On the day Agnivesh is assaulted, SC issues guidelines
By Harvinder Ahuja
The inevitable has happened! The mob attack on Swami Agniveshin Jharkhand on Tuesday is a natural corollary to the environment of hate prevailing in the country for well over four years now. Thankfully enough, the 79-yer-old social activist survived although he did sustain multiple injuries.
A welcome concurrence was that on the day of the incident, the Supreme Court asked Parliament to come up with a special law to deter such crimes, saying “the horrendous acts of mobocracy cannot be permitted to inundate the law of the land”. The “recurrent pattern of violencecannot be allowed to become the new normal”, said the apex court.
Agnivesh, who has been crusading against bonded and child labour for decades and has earned the wrath of rightwing Hindutva brigade many a time, was punched, kicked and verbally abused by a mob outside a hotel in Jharkhand’s Pakur district. He had gone there to attend a programme on Paharia tribe.
The activist later said the mob that attacked him included activists of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), an affiliate of the BJP. Although the police registered an FIR against eight activists of the outfit, BJYM state chief Amit Singh claimed that the youth wing activists were not involved in the assault.
Media reports quoting sources said as the group got close to Agnivesh, some men assaulted him. He fell to the ground, his clothes were torn and his turban was pulled off. The reported video footage also showed people beating Agnivesh as he lay on the ground and shouting “go back” while calling him a “Pakistani agent”.
That is what has become the new normal. An atmosphere of hate and intolerance is being created all around. Anyone who does not subscribe to a particular thought-process or raises a contrarian viewpoint is dubbed anti-national or a Pakistani agent. A group of people (mostly right-wingers)then arrogate upon themselves the responsibility of ‘punishing’ such ‘deviants’. Be it in the name of cow, food habits, or dress style, these self-appointed guardians of society believe only in their kind of instant justice. Caste, religion and gender are being used as catalysts to create fissures in society. The pluralistic and inclusive nature of our culture isincreasingly being brought under threat.
This atmosphere of intolerance and negativity has seen a significant rise after the present Government came to power at the Centre. While there isn’t, and there can’t be, any direct evidence of the State complicity, the silence at the top and the remarks or actions of some of those holding positions of power have largely contributed to fanning it.
The most recent instance was that of Union Minister Jayant Sinha garlanding and distributing sweets to convicts in a lynching case in Jharkhand. A few other ministers and party functionaries have earlier been reported to have made remarks or indulged in actions which gave the impression of their tacit backing. No one would ever forget how Union Minister Mahesh Sharma was in attendance at the cremation of one of the accused, whose body was draped in tricolor, in the infamous Dadri lynching case.
Such behavior or action clearly signals political backing to those resorting to mob violence on one pretext or the other. Besides giving them a sense of impunity, it emboldens these reckless elements. The end result is increase in incidents of intolerance, hate crime and communal flare-up. The assault on Swami Agnivesh was yet another testimony to this negative environment which the Supreme Court has now flagged and attempted to bring an end to.
Passing a slew of directions to provide “preventive, remedial and punitive” measures to deal with lynching and mob vigilantism, the three-judge Bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud said “apart from the directions… we think it appropriate to recommend to Parliament to create a separate offence for lynching and provide adequate punishment for the same”.
Delivering its judgment on petitions filed by social activist Tushar Gandhi and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawala seeking action against cow protection groups, the Bench put the onus on the State and said it had “to ensure that the machinery of law and order functions efficiently and effectively in maintaining peace so as to preserve our quintessentially secular ethos and pluralistic social fabric in a democratic set-up governed by rule of law”.
The court also directed that the Centre and states must carry out its directions within four weeks and file compliance reports.
A scathing indictment of the prevailing atmosphere and crucial guidelines being issued by the highest court of the land are, no doubt, timely and welcome. What is to be seen is how seriously, and urgently, these are implemented.
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