Afia Ambreen
Recently, an FIR has been lodged against nearly 50 Indian celebrities for writing an open letter of dissent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the growing cases of mob lynching in India. The cases were lodged after an order was passed by Chief Justice Magistrate Surya Kant Tiwari two months ago on a petition filed by local advocate Sudhir Kumar Ojha. The letter was penned down by prominent personalities of India’s entertainment industries including film producers Mani Ratnam, Anurag Kashyap, singer Shubda Mugal, Shyman Bengal, Sumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Sen, Ramachandra Guha, and others. The celebrities have raised concerns on the rise cases of lynching of Muslims and Dalits in India, asking to stop the immediate rise of religious extremism in the country. The letter stressed that there is ‘no democracy without dissent’. Added to this, the letter stressed that “Jai Shri Ram” was no less than a “provocative war cry” and that there was “no democracy without dissent”.
In 2017, a group of 65 retired senior civil servants published an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticising “a rising authoritarianism and majoritarianism, which do not allow for reasoned debate, discussion and dissent”. The group includes Ishrat Aziz and Deb Mukharji of the Indian Foreign Service, Julio Ribeiro and M. Balachandran of the Indian Police Service, and activist Harsh Mander, who has valiantly sought justice for victims of anti-Muslim pogroms. Furthermore, in the face of a rising authoritarianism and majoritarianism, which do not allow for reasoned debate, discussion and dissent, we appeal to all public authorities, public institutions and constitutional bodies to take heed of these disturbing trends and take corrective action. We have to reclaim and defend the spirit of the Constitution of India, as envisaged by the founding fathers. Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won power in India five years ago, lynchings of the country’s minorities have surged. In February, Human Rights Watch reported at least 44 such murders between May 2015 and December 2018. Hundreds more people have been injured in religiously motivated attacks. Most of the victims are Muslims, members of the country’s largest religious minority. They comprise about 15% of India’s 1.3 billion people. Other victims include lower-caste Hindus and Christians. Most of the attackers are devout Hindu men, known as “cow vigilantes” who take it upon themselves to enforce beef bans. Some of them claim ties to the BJP. Last year, a BJP minister met with a group of men convicted of a lynching and draped them in flower garlands.
In April this year, 55 year old Prakash Lakda, a member of a Christian tribe, was lynched by a mob of Hindu villagers who suspected him of slaughtering a cow in the central Indian state of Jharkhand. Three other tribals from his village were also attacked, leaving them grievously injured. Now, a police investigation has shown that Lakda’s death might have been as much a result of police complicity as it was of the violent mob. Last week, the investigation revealed how Lakda and the three other victims were ignored by the police for over an hour and a half, as they lay on the street, writhing in pain, after having been attacked for over four hours. The police, however, have now gone on to charge the three victims on charges of cow slaughter, an offense under local laws that can lead to 10 years of imprisonment, or a fine of 10,000 rupees (€126, $140). The complaint against them was lodged by the mob that lynched Lakda. The lynching itself and the official response to it are symbolic of the Indian state’s inept handling of these crimes and the long road to justice for victims. There have already been 23 such hate crimes in 2019, and Jharkhand, the central state where Lakda was lynched, has seen 15 of them. These hate crimes often have the tacit or overt support of Modi’s ministers or members of his party. Last year, former Indian minister for civil aviation, Jayant Sinha, congratulated eight people convicted of lynching a Muslim trader on a busy street in Jharkhand for carrying beef in his car. In the same state last June, another member of parliament from Modi’s BJP, Nishikant Dubey, said that he would bear the legal expenses of those accused of lynching two Muslim cattle traders to death on suspicion of cattle theft.
Unfortunately, India’s constitution provides for religious freedom, but the country does not always practice it. It has been criticized that India for having high levels of government restrictions on religion, defined as interference in religion practice or proselytizing, hostility to minority religions and inaction on complaints of discrimination.
