Lynching started in the South (United States of America) during slavery. Targets were the slaves imported from Africa to work on farms. The farmers were mostly rich farmers who owned thousands of acres of fertile land. In India, it was ushered in 2014 when PM Narendra Modi assumed office. Early morning namaz was over and Mohsin Shaikh was returning when he was lynched on the road in Pune on June 2, 2014, soon after Modi took over the reign a month ago. He was working in the IT industry. He was from a family which lived with bonhomie with their Hindu neighbors in Solapur.
All spoke Marathi well and had harmonious relations. This was the harbinger of more to come. In the 2 the police arrested Dhananjay Desai who was chief of Hindu Rashtra Sena. Another group of 22 from Hindu Rashtra Sena were arrested but were soon released on bail. They were like the other outfit in Muzaffarnagar named after Modi who had executed the pogroms during 2013 there.
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Lynching is the game-changer in New India
Coercion became a means of terror. This was calculated to overturn the so-called block voting by Muslims in favor of secular parties. BJP was not and is not even today a secular party. India is a secular party and PM Modi shows it off by wearing a Hindu color dress as a Hindu priest as recently as opening the corridor for Hindus to visit Varanasi Wishwnath temple and other temples on the Ganges.
The lynching of Ansari Tabrez was by means of threat and violence perpetrated with utter impunity for hours at end, nay, for days together. This is the darkest hour in the history of India which marks a departure of Narendra Modi from the first term as PM since he remained silent in most of such cases instead of condemning. It heralds the worst for the minorities. The miracle is that Tabrez survived to illustrate this fact four days and then died. Sure, the sign of phenomenalism. The realities and facts of today undoubtedly point it, coercion, a form of terrorism. Such is the power and efficacy of the second Reich of Modi that the remains of the cause of terror traveled to Japan within the week of his junket.
Such inveterate is our PM that as CM of Gujarat he could ask the police to not come in the way of RSS, HVP, ABVP and let Hindus vent their anger in 2002. Those who revealed the truth of it, Haren Pandya and Sanjiv Bhat, met their end at his hand. Dissent is the crying need of today if we want our democracy to thrive and not be throttled. What matters to him is that the Diaspora in 2002 was with him and now in Japan they encore him. ‘Jai Shri Ram.’ ‘Vande Matrum.’ The first slogan was never uttered with the same ferocity then. The second is in praise of India as a mother goddess, which Muslims refuse to utter because of idolatry. That is how the juggernaut of dividing India continues.
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But what is painful is that those who lynched Tabrez coerced him to utter such slogans umpteen times, ad absurdum. When he was in jail after two days the main accused Papu Mandal went there and asked in surprise:‘Ab tak yeh mara kyon nahin? [why did he not die till now?]’ The wife of Tabrez and his mother-in-law were also there whom the police threatened that they would break their knees if they did not go out.
The young widow passed out at the sight of her husband
It is strange that only the crime of theft is registered but not of attack on the victim and his death! They forced him to chant against his will. This is part of the definition of terror and then they left him as a living mummy that amounts to lynching and essentially terrorism. He died on account of the torture. The police aggravated the condition by not paying attention to the serious condition.
There are no reasons to believe that a man could have done thieving hardly a month after marriage. He had a job as a welder in Pune and was visiting his village for Id festival. He was to return back to Pune soon to resume his work. This is not a “cut and paste” allegation of terror, as the Jharkhand- minister would like us to believe. It is sheer terror. It has put on noticing the minorities that they are at the mercy of the majority Hindus. When Menahem Begin and his groups of terrorists bombed Hotel David in Jerusalem they had put the imperialist British on notice that their days were over and Israel would be created.
Despite the gravity of the lynching of the week, Modi went to the G20 meeting in Japan. He spoke succinctly on the global threat of terrorism on June 28. Terrorism is the greatest threat to humanity. It kills not only innocent people but also has the most disastrous effect on economic opportunity and poses threat to social stability and to remove it, we have to close all the means that support communalism and extremism.
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This is a sham statement because he and his right-wing groups and party do not believe what he is pontificating there. What is rampant in India is precisely due to him: communalism and extremism. Tabrez’s lynching is the living proof of it. If it cannot change the game then it is hunting with the hounds and playing with the hair. But can he play until kingdom come!
The world is a large stage and he cannot strut and fret forever
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
During the farmers protest shut down at the Punjab border two most notorious lynching took place. One was by the son of the deputy home minister under Amit Shah in 2021 when he crushed agitators in the attack which led to the outraged farmers lynching the farmers with their weapons. A few days earlier an Indian was also lynched by Sikhs.
Like Mohsin, Tabrez was also on leave from his job in Pune, during which he married and subsequently lynched in Jharkhand by Bajrang Dal.