Bureaucrat’s fix: Social media isn’t the lynch mob’s oxygen. Improve law and order, excise hate from politics

A panel of secretaries tasked with studying the spate of lynchings has found a convenient bugbear: social media. In a report to a Group of Ministers, the bureaucrats are reported to have stressed on the liability of social media platforms. They have proposed stronger penal provisions to tackle this new menace. But the conclusion that lynchings are the outcome of malicious content in cyberspace is by no means the full story.

Over the last five years use of social media platforms has grown, even exploded, worldwide. But nowhere else have they led to an explosion of lynchings as in India – where we are forced to read news about a fresh lynching almost every other day. Thus local factors are responsible – among which the weakness of policing, which in India appears geared to ensuring security for VIPs rather than citizens in general, bulks large. Stronger penal provisions to tackle lynching may help at the margins. But India has a plethora of laws and absence of political will, which in this instance permits vigilantism to gain currency. The latter is brought out starkly in the example of a Union minister garlanding lynching suspects, in a mistaken quest for votes in his constituency. Some of the lynchings, especially those involving gau raksha, have little social media interface and more to do with the upsurge of political Hindutva.

One should perhaps not expect a report prepared by bureaucrats to point at this larger rot. But it is incumbent on the government to try a different tack involving better policing, fast tracking of lynching cases, asking its ministers and functionaries not to fan hate themselves. Some of these measures were ordered by Supreme Court recently. Meanwhile, excessive curbs on social media will hurt India’s business competitiveness relative to its peers.