And despite Joshi apologising and deleting his account, the hate continued to spew online. 

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Though a city court had ordered reopening of the Hotel Hayat Rabbani on April 29,  the civic body did not follow the order offering lame excuses. It moved the court seeking change or stay on the order, but the court on May 23 repeated the earlier order of April 29 and asked Nagar Nigam to open the hotel or face the contempt of court charge.

 The recent case of the Hotel Hayat Rabbani on Kanti Chandra Road, Jaipur City is a spectacle of the unnecessary havoc caused by the self-proclaimed cow vigilantes in the state of Rajasthan. On the unfortunate evening of March 19, 2017, Sadhvi Kamal Didi and her supporters, stormed the Hotel Hayat Rabbani and allegedly battered the staff in the lobby. The local police arrested two staff members of the hotel alleging that they were in possession of beef. An FIR was filed against the owner of the hotel Naeem Rabbani under S.295-A(act intended to outrage religious feelings) of the Indian Penal Code.

The Court of J. Amarjit Singh, Additional Civil Magistrate & Metropolitan Magistrate, Jaipur City Civil Court, heard the suit filed by the hotel owner, Naeem Rabbani and passed a temporary injunction order in his favour on April 29, 2017. The Court asked the Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) to unseal the hotel within seven days of the order.As per the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) report submitted to the police, meat samples seized from the hotel were not beef. Instead they were of chicken as also earlier testified by Naeem Rabbani.

The order of the court delivered in Hindi may be read here.

Over a month had passed since the hotel had been sealed. On May 10, 2017, the hotel owner, Naeem Rabbani, served a notice to the civic body, asking it to unseal the hotel.An appeal was made by the JMC to the Additional District Judge, ADJ-10 and J.Bhupendra Singh disposed the appeal on May 23, 2017 by ruling in favour of the hotel and hotel owner. The JMC has been ordered to reopen the Hotel Hayat Rabbani at the earliest and not take any further action against the hotel. The Court is still deciding the damages to be awarded to the hotel.

A detailed reading of the Additional District Judge Court Order dated May 23, 2017 has brought to light certain pertinent facts about the case.

• Hotel Hayat Rabbani is a lodging hotel and has no restaurant facility
• The food cooked in its kitchen is only for its employees
• The hotel has paid the taxes due for the financial year 2017
• The hotel does not have a food licence, but has now applied for one
• The hotel has a green licence
• The cow vigilantes examined the garbage of the restaurant dumped at the Municipal dumping ground at 6 pm on 19 March, 2017
• The cleaner of the restaurant, Kasim was allegedly assaulted on the road by the supporters of Sadhvi Kamal
• The hotel guard was beaten up
• The hotel kitchen was sealed around midnight
• Guests staying in the 20 rooms of the hotel were immediately checked out
• The hotel was sealed with a lock by the supporters of Sadhvi Kamal
• No prior show cause notice was given to the hotel owner
• The hotel owner was not given any chance to speak, he was not heard
• The cow vigilantes are not allowed to conduct their activities at night yet they unlawfully did all this
• The local police were called by an onlooker much after all the damage was done
• The act of the cow vigilantes was unlawful in fact against natural law

Having recorded all these facts, the Court ordered the hotel be reopened.

As per statements made by the hotel owner Naeem Rabbani to the media, there were 5 or 6 people around 6 pm who beat up Kasim, all seemed to be strangers, outsiders. They kept chanting “Jai Gau Mata” all the way from the dump yard to the hotel. As the sky got darker, the number of people increased. Soon enough it became a mob of 80-100 people. They surrounded the hotel, sloganeering, violently protesting. There was no sign of the police, no sign of help. Just, vehement misuse of hegemonic power.
What else does an incident like this depict besides a Blitzkreig against a certain minority group.

In an India that speaks of liberty, equality and fraternity, how can such an act of physical assault and violence by one man on another be justified? How can a vicious and vehement mob be allowed to persist for so many hours (from 6 pm till midnight) without any intervention from the local police and authorities? Under the garb of protecting the mute animal are we hearing the reverberations of another jolt of communal violence? The Dadri lynching case, in September 2015 wasn’t the first of its kind, but India certainly hoped it would be the last. Sadly, even today, 2 years later, the torture continues. It’swell established that cows for certain communities in India are sacred, but the heinous acts of violence committed in the name of ‘Gauraksha’ are belittling their holiness. The executive seems to be doing nothing to stop these overt acts of injustice. Finally, the Jaipur City Court has provided some respite by ordering the JMC to reopen the hotel. The first step in the right direction has been taken but a lot more needs to be done. Bhakshaks such as Sadhvi Kamal Didi and the like should be punished for their criminal acts of violence, in the name of Raksha.

