The locals had got CCTV visuals of Madhu stealing from a shop. A few locals spotted him in the hills, tied him up and brought him to the town. Then they informed us and we reached the spot to take him into custody.”
Madhu may or may not have been a thief. Whatever the crime, the mob had no right to “punish” him. A group of people ganging up to thrash one man is never about justice, it is either blind anger, or a domination exercise.
Madhu was a tribal. The police have said all the assailants were local residents. Did his identity have a part to play in deciding the mob’s brutality towards him? It is easy to hate an “other”, and if the other belongs to a lower social or economic stratum, the urge to “show him his place” is strong.
Usha Punathil, an ex-worker of the Attapady Hills Area Development Society, has expressed very well on Facebook: “After stealing the land and everything the Adivasis owned, and made legislation for all that, now an Adivasi is beaten to death. He had nowhere to go when he was attacked. An adivasi is killed accused of stealing food, then how should we, who have stolen everything from them, be killed?”
What makes this saga of fatal bullying more ghastly are the grinning selfies that popularised it.
What can make you smile as you humiliate, assault, inflict every kind of pain on another human? The sick smile of a trophy hunter, the “joy” one apparently derives from the utter subjugation of another living being, has no place in a civilised society. The pictures are terrible: of a totally helpless Madhu – his hands tied with his own lungi, frisked, beaten, his bag rummaged through and emptied – and his remarkably unfazed attackers.
You take selfies next to something you feel is worth capturing, something important, something you want to be seen doing or associating with. Is the desire to be doing something “different” so strong that even lynching is fair game for it?
We as a society have become so full of hatred, so inured to violence, that tying up a defenceless man who was reportedly mentally ill, raining blows on him, and watching him suffer did not make anyone’s stomach turn.
This is a scary thought. If we have to reclaim a semblance of being a civilised society, Madhu must be given justice. Also, the incident should serve as a wake-up call for all of us to introspect on why inflicting pain on someone else has apparently become a “cool” activity.