Jharkhand mob lynching: Social media, TV news and lack of faith in institutions eroding individual identities, morality

Last week in Jharkhand, Tabrez Ansari, a young man in his 20s who worked as a welder in Pune, was caught by a mob who suspected him of being a thief and beaten to within an inch of his life over a period of several hours. Joining the Dots is a weekly column by author and journalist Samrat in which he connects events to ideas, often through analysis, but occasionally through satire *** Last week in Jharkhand, Tabrez Ansari, a young man in his 20s who worked as a welder in Pune, was caught by a mob who suspected him of being a thief and beaten to within an inch of his life over a period of several hours. While mobs beating men to death has unfortunately been recurring in recent years in India – recall the incident from 2015 in Dimapur, Nagaland, where a Naga mob that included schoolgirls in uniform had stormed the local jail, dragged out Farid Khan, a man arrested on a dodgy charge of alleged rape, and beat him to death on the streets — this incident had an additional layer: the mob forced its Muslim victim to chant “Jai Shri Ram”. In a diverse country like India, where every group carries its own grievances and grudges from real and imagined hurts, and fanciful memories stretch back centuries, the forming of these ever-larger virtual mobs is a real danger whose true potential for breaking the moral barriers of humane behaviour has been witnessed in the past during large-scale communal riots. The permanent elevation of group identity as primary identity – the self as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Dalit, Naga, whatever – in an ever-growing number of people through TV and social media means the ordinary virtues of daily life, such as tolerance, forgiveness, and trust, take a backseat, because everyone is now, first and foremost, a warrior for the group they belong to.