India needs to stand by its core constitutional mandate, be it from within unite the judiciary, the executive, the legislature all need to awaken to stop this alarming issue to ensure that India does not once again become witness to the carnage of majoritarian diktats and violence.
 

Related Articles

Man Who is Part of a Lynch Mob is a Freedom Fighter a la Bhagat Singh: Sadhvi Kamal

Chilling Collusion Between State & Cow Vigilantes: The Case of Hotel Hyatt Rabbani

No Terrorism in the Name of Cow Protection: Call for Nationwide Protest on Lynchings& Violence

“Very disturbed” by lynching of Pehlu Khan: Former IAS officers letter to Rajasthan CM
 

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The UP police and civic administration are busy implementing UP chief minister Yogi Adityanand’s directive to shut down illegal abattoirs with a vengeance. While the slaughter of cows and their progeny has been banned in the state for years, the targets of indiscriminate action following the CM’s order include not only slaughter houses for buffalo meat but even mutton and chicken retail shops.

But in Christian-predominant Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, the BJP is singing a different tune. The party has made it clear that it has no intention of imposing a ban on beef in these north-eastern states if voted to power in the Assembly polls scheduled for next year, according to a Hindustan Times report.

Beef is widely consumed in the three north-eastern states and the current crackdown in UP has led to people wondering whether the BJP would act similarly if voted to power in the next elections.

Scotching all speculation on the issue, the party’s Meghalaya unit general secretary David Kharsati issued a statement on Sunday blaming “groups with vested interest” for spreading rumours.

“Ban on cow slaughter like the one in UP won’t take effect in Nagaland if our party comes to power next year. The reality here is very different and our central leaders are aware of that,” Nagaland BJP chief Visasolie Lhoungu told Hindustan Times.

Census 2011 figures indicate 88% of the population in Nagaland is Christian. The corresponding figures for Mizoram and Meghalaya are 87% and 75% respectively.

The Congress party is currently in power in Meghalaya and Mizoram while the BJP is a minor partner in the Naga People’s Front-led Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) coalition in Nagaland.

“There would be no ban on cow slaughter in Mizoram and other states in the region where there is a majority Christian population,” Mizoram BJP president JV Hluna said.

Interestingly, even in Goa where only 25% of the population is Christian as against 66% Hindus, the BJP governments continue to turn a deaf year to the demand for a beef ban frequently raised by some Hindu organisations.  
 

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(Representational)

ANHAD Delhi has in a press release listed out serious questions that arise with these claims:

1.   Which laboratory in the university has carried out the said tests? 

2.   Whether the said laboratory has been accredited by accreditation body or recognized by the state government as provided in Section 12 (1) of The Haryana Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act 2015. It is a matter of fact that no laboratory in the said university has any accreditation or recognition to carry out such tests

3.    Whether the report given by the said laboratory is valid for vetro-legal purposes? Is it not true that the university officials write on the test report page that the report is not valid for vetro-legal purpose

4.    In which department of the university the laboratory (where the said test has been reported to be carried out) is located? Whether the head of that department has been informed about the findings of the laboratory? The answer is no.

5.   What procedure was followed while taking of samples and their labeling? As a matter of fact, no authority in the university has been designated to ensure that the sampling, labeling of samples is done in a proper manner in matters involving species differentiation

6.    Whether the permission of the state government was taken before giving press statements as those appearing in news channels yesterday and newspapers today? The answer is no. 

7.    Who officer of the university will be responsible for genuineness of the results in the event of any untoward event occurring after publishing of news item?

Would media ask these questions from the authorities involved? 

Phone Number of Director of Research: 98968-23198

Phone Number of Vice Chancellor: 94163-14967

ANHAD has also stated that some senior faculty members of the university have been visiting Nagpur regularly and also conducting training programmes for ABVP students of the university

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A historic movement of Dalits is unfolding in the State of Gujarat in India. This movement, led by young Dalit leaders like Jignesh Mevani, emerged after the incident at Una in Gir Somnath district, where seven Dalit men were assaulted with iron rods for allegedly skinning a dead cow. These men suffered serious injuries, and four of them were further humiliated by parading them in the town.

