The India Spend initiative has found as many as 90%
of religious hate crimes since 2009 have occurred after the BJP took power at
the Centre in 2014.
Protest against lynchings in New Delhi. | PTI
The
election results in Brazil last month came as another troubling reminder of the
direction in which an increasing number of countries are careening. In nation
after nation, a growing number of people are voting for leaders who stoke
hatred against minorities and other oppressed groups, crush Opposition by left
and liberal dissenters, wave the flag of an aggressive and exclusionary
nationalism, and advocate belligerent militarism against other nations. In some
countries such right-wing authoritarian leaders are being elected to form
governments, while in others they build formidable oppositions.
As a
consequence, the world has become a progressively more frightening and
dangerous place to live in for minorities of various kinds – religious,
national, racial, linguistic, ethnic, and sexual – as well as for left and
liberal dissidents. As fear, violence and state bias become increasingly
normalised for minorities in country after country, it is sobering to remember
that India is still unique because of the rise of one particular kind of hate
violence that targets its religious and caste minorities: lynching. In the past
few years, India has seen several instances of lynchings in which frenzied mobs
have targeted people mainly because of their religious or caste identity – for
being Muslim or Dalit. This is part of a larger surge of hate crimes that is
corroding social peace and trust across the country.
A hate
crime is one in which crimes are committed against a person not because of what
a person might have done, but because of who they are. In a communal lynching,
a person is attacked for the alleged transgressions, real or imagined, past or
present, of other members of that person’s community.
“In cases
of xenophobic and communal lynching, one person’s body becomes a site of
history,” Jurist Upendra Baxi told data-driven news portal India
Spend,
speaking of the nature of lynching as a hate crime. “The person is not lynched
for his or her own conduct, but for the past conduct of others. In allowing
this to happen the administration and the law proceeds to become a programme of
revenge.”
Confronted
with criticism for the rising graph of incidents of communal and caste
lynching, the Union government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi initially
responded with denial, claiming that these incidents are statistically trivial.
As news of such incidents grew, spokepersons of the ruling party described
these crimes as routine breakdowns of law and order that have occurred under
the watch of every government. They claimed it was vested interests that
specifically associated the present Bharatiya Janata Party regime with
lynchings in India. In 2017, in a reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha about
the incidence of lynching, Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Ahir did
not report a single case of lynching for that year, and small numbers in
earlier years. In July, Ahir affirmed that “The National Crime Records Bureau
does not maintain specific data with respect to lynching incidents in the
country.”
What the
government and ruling party refuse to acknowledge is that incidents of lynching
are not ordinary crimes, reflecting normal periodic failures of law and order.
The large majority of these incidents are hate crimes, or crimes that target
people because of their identity. In the 22 journeys the Karwan-e-Mohabbat made since September 2017 –
during which we visited families of lynching and hate crimes in 12 states – we
found a wave of these crimes had erupted in many corners of the country.
The scale
of these hate crimes remains obscured and bitterly contested because of the
official policy of the National Crime Records Bureau to not keep a separate
record of hate crimes or lynching. Moreover, as Abhishek Dey of Scroll.in concluded last December after
looking closely at five hate crimes that made the headlines in 2017, India is undercounting
religious hate crimes by failing
to invoke a crucial section of the law. This is Section 153A of the Indian
Penal Code, which is commonly used to gauge the prevalence of religion-based
hate crimes in the country. It lays down punishment for promoting enmity
between different groups on grounds of religion, race, caste and community, and
acting in ways that are prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony. If applied
to all hate crimes, it would be a useful index to gauge the prevalence of
religion-based hate crimes. But Dey found that this section was not applied in
any of these cases he had investigated.
“We
cannot speak of hate crimes, eyes closed, with conviction, if we do not have
data,” Baxi told India Spend. “We have to understand the
pattern of violence, the rise and fall, study the ebbs and flows and the
surrounding circumstances. What do the data mean when perpetrators become
victims? And when victims become perpetrators?”
