Participatory mob lynchings, with hundreds of people standing around ‘enjoying’ the spectacle, and hundreds of thousands more consuming it on social media, have rapidly evolved into the new street theatre of our times. Indian streets have become the latest arena for enthusiastic spectating of increasingly brutal blood-sport.
Of course, in no way does this imply that we are a newly violent nation. It is just that till recently, such violence has happened mostly in theatres obscured from general public view, perpetrated by players licensed for it, like the police and the armed forces. Their actions are usually not on offer for mass spectating. These state agents have been, for decades, on rampage at the ‘margins’, like Kashmir or the Northeast or the forests of middle India. They use their armed power with impunity and have scaled up their violence to unspeakable levels. But, in the absence of any sustained and credible reporting by the mainstream media or social media from these places, the nation has only heard mere whispers of what its own governments do in the dark.
And it is shrugged off by the average citizen as a necessary side-effect of governance. The myth has taken deep root in the public mind that the state needs to be unsparingly violent if the citizen has to live in peace. It is a state of mind entirely toxic for ‘democracy’, but it has become the inevitable norm.
The police too, across the sub-continent, enjoy their theatrical role as law-breakers rather than as law-keepers. The janata seemingly derives vicarious pleasure in imagining their men in uniform deploy ever more refined methods of torture upon ‘suspects’. Again, much of this happens away from public view in the hell-holes that police chowkies and jails have become. And when it does happen on the streets, we find photographers operating from behind the police lines, providing only the perspective of the cops. The most affective photographs I have seen of police brutality in India are those, taken in the 1980s, by the late Krishna Murari Kishan whose spine-chilling images of the arms of the law at work in Bihar, with crowds of cheering youngsters egging on the cops, should have prepared any student of Indian society for what was in store for the future.
Choreographed killings
Then, of course, we have the ‘spectacle’ of encounter killings, where we are not witness to what happened, but are treated to sumptuous, well-choreographed, post-facto visuals of sundry individuals or groups of people, duly labelled terrorists or Naxals or dangerous goondas or, of course, now with greater frequency, ruthless conspirators out to eliminate our own Don Quixote or his Sancho Panza. This is the ‘permitted’ brutality of the state, but we will only be deluding ourselves if we did not recognise these too as officially sanctioned lynching.
The manner in which the average mind processes these excitements of deep violence is through popular media. It is our cinema, in its many bhasha avatars, that gives us a chance to applaud and endorse the bestialities of the men in khakhi or, when that seems redundant, get the hero to become the extra-constitutional arbiter of justice. For example, in Malayalam cinema, fight scenes are gratuitous and I have lost count of the obscene number of times superstars like Mammootty and Mohanlal have singlehandedly beaten large gangs to pulp. But what is remarkable here is the manner in which these ‘fight’ scenes are artificially prolonged with the hero repeatedly hitting the same villain a good 10-20 times in a minute. It is a cinematic device through which the audience vicariously derives scopophilic pleasure in the act of a deracinated excess of brute power causing injury — even death — to the other, but all framed within the cloak of ‘legitimacy’, as it is the hero (the righteous one) who indulges in it.
Interestingly, this heroic legitimacy has now, through a process of slippage, become the weapon of those who were, till now, only viewers. Today, they are unashamedly laying claims to being actors themselves; ably assisted by the hysteria and mock outrage that the anonymity of social media can instantly whip up, not to speak the manipulation and distortion of facts it gleefully enables.
The selfie sticks
But, it is not so simple either, because in the age of the selfie, one not only wants to ‘act’ but also to be seen as ‘acting’. It is not for nothing that a majority of the 70-odd lynchings across the country in the last few years were uploaded on social media by the perpetrators themselves. Roland Barthes was right when he defined the petit bourgeois as ‘someone who has preferred himself to all else.’ Narcissism, not politics, is what is driving our mobs.
One could, of course, make the point that all this began with the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, when most of the acts of arson, rape and murder were diligently video-recorded by the mobs and were, for long, available as ‘entertainment’ in video libraries. That no action was ever initiated based on these tells us much about the state of mind of the nation.
After picking on assorted Muslims, Dalits, academics and activists, the mobs are now seeking out targets that bring visibility to their action and help spread fear in a more unambiguous way. The pathetic assault on the 80-year-old Swami Agnivesh is part of a plan that sends out a clear message to dissenters in the majority community too; that even a saffron robe is no longer going to shield you.
I have known Agnivesh now for close to 40 years. During the 1984 pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi, a group of us who were on a peace morcha, as part of the Nagrik Ekta Manch in the Lajpat Nagar area, would have been lynched by a mob with weapons and petrol cans in hand, had not Agnivesh suddenly materialised and placed himself between the mob and us.
His saffron robe saved us that day. Today, in the tragic cathartics of the new street theatre, it cannot even save himself. The hitherto repressed mobs are ready. No virtuous law can really restrain these stormtroopers anymore. We must now prepare for ever innovative, if senseless, performances of violence on our streets.
The writer takes interest in the deep interlink between all spectatorial forms.