The Una incident initiated a state-wide protest movement of Dalits. A long march – the Azadi Kooch March – is being planned by the movement in August 2016 from Ahmedabad to Una. A marked feature of this movement is also the wide-ranging nature of its demands. Justice to the victims of Una is one of the demands, of course, but the movement has also demanded the urgent implementation of land reforms. Speaking to SabrangIndia and Newsclick, Mevani said:

In Gujarat, the Gujarat Land Ceilings Act and the Government’s agricultural policy have provisions to apportion 5 acres each of land to Gujarat’s Dalit families. This must be done. Immediately. Brooking no further delay. A government that can grant land, virtually free or gratis to the Adanis, Ambanis, and Essar can surely grant land to Gujarat’s Dalits? This is a social revolution for Dalit’s economic upliftment.

Mevani also said: “We appeal to all Indians, democratic and secular, be they Gandhian, Communist, feminists, or from non-governmental organizations, to join this movement for upliftment and emancipation.”

In this context, it is useful to examine how successive Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments in Gujarat have weakened land reform laws and gifted away thousands of acres of surplus and waste land, to be redistributed to the landless, including Dalits, to private firms close to the ruling class. A more detailed analysis is in a paper I wrote for ‘The Marxist’ in 2014, but here are some salient points from the article.

Until the late 1980s, land reform in Gujarat was guided by a set of laws enacted from the 1940s onwards. Outside the Saurashtra region, which had its own land reform legislation, the rest of the State was governed by the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Land Act, 1948. A number of changes were made to the existing legislation by Congress and BJP governments in order to free up land markets and facilitate the private takeover of large tracts of land (see Sud, 2014).

Dalits taking a pledge to end the caste-based practice of disposing dead cattle in Dholka block, Ahmedabad district, Gujarat. This image is taken from Jignesh Mevani’s Facebook page.

First, in 1987, the Congress government withdrew Section 2(6) of the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Land Rules. Section 2(6) disallowed any person from buying or or selling agricultural land beyond 8 km from one’s residence. The clause was intended to discourage absentee landlordism. Under the amended law, any person could buy agricultural land anywhere in the State. Initially, this was applicable only to drought-affected regions; in 1995, the amended law was implemented across the State. The Congress government justified the amendment and stated that it would “facilitate mobility and entrepreneurship” (Sud, 2014, p. 238).

Secondly, in 1995, the BJP government introduced an amendment to Section 65 of the Bombay Land Revenue Act. This amendment removed all restrictions on the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural land. Suresh Mehta, the Industries Minister, called this move “revolutionary” (Sud, 2014, p. 238). However, within Gujarat, the move was criticised immediately (see Ramachandran and Ramakumar, 2000). A former Commissioner of Land Reforms in the State was reported to have said that it was an attempt by the BJP Government to bring back the Zamindari system, “depriving poor farmers of their land holdings and reducing them to the level of landless labourers” (Dasgupta, 1995). He said that the measure “would not only reduce the cultivable land area, but would also affect the rural economy seriously and increase the number of people living below the poverty line” (ibid.).

A Gujarat correspondent of The Hindu wrote that:

Politicians and experts are surprised at the speed with which the BJP intends to rush through a measure to abolish all restrictions on land sharks and big industrial houses from grabbing agricultural land… [From] the way the draft bill was circulated among members, it is clear that the exercise was taken up by the BJP from day one after the swearing-in ceremony of the new Cabinet, apparently under heavy political pressure from influential land sharks and business houses. It is learnt that the party has been promised liberal financial assistance towards its election funds for the coming parliamentary elections if the restrictions on land purchase were withdrawn promptly by the State Government (cited in Ramachandran and Ramakumar, 2000).

Thirdly, a New Land Policy was approved by the BJP government in 1996 (Sud, 2014). All beneficiaries of land reforms in the 1960s and 1970s and beneficiaries of waste land development schemes were provided with “new tenure” (navi sharat), under which land was not saleable. The new policy allowed people holding navi sharat over land for 15 years to convert it to the old form of tenure (juni sharat) and become eligible to sell it. The change of tenurial status allowed industry to buy land freely from navi sharat holders and use it for non-agricultural purposes. Nikita Sud writes that in 2003, after Narendra Modi became Chief Minister, land policy was further liberalised and all navi sharatlands were automatically and immediately converted to juni sharat lands. All requirements to obtain permission to sell land were waived.

Fourthly, in 2005, the government allowed gauchar land or village common land and all wasteland to be sold to industry for non-agricultural uses. According to Sud (2014), the 2005 amendment transferred about 46 lakh hectares of state-controlled wasteland to industrial houses to establish industries or introduce corporate farming. Wherever wastelands were suitable for cultivation, a private individual or entity was provided up to 2000 acres of land for 20 years, of which the first five years were rent-free; for the remaining period, the rent was fixed at Rs 40-100 per acre.

