It was reported today that three men were lynched in a Jharkhand village Thursday night, with villagers taking a leaf out of their neighbours in Bihar to allege the victims were thieves and that the police were doing nothing to stop a rising tide of thefts.
Vigilantism has been around for aeons, and is often seen as a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived lack of confidence in local police forces or at times even the armed forces.
But what most fail to realise is man’s intrinsic need for violence or the ‘eye for an eye’ philosophy. Now while that philosophy might not hold water in cases of men being lynched for alleged theft, it is nevertheless a powerful one.
Vigilantism has often been the errant sibling of anarchism, shrouding the latter’s positives with its mob mentality.
But is vigilantism wrong? What happens when a local police force is ether to corrupt, caught up in bureaucracy or just plain lazy? Is it then a citizen’s right to take the law into his own hands?
The key to that question lies in the world ‘law’. If citizens apprehended alleged criminals and tried them — without bias — and if found guilty sentenced them to a punishment befitting the crime, then vigilantism would not be the social pariah it is (it would simply be frowned upon).
To hang a man when his crime is stealing a say...TV set...smacks of immaturity and frenzy, rather than rule of law — citizen or otherwise.
Fortunately the perpetrators of vigilantism in the Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand are not the increasingly erudite middle-class tom-tommed by the Press: They are rural dwellers who have very rarely lived within the diktats of the state. So to expect them to behave differently would be delusional.
The government must now label the lynch mob murderers and try them under that charge...even if it does mean locking up most of the people of a village. Unenlightened vigilantism spreads like a virus and can engulf nations in the garb of revolutions.
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