Thread by @vsirnate

The first time I read about a lynching in my lifetime was in 2002. On Oct 17, 2002, 5 Dalits were lynched to death in Jhajjar. At that time I didn't understand why the term was used in big, black, bold letters in the newspapers. What was a lynching? #StopLynchings

Last year while writing this piece I wrote "Lynchings are public, extrajudicial executions"

thepolisproject.com/are-lynchings-…

This is a widely accepted definition of a lynching. However, moving beyond definitions, a lynching is something that tears the fabric of society producing historical trauma for the victim group involved.

Since 2014, when lynchings started becoming all too regular in India, I began reading more about lynchings. Needless to say, a lot of the academic work on lynchings came from societies that were segregationist - USA, South Africa and others. I wrote this based on my reading.

thehindu.com/thread/arts-cu…

The term “lynching” has often been traced back to William Lynch’s ‘Lynch Laws’ in an America driven by slavery as early as 1780. In 1782, Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace, is believed to have used the term to authorise extra-legal punishment of Loyalists.

These assertions are, of course, the subject of much debate. In America, lynchings were products of a time with weak state penetration, where men and women frequently took the law into their own hands to punish those they thought had committed some wrongdoing. #StopLynchings

Often, such lynchings in the American South between the 1880s and 1920s were carefully organised social events, with the explicit purpose of punishing black persons for perceived infractions such as not bowing properly before a plantation owner. #StopLynchings

Posters would be put up in advance, and leaders of society and local notables like the clergy often attended. Photographs of the event were taken and sold. Souvenirs in the form of the murdered person’s bones, organs and artefacts, were also auctioned.

Writing in the year 1900, Ida B. Wells stated that “Lynchings were most common in regions with highly transient populations, scattered farms, few towns, and weak law enforcement — settings that fuelled insecurity and suspicion.”

However, far from being a modern phenomenon, lynchings have a long history in India. On April 10, 1919 a missionary called MArcella Sherwood was thrown from her bicycle, beaten, and left for dead on a street in Amritsar. She miraculously survived.

In later inquiries it was found that this incident did quite a bit to influence the actions of Reginald Dyer in executing peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh a few days later #StopLynchings

Lynchings have existed in India for a long time. Women have been lynch-raped in India for merely being women, on the diktats of local village councils and for sport. Dalits have been similarly treated merely for being Dalit. #StopLynchings

The lynching/rape and sexual harassment of women has also been a part of counterinsurgency in places like Chhattisgarh, Manipur and Kashmir.

A lynching is never an aberration. It is instead a product of a dominant narrative and the place of people that do not fit into that narrative.

It is part of a pattern rooted in a culture of identity-based competition over resources and social domination that is at its most strident when economic resources are limited and when someone in power allows the space where such acts can occur without fear of punishment.

A lynching is a product of an intense hatred for someone or some group, which is no longer expressed verbally or through social disassociation. When this hatred is encouraged, stoked, made legitimate by the state apparatus and politically incentivised, we get such behaviour.

"All night a bright and solitary star ...
Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;

And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.”
~ 'The Lynching', by Claude McKay (1922)

Lynching, in this instance of poetry, is a ritual of transformation that turns something living and human, into something that is inhuman, non-living, garish; something that is exhibited for entertainment.

Some of the best explanations of lynchings come not from definitions or academic or journalistic work, but from poetry . I read Richard Wright's "Between the World and Me", where he writes:

"And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling." #StopLynchings

"And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline." #StopLynchings

"And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
yellow surprise at the sun.... "

#StopLynchings

To really stop lynching, we need to first interrogate Indian society's relationship and acceptance of everyday violence. We need to make all kinds of violence unacceptable - parent to child, student to teacher, brother to sister, husband to wife, wife to husband...

police to public, state to the poor, employers to employees, male to female... the list of structural and physical violence in India is endless.

But all of this is undergirded by the fact that as a society we have immense acceptance for violence. Consider human to animal violence for instance. we need a massive system reboot in India, but that can only be done by a systematic engagement and

a complete overhaul of parenting, schooling, and all those other little things we never interrogate. I came to this point of view through a simple incident a few years ago. A research scholar came to my house and met my newly adopted street dog.

This dog I have faced much abuse on the streets. I took her in. So this girl comes to my house sees my dog, raises her hand to strike her and says "Hey cutie main ek thappad lagaoongi". The dog hadn't done anything. She just wagged her tail.

This normalization of the script of violence towards an animal that had harmed no one and was pretty well-behaved gave me a bunch of sleepless nights. I realized that the violence that I had spent so many years studying had its roots in what we were being taught at home & school.

I concluded that literally everyone I knew had latent capacity for immense violence - it was so evident in how they dealt with servers, with maids, with animals, with shopkeepers. Even those that claimed to be "activists". In my mind we were all "lynchers in waiting". ENd.