Thus, in the 1990s and 2000s, the Congress and BJP governments in Gujarat facilitated the transfer of lakhs of hectares of agricultural and public land to industrial houses at cheap rates. In 2014, there were around 60 Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Gujarat, covering an area of approximately 27,125 hectares of land acquired under the new land regulations. This had two consequences. First, such policies significantly reduced the extent of land that could have been allotted to landless agricultural workers and small peasants as part of a continuing land reform programme. Secondly, hundreds of crores worth of public assets were gifted away to private corporate aggrandisement. Writing on such social bribery through land transfers, Sud wrote:

…land has been deregulated in Gujarat in order to facilitate an open market. However, in the face of continued imperfections and power imbalances, the state quite openly takes sides in the land market and in the process continues to be a key player in the economy of a liberalized resource…Institutions of the state, ranging from government departments to local councils, are involved in deft manoeuvring between market- and business-friendly practices, both legal and extra-legal. (Sud, 2014, p. 239)

It is in this context that the Una agitation has to be seen. Will the movement lead to a convergence of all forces that can reignite the movement for land reform in Gujarat? Only time will tell, but the signs are promising.

References
Dasgupta, Manas (1995), “Gujarat Land Reform Bill under Fire”, The Hindu, Chennai, Mar 30.
Ramachandran, V. K. and Ramakumar, R. (2000), “Agrarian Reforms and Rural Development Policies in India: A Note”, Paper presented at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, Government of the Philippines and the Philippines Development Academy, Tagaytay City, Philippines, December 5 to 8.
Sud, Nikita (2014), “The State in the Era of India’s Sub-national Regions: Liberalization and Land in Gujarat”,Geoforum, 51, pp. 233-242.

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Four Dalit youths who skin dead animals for a living were thrashed with iron rods, chained to a car and dragged to a police station, their ordeal captured on video by their assaulters who accused them of slaughtering a cow. The victims were targeted assaulters from the Darbar caste that accused them of killing a cow for the purpose of selling beef when all that the Dalit youths had done was skin a cow that was already dead.  Dalits from Una town in Saurashtra owned a Bone Mill and had been skinning animals for that purpose. While slaughtering cows and selling or consuming beef is banned in the state, skinning of dead animals is not illegal.

This incident comes fast on the heels of another gruesome attack on Dalits about a week ago: Rama Singrakhiya, a Dalit, was allegedly hacked to death by a dominant caste mob in Sodhana village of Porbandar district. Leading Dalit campaigner and senior advocate Valjibhai Patel told Sabrangindia that there had been a series of such attacks in past months and yet no words of sharp condemnation from the state’s political leadership.

In the latest attack on July 12, reportedly, a vigilante group pounced on the four, beat them up with iron rods and sticks and chained them to their car before leaving them at Una police station. The car had the nameplate of a Shiv Sena member. The accused also filmed the assault. The video taken by the assaulters themselves has since gone viral on social media. Though a large crowd had gathered at the place, no one seemed to forward to rescue the Dalits. A video is said to have gone viral on the social media.
 
ईन्सानियत नाम की चीज नही है और बडे गौ भक्त बने फिरते है।
गुजरात में संघीओ का आतंक। मरी गाय का चमडा उतारते दलितो को बूरी तरह पीटा।
वीडियो जीतना हो सके शेयर करे।
जयभीम। जय मूलनिवासी।

The group which intercepted the youth claimed to be working for the cause of cow protection, with one of them belonging to the regional Shiv Sena outfit. The Dalits were beaten up for over half an hour, the sources said, before being dragged by chain to a police station, situated about a kilometre away.

While the onlookers didn't react to the gruesome incident, on hearing about the incident, the Dalit community people of Una town gathered at the police station, demanding action.

Meanwhile, the police registered FIR against those who beat up the Dalits under Sections 307 (attempt to murder) and 395 (loot), and the anti-atrocities Act. The accused are absconding, say sources. While two of victims were got treatment in a local hospital, the other two, who were injured in the head, were shifted to the Junagarh Civil Hospital.

Apart from Una town, Amreli district was the centre of such assaults where he said there had been six incidents in two months. These six vile attacks against Dalits in Amreli district, included one rape of a young woman by sections of the Darbar caste. Even after being arrested by the local plice the assaulters had threatened the father and uncle of the raped woman, Valjibhai Patel said.  Valjibhai has been in touch with the top echelons of the Gujarat police on even the recent incident at Una.