This is why India Spend’s recent initiative –
the Citizen’s Religious Hate Crime Watch – is significant. This fact-checker tracks those crimes that target an individual
or group of individuals because of their religious identity. It was launched on
October 30 to counter the deliberate obscuring of the nature and scale of hate
crimes in India. The initiative is supported by the news portal NewsClick and
Aman Biradari, the people’s campaign for secularism and compassion.
Relatives and neighbours of Rakhbar Khan,
who was allegedly lynched to death in Alwar on July 20 on suspicion of cow
smuggling. (Photo credit: HT).
What the tracker found
The
Hate Crime Watch tracker
is currently based on an analysis of 254 incidents of hate crimes motivated by
religious hatred, which resulted in 91 deaths and 579 injuries between 2009 and
2018.
A striking finding of the data
compiled by it is that as many as 90% of religious hate crimes since 2009 have
occurred after Modi led the BJP to power at the Centre in 2014. This points
compellingly to the conclusion that an environment has been created under
Modi’s watch in which people feel safe, enabled, even encouraged to act out their
hate and attack religious minorities. The permissive environment for hate
attacks created by frequent hate speeches by senior leaders of the party, and
Modi’s refusal to criticise these attacks except very occasionally and in
general terms, means that communal and vigilante formations feel emboldened and
encouraged to attack people of minority identities wth impunity.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most
populous state, led today by a firebrand Hindutva leader of the BJP, also
records the highest numbers of hate crimes. But the second-largest number of
hate crimes have occurred in Karnataka, which is ruled by an alliance between
the Janata Dal (Secular) and Congress. This is followed by BJP-ruled Rajasthan.
As seen by Hate Crime Watch, around 66% of the cases have occurred in BJP-ruled
states. But this in itself this should not be surprising as the BJP is in power
in 20 out of 29 states. Sixteen per cent of hate crimes have been recorded in
Congress-ruled states.
What is far more telling is that
among the cases in which the details of the attackers’ political affiliations
are known or reported, as high as 83% of the hate crimes were by attackers who
were allegedly affiliated with Hindutva organisations, including the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Yuva Vahini and Vishwa Hindu Parishad,
among others; as well of the political parties of the BJP and the Shiv Sena.
Members of the Bajrang Dal were found to be involved in the largest number of
hate crimes. Of the 30 cases of hate crimes in which Bajrang Dal members were
alleged to have participated, the
Hate Crime Watch shows that 29 took place after 2014.
Worst districts
The district with the highest
numbers of hate crimes as reported in the
Hate Crime Watch is Dakshina Kannada. This coastal
Karnataka district was once famed for the peace between its Hindu, Muslim and
Christian citizens. But over the last two decades, it has seethed with communal
clashes and targeted bloodletting, as it grew into one of the key sites of
communal mobilisation by organisations of the Sangh. Its cow vigilantism and
attacks on even friendships between women and men of different religions in the
name of “love jihad” helped create the template that has now been adopted by
Sangh organisations in many parts of the country. The coastal Karnataka
districts also voted entirely for the BJP in the recent state elections.
Alwar district in Rajasthan comes
next. This is where self-styled cow vigilantes lynched Pehlu Khan in 2017 and
Rakbar Khan in 2018. Like both these dairy farmers, a significant number of
people who have been lynched in Alwar are Muslims from the neighbouring
district of Nuh in Haryana. Nuh district has the second highest proportion of
Muslim residents in India outside of Kashmir. Its Meo Muslims are impoverished,
with arid land holdings, but devoted traditionally to dairying. These dairy
farmers have been victims of attacks by cow vigilantes as well as targeted
extra-judicial killings by the police. Both perpetrators choose to attack their
targets usually outside Nuh, mainly in Alwar. After Alwar, come the districts
of Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Shamli, all in the agriculturally prosperous
western Uttar Pradesh, which has smouldered with religious and caste violence
ever since the communal carnage in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in 2013.
