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Lynchings destroy the notion of community. Each act of violence renders the subsequent act of violence inevitable&more heinous. We should be worried about these events, & not relegate them to ‘apolitical’ acts of disciplinary violence aimed at ‘alleged criminals’. #StopLynchings
Acts of collective public violence do not occur in isolation. These seemingly independent events are linked to broader social, economic, and political forces. #StopLynchings
Framing these acts as “disciplinary violence” against an “errant” individual out of “righteous anger” or “anxiety” does great harm and disservice to understanding and preventing what is now an everyday enactment of grotesque violence. #StopLynchings
For the past year, our team of researchers at The Polis Project’s Violence and Justice Lab has been building a data set on collective public violence and justice in India since 2000. #StopLynchings
We logs acts of mob-based violence – lynchings, massacres, riots, gang rapes, etc. involving two or more persons – and traces how these acts are processed through the justice system. We have found collective public violence to be steadily on the increase since 2000.#StopLynchings
India has always been a profoundly violent nation with a legal system that is skewed in favor of the country’s ruling elite. #StopLynchings
This is why perpetrators of such violence are often vindicated, while the most marginalized people and their bodies are the victims and sites of such violence. #StopLynchings
Recent repetitions of collective public violence against several types of victims, its recording and dissemination demonstrate that Indians have no fear of or faith in the institutions of the state to dispense justice. #StopLynchings
A lynching, is always political. The collective public violence of mobs is almost always planned and is a joint criminal enterprise. To present such incidents as apolitical is to distort the political function that lynchings have performed. #StopLynchings
They are used as tools to threaten and police groups through a deliberate weaponization of civilians. Indian society is being primed to use violence as a solution for all social differences and conflicts. #StopLynchings
This is not surprising. In recent years, the ruling party, the BJP, has used directed and deliberate violence to polarize voters in specific constituencies. #stoplynchings
Where outright violence against the other has not been used, hate speech has been invoked as a proxy for actual violence. #StopLynchings
What can we make of these incidents? First, the victims are a category of people considered disposable. #StopLynchings
They are usually weak, poor, female, transgender, non-natives or outsiders (or suspected to be outsiders) and those that wield little power within their communities. #StopLynchings
While the identity of the victims vary, what unites them, in most of these cases, is their vulnerability and marginality. #StopLynchings