Singrakhiya was reportedly assaulted by a mob when he went to the village to sow caster seeds on a plot of land which, he claimed, he had been cultivating for the last 15 years. According to an FIR registered against the assaulters, Singrakhiya, 42, was beaten up using clubs and axes. He died in hospital. The village is located just 30 km away from Porbandar, Gandhiji's birthplace.
 
The victims, belonging to the Dalit community at Mota Samadiyara village of Una taluka, had registered an FIR that detailed how they were skinning an already dead cow, but the six accused said the animal was killed before being skinned, police said.“We have arrested three persons in this connection while three others are absconding. We have also called a team of forensic science laboratory experts and veterinary doctors to ascertain if the cow was already dead before being skinned or was killed for skin,” Gir Somnath district’s deputy superintendent of police KM Joshi had told the media.

According to the FIR, the six accused — identified as Ramesh Giri, Balwant Simer, Ramesh Bhagwan, Rakesh Joshi, Rasikbhai and Nagjibhai Vaniya — came in a car and began abusing the villagers on finding that they were skinning a cow.
They then allegedly took out iron rods from their car and started beating them up. Two people sustained severe head injuries and were referred to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment, Joshi said. According to the complainant, Vasrambhai Sarvaiya, the accused also took away their mobile phones.

Cow protection vigilante groups have been active in various parts of the country against slaughter of cows and consumption of beef. Several state governments too have tightened laws on both. In one of the most brutal attacks over cow protection, 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched in Bisada village near Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, by a Hindu mob for allegedly killing a calf for meat.

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The recent spate of vigilante attacks in India has lent a new, nearly domestic familiarity to the word “lynching”. This, though, is more than just a shift in language: the nation’s visual archive itself seems be shifting, towards instatement of a new normal. Inside just a year the “lynching photograph” has moved center-stage, filling mainstream news reportage and social media newsfeeds. The imagistic vocabulary of lynching has thus taken on a touch of mundane inevitability in caste and communal violence.

It began in March 2015, with the lynching of Syed Arif Khan in Dimapur, Nagaland. A couple of months later two teenage Dalit girls were raped, strangled and left hanging from a mango tree in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh. Then, on 28 September 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was bludgeoned to death by a mob in his home near Dadri in what went on to gain spurious notoriety as a “beef-eating incident”. The following March, continuing with the logical rhythm of a scheduled sequel, the cattle herder Mazlum Ansari and his 14-year-old nephew Imteyaz Khan were lynched and hanged from a tree in Jharkhand. Most recently (on May 22) M. T. Oliva, a Congolese citizen, was beaten to death in the national capital of Delhi. This is an incomplete list: it includes only those incidents that resulted in fatalities. In the same timeframe there have been at least a dozen other cases in which the victims somehow survived the end-stage public shaming, torment and lurid physical violence, in short the ordeal of a completed lynching.

There is no lynching without its spectators. In quite a few of these cases, photographs of bodies of the lynched have accompanied the verbal reporting of these ‘incidents’. The appearance and wide circulation of the lynching photograph no doubt means to bring home the sheer brutality of the event, to shake us out of our stupor and help us empathize more proactively with the victims. Nonetheless Susan Sontag (who has written with rare perceptiveness about photography) would have challenged the efficacy of this move, howsoever well intended. In On Photography she suggests that after a point, photographs of suffering become tired clichés. The more we are bombarded with sensationalist photography, the less it affects us.

Others like Judith Butler have contrarily argued that the numbness of our response does not belong to the photograph but to our politics. It is the enabling social contexts and mobilizations that make the images mean what they do – or don’t.

While such debates on the possibilities or otherwise of photography for triggering social change have their uses (and even their horrific fascination), my own interest here is a little different. I wish to consider the present saturation of lynching-affiliated photo-records in today’s India in relation to the long history of the lynching photograph from its early days.

Such a perspectival glance serves as a reminder that the lynching photograph was not born out of the ameliorative agenda to arouse righteous public wrath against acts of extrajudicial violence. In fact, in the early 20^th century it wasn’t journalists at all who took most of these photographs. It was the perpetrators themselves who took them, in an attempt to convert a transient memory into a lasting material souvenir and trophy. The lynching photograph’s longstanding enmeshment in the history of slavery, colonialism and racial violence in which it was complicit, helps annotate its reemergence and redeployment in India’s contemporary politics.
 