Mother of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan along with
her family members stage a sit-in demonstration to demand justice for him, in New
Delhi on April 19, 2017. (Photo credit: IANS).
Primary target: Muslims
Hate Crime Watch demonstrates that
the paramount target of religious hate crimes are Muslims. In particular, at
least 87% of the victims of cow-related attacks tracked by Hate Crime Watch
were Muslim. Muslims also formed a large proportion of persons who were
attacked for inter-faith relationships. Hate Crime Watch data shows that the
victims were Muslim in 64% of instances of violence related to inter-faith
liaisons. Overall, Muslims, who comprise 14% of India’s population, were the
victims in 62% of cases of religious violence recorded by Hate Crime Watch
since 2009.
Christians are another religious
group who have suffered hate violence on a scale many times higher than their
share of the population. Christians constitute a little more than 2% of India’s
population, but are victims in 14% of the cases of religious identity based
violence. Their highest share, unsurprisingly, is in violence spurred by
allegations of forced religious conversions. The victims were Christian in at
least 78% of these attacks. These assaults tend to take the form of attacks on
churches and prayer spaces, even those located within homes, and on priests,
nuns and ordinary members of the community.
By contrast, Hindus, who comprise
more than 80% of India’s population, were victims in only 10% of religious
identity based hate crimes after 2009. The story is reversed if the identities
of the perpetrators of violence are considered. In 86% of the cases of hate
crimes in which the religion of the alleged perpetrator is known, the attackers
were Hindus. The attackers were Muslim only in 13% incidents.
What were the triggers for these episodes of
hate violence that targeted religious identities? Around 30% of the attacks
that are included in Hate Crime Watch are in the name of cow protection. While
14% are to protest inter-religious relationships, 9% are spurred by allegations
of religious conversions. In several of the remaining cases, the reasons are
not confirmed.
Policewomen keep watch as Christians
demonstrate outside the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi in 2015. (Photo credit:
AFP)
The slow arm of the law
Hate Crime Watch also has only
partial information about whether legal action was taken against the
perpetrators of hate crimes. But the information that is available is
disquieting. In at least 23 cases recorded in Hate Crime Watch so far, or about
a tenth of the cases, the police had not filed even a first information report
against the perpetrators. At the same time, in at least a fifth of the cases,
or 53 cases, first information reports have also been filed against the victim.
In cow-related hate crimes, the police, in at least a third of the
incidents, had also arrested the victims of the attacks.
Hate Crime Watch has sourced its
data mainly from news reports in the English language press. The actual numbers
of hate crimes and of fatalities are likely to be higher, perhaps much higher,
because the national press ignores many of these incidents, particularly those
that are not fatal. This is also because the police often attempt to disguise
these crimes – even when they result in fatalities – as ordinary murders and
assaults, or even road traffic injuries, unwilling to acknowledge that these
are motivated by religious hatred. (We hope to bring together a country-wide
collective of voluntary fact finders who will both scan newspapers in other
Indian languages, and also investigate incidents that are not reported, or
those in which the police claim that the crime was not motivated by hate.)
Even so, despite the fact that Hate
Crime Watch relies mainly on English language newspaper reports, its findings
are intensely distressing. It is difficult for supporters of Modi to
convincingly deny any longer the massive spurt of hate crimes during his
stewardship of the country, or that religious hate crimes overwhelmingly target
the country’s Muslim and Christian citizens. But despite this evidence, the
rising tide of hate violence in India has not significantly caught global
attention.
India sometimes creates its own
specific cruelties. Untouchability and caste atrocities is one of these.
Domestic violence is a worldwide malaise but India alone has innovated the
cruelty of the burning of brides for dowry. In the same way, whereas
politically encouraged bigotry and hatred against minorities is growing into a
malign global epidemic, will India’s dubious contribution to this be its unique
spate of communal mob lynching targeting its religious minorities and
disadvantaged castes?