II
I first saw a lynching photograph six years ago right before moving, for a PhD, to Indiana in the United States. My perfunctory research about the state yielded three notable facts: Indiana had a lot of corn fields; Axl Rose the lead singer of the rock band Guns and Roses was born and raised in Lafayette (the city I was moving to); and, finally, that Indiana had been at the heart of the 20^th century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was in this context that I chanced upon a 1930 photograph, taken in Marion, Indiana. On view are two bodies – those of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith – hanging from a tree, their necks broken, arms dangling limply by their sides, their clothes tattered and stained (with dirt, blood and faeces). The men and women who occupy the photograph’s frontline seem pleased (and not the least bit fazed) at having the camera record and ratify their attendance at a scene of violence. The gathered company’s brazen confidence, reflected in their willingness to stare, make merry and smile and point fingers at the hanging corpses, converts the lynching into an event, an entertaining spectacle, an evening out, a place to be…
 

Thomas Shipp and Abrahm Smith, Indiana 1930.
 

It was regular fare for local studio photographers to arrive at lynching sites, take photographs of the perpetrators posing gleefully in front of the dead victims, and mail out the developed copies of the photographs to everyone who had paid for them in advance. Tracing these intimate linkages between lynching and photography, scholars have drawn attention to the celebratory and self-congratulatory tenor of photographic documentation of lynching occurrences. From the perspective of the white executors’ these murders were worth memorializing, and photography was the means to do that. Even more, it turned the lynching into a floating “portable memory” of a shared history: of power, domination, and confirmation of one’s superior race position.

The camera at lynching sites was not therefore a neutral apparatus objectively recording what transpired. It was an actor in the catastrophe, one that normalized and prolonged the agony of the victim: the mob would often stop their torture in order to have their pictures taken with the battered, torn and quartered bodies of their ‘prey’ writhing in the background.
******
Closer to home, another even older photograph is worth a revisiting. Taken by Felice Beato (a pioneering Italian photojournalist) during his travels in India in the immediate aftermath of the Revolt of 1857, this photograph technically is not of a lynching. The two men seen hanging from the wooden scaffold have not been beaten and strung up by an ‘unofficial’ rabble. Their execution is a state-sanctioned affair instead – the colonial government’s public enactment of retribution against the ‘mutineers’ of 1857.

Nevertheless, this photograph is useful in thinking about the long and complicated history of lynching because it epitomizes colonial force disguised as law. The immorality of coloniality forces us to notice just how thin and porous the line is between state-sanctioned ‘legal’ executions, and extrajudicial extreme punishments; between an ordered execution and an illegal, frenzied enactment of mob justice.
 

Two “Rebels”, India 1858.
 

The stark and rather empty landscape of Beato’s “The Hanging of Two Rebels” (1858) with its overmastering presence of a large wooden scaffold that dominates the scene; the straggling onlookers; the marked absence of British personnel – those giving the orders – creates a dramatic contrast to the lynching photograph described earlier. The 1930 Indiana photograph feels cramped, filled up by the gathered crowd; the distance between the lynched bodies and spectators is minimal. The perpetrators are everywhere, crowding around, hogging the camera’s attention, totalizing the show: no doubts exist about who is the producer of this spectacle or who its consumers are – it is the white folk strutting in the foreground of the photograph, even as the limply hanging black bodies recede into crumpled background. By contrast, the Beato photograph evokes a strangely barren atmosphere heightened by the ghostly white expanse of its evacuated terrain. In this photograph, the hanging bodies are at the representational center. There is no escaping their centrality in the picture.

Ten Indians, in attitudes differing markedly from those of the spectators in the Indiana photograph, stand languidly by the scaffold. Most of the men on the right appear to stare downwards toward the ground in what seems a gestural confession of defeat; some gaze vacuously at something at eye-level. Only the three men to the left are looking at the bodies for sure, yet since they have their backs turned to the camera and we cannot ascertain their facial expression, even their reaction stays uncertain and undefined. It is unclear how much time has gone by since the hangings and strictly impossible to gauge with certitude whether the men standing around are the execution squad or mourners for the dead. Or simply chance onlookers, perhaps? Does the lack of an obvious reaction imply the hopeless indifference of resigned apathy? Or has a quiet sullenness stolen upon the loose group underneath the surface insouciance? The photograph’s unfathomable quality places meaning in the range of questions that cannot be definitely answered.

Contrary to the expectation that photo-journalistic records capture an inarguable objective reality this photograph pronounces, disconcertingly, the impossibility of arriving at ontological, political or ethical certitude. In fact, the very purpose remains questionable. This is very different from the lynching photograph from America, which we know was meant to clearly function as a memento of a spectacle – something white supremacists might take home to show around proudly to friends and family unable to attend the lynching. Beato’s photograph instead marks a rupture in colonial rhetoric. What ought to have functioned as a triumphal inaugural moment marking the reinstatement of British imperiality through the exercise of legalized violence, is instead turned by a photography of non-signs into a dusty, empty and strategically doubtful image.

It is important to hold onto the inwardly fissured potentiality within the lynching photograph; it is capable of a double possibility. The purveyors intend to advertise the deed, and the victim’s abject powerlessness, and use the photograph to bludgeon us with terror. The photograph, however, can also quarrel with the intention of its production.

III
To move in twos is to render oneself into something amorphous and open. It is to turn oneself from a solitary being, into an “Us”: a syntactical shift that re-ascribes the locus of the self from “me” to that which lies in an inter-space, in some unmarked place between “me and you”. It is to become a friend, a lover, a parent, a child, a worker. A twosome potentiates the capacity for proliferation, for expansion – into a countless collective, something beyond digits. A single soldier who disobeys military commands is just a “bad apple” – dismissible and forgettable (as much from the mind as from the ranks). It’s not so for two recalcitrant soldiers who quit together – two connotes a rebellion, mutiny, solidarity, camaraderie. It is not enough simply to discharge them, to merely heap dishonor upon their heads. Only publicly executing the partners-in-infamy, then leaving their bodies hanging for display will suffice.

Mohammad Akhlaq – the lone man lynched in December last year for his fatal if flagrantly confabulated association with consumption of bovine meat – elicits a different affective response – not less of a response, but different – from the case of the father-son duo butchered for transporting cows.

It is this affective difference I am seeking to probe here, for it holds the key to something crucial. Single deaths come to us as textual records, newspaper reports, narratives in words. Deaths in pairs on the other hand have a strange proclivity for arriving at our virtual doorsteps, packaged as photographs.

The question I pose is this. Why are “two lynched bodies” mutilated by mobs more photograph-worthy than a single body? In what way do the visual semiotics of twinned bodies hanging from some makeshift scaffold acquire a more efficacious and tenacious – and more terrible – semantic charge, one more amenable to imagery making? Why do perpetrators hang up bodies in twos? And, correspondingly, why do we most often photograph lynched bodies when they come in pairs?

To be killed as a couple, it might be said, is to be punished for more than just a flouting of the written and unwritten laws of the world. Figuratively, it entails being penalized for a greater infraction: the offence of inter-relationality. It is the audacity of seeking companions in one’s [‘mis’]deeds. It is, to organize – that is, to corrupt and infect the hitherto loyal and submissive. These two pairs – the executed soldiers in the 1857 photograph, and the man and his nephew lynched in Jharkhand two months ago –, in challenging the colonial/majoritarian diktats in togetherness, commit a second implicit crime. Through their companionship, they allude to their own humanity, i.e. to the whole unallowable network of human relationships they are embedded within – both things that, the perpetrators must deny or extinguish. What audacity emboldens a colonial subject to pretend to have a political ally? What makes a Muslim man presume to father a child (“yet another child”, in the scandalized and disgusted protestations of Islamophobic constructions)? How dare his thirteen years old offspring perpetuate the sins of the father by playing traitorous assistant in the sacrilegious labour of transporting cows?

Lynching in twos, then, does not just terminate lives but marks the banishment of dangerous liaisons. To be murdered as a twosome is to be punished not simply for a tangible crime, but for forging a bond that ties us unacceptably to another. It converts the very holding of an outlawed affinity – between soldiers, or amongst racially/communally demarcated men and women, or even a parent and a child – into a punishable offence.

Perhaps those of us who, in producing-and-circulating them as images, bear witness to these lynched bodies – perhaps we too operate under this unconscious, aphasic power of two-ness. The two-ness of the lynched bodies is precisely what makes them reproducible as forceful images. It is not just a question of numeric accounting, where two corpses inevitably mean something ‘more’ or something ‘worse’ than a corpse in solus. It is not a simple equation, where the presence of an additional or ‘extra’ body shores up our fill of horror and, thus, makes for a heightened critique of colonial/racial/majoritarian ‘excesses’, multiplied arithmetically.

Instead, the longevity and iconicity of these photographs may be attributable to something else. The lynched forms pendant from trees or other ad hoc wooden structures unwittingly alert the viewer to a living relationality between two hanging cadavers. This awareness of a relationship that exists – had existed – between two silent, lifeless beings, no matter how co-alienated they might now look in death, is what makes the photograph at once more shocking but also, potentially, entry point for a more radical politics.

It is not unlikely that the two lynched men would have caught harrowing glimpses of each other’s torment. Perhaps, each was even forced by the torturers, as a terror-instilling strategy, to observe the agony of the other. It is not implausible to suppose that each man grappled with his own extermination-in-progress through the mirrored screams of the other figure being strung up beside him. Even in their post-mortem postures they seem eerily equipped with an uncanny, imperceptible, even surreptitious propensity to swivel, so that they may very well end up facing one another. I cannot help but wonder if in the moments of their demise the men sought out the witnessing-capacity of someone other than their executioners, whether they turned to look or be looked at by other body that suffered beside them.

Each of the photographs articulates this implicit glance of recognition: the process of a partnered-witnessing (watching each other die), which in turn produces an indelible consanguinity between the lynched men. Whether they are strangers being executed side-by-side for a coincidentally common crime, or close blood relatives killed for ‘congenital-crimes’, a stubborn affinity that springs up between simultaneously and cruelly murdered human beings. You’ll never recall just one of them; they will always and forever stand paired together – partners in memory, in pictures, in our nightmares.
Which brings me back to the peculiar nature of the twosome as a configuration. It is a trope that disrupts the singular hero/martyr/victim discourse that lone bodies are subjected to. At the same time it resists the dismissive flourish with which we refer to and forget the statistically effaced “hundreds and thousands” who suffer in distant, war-torn lands.

Two bodies are harder to forget. Two is too concrete; there is nothing non-specific or blankly generic about it. A twosome forces us to contend with suffering as something different from simply our transitive capacity to put ourselves “in another’s shoes”. When we shudder at someone’s death by transposing ourselves into his or her place, it is really our own death we fear, experience and mourn. Our bodies, however, do not have the magnitude to fill the shoes of a twosome. To meditate on the suffering of two people, to really apprehend their co-presence to each other at the time of death, is necessarily to move past this acquisitive tendency which appropriates someone else’s real suffering as an imagined proxy for our own hypothetical suffering capability. Witnessing two lynched bodies ejects us out of the indulgent equation and forces us to contemplate the horror of a death that excludes us; a death that is neither symbolically, not psychologically about us (even if socially we are implicated at every turn).
This is why, to me, the primary relationship of these photographs does not exist between the corpse and the audience(s) who watch the lynching spectacle, whether as live witnesses or in photo representation. Instead, the most important relationship here is between the two lynched bodies seen in the photographic frame.

What does this relationship entail? It involves an injunctive demand-command – namely, that each person acknowledge the truth of the other’s anguish. For in their very death they confirm the possibility of suffering so horrifically in the presence of another. Or rather, that one can suffer this horrifically onlyin the presence of another.

Here then is a crucial semantic shift – we move from a framework of two autonomous and separate bodies suffering in parallel, yet also in utter isolation (“I suffer, you suffer”), to a communion in suffering–“I suffer [even more] because you suffer.”

I recently discovered that there was a third man, named James Cameron, who was to be lynched alongside Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana, 1930. Cameron was beaten, even strung up from the tree along with the other two men, but miraculously escaped execution at the last minute. It is this third man who for me holds the key to a response to the recent incidents of reactionary vigilantism within our own borders. Cameron, the third man, did not retreat after the trauma but went on to become a fearless civil rights activist, fighting for the right to life, dignity and equality of fellow African-Americans across the American Midwest – the dead man walking as a real riposte to the resurgent KKK.

It might be useful for those of us committed to a free, fearless, secular and equal India to start thinking of ourselves as this third figure that “got away.” The current dispensation has dispersed vulnerability on an unprecedented scale. To be sure, there is a difference in degrees of endangerment, and it would be foolish and unethical to ignore that some of us are more vulnerable than others.

Even so, to recognize that we live in an age where a man may be murdered for an Ambedkar-praising ringtone is to acknowledge (that is, if you’re not a purely self-preserving person of privilege) the tenuous and fortuitous quality of one’s supposed wellbeing. Cameron’s ghostly absence-presence (he was there and yet isn’t seen in the photograph) signals the unreliability and incompleteness of photographs as memorial testaments (they rarely give us the full ‘picture’), and the chanciness of surviving a supremacist politics. Cameron’s absence from the photograph should open up a door for us to enter, as the shadowed “third body” that may well have hung beside the other two.

May have, but did not. Therein lies the hope.

Megha Anwer teaches at Purdue University, U.S and works on literary and visual narratives of crime and terror.

Courtesy: Kafila.org

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