Opinion No one killed Akhlaq? 10 years after a lynching, it’s a whole new India

Akhlaq’s death, horrific in itself, was a beginning. “Cow vigilantism” has since entered the political, social, and legal vocabulary, and several people — mostly Muslims, and sometimes Dalits — have been assaulted, insulted, humiliated, and killed. Often, cases have been registered against the victims or their families. In some cases, as with 15-year-old Junaid Khan, merely bearing the sartorial marks of being a Muslim incited people who did not know him to kill him.

The UP government’s petition to cease prosecution will be ruled on by the court. But the message it sends out, intentionally or otherwise, is clear: That the state will be, at best, half-hearted in its prosecution going forward. That some victims are less than others, some crimes have no perpetrator. It is for that reason that Akhlaq’s death and its decade-long aftermath matter. It needs us to look back from and beyond this moment. For in the tragedy of Mohammad Akhlaq, there is a deeper reckoning.

In India, as in most modern justice systems, the victims of crime are not, in a direct sense, a party in the case. The police gather evidence, and the state prosecutes the alleged perpetrator. The reasons behind this are rooted in what the state owes its citizens, and we owe each other — the essence of what political scientists call the “social contract”. Simply put, a crime, particularly a violent one, is not a civil dispute. It not only damages the person who faces it, but also breaches the state’s guarantee of ensuring that violence is used only through due process and the law. It acknowledges that crime is not merely the failure of an individual but society as a whole, and it is the collective that demands justice, a moral reparation. The might of the state stands with the victim and the broader collective, no matter the power, station and wealth of the perpetrator.

If a crime, a most heinous one, is a wound not just against the individual but society, isn’t the failure to prosecute it a collective one as well? Perhaps not. It depends, really, on how we see society, politics and what the government is meant to do.

One perspective, let’s call it the “old view”, looks at the social contract as something beyond the current political flavour of the month (or decade). Elections, central to democracy and even at the very root of India as we know it, are not the sole basis for how we choose to come together as a political unit and interact with other citizens and the state. In India’s case, this contract was enshrined in the Constitution, of course, but also in the ideals, conventions, compromises, and decencies that evolved through the freedom struggle to well after Independence. Elections, in this schema, are a product of the social contract, an expression of it — but not a rewriting of the contract itself. Put another way, a change in government was not always a change in the nature of the state.

In the old view, it should not matter who is in power, or how dominant an ideology is — celebrating those responsible for Akhlaq’s lynching and Junaid’s murder, for killing Graham Staines or assassinating Mahatma Gandhi would not become currency in public life, a route to power. Those who did so would, in many cases, be “excluded”. By and large, this was not done through the law or censorship, but a consensus around what kind of society we are and want to be.

The “new view” is both simpler and far more subtle; perhaps even more “realistic”. In it, political power is not an end in itself, a product of being successful within a system. It is a mandate to rewrite the software that runs the machine of state. In this view, there is a moral, political, and legal attempt to de-universalise what was once the fundamental promise of India’s social contract — liberty, equality, fraternity.

Instead, it seeks to make some citizens lesser by looking to an often imagined past through a narrow lens. It makes villains of victims, and oppressors of those at the margins. And, with a disturbing lack of remorse, it says it cannot prosecute a death that was a symbol of something much worse, deep inside and spilling over each day.

Persecution, bigotry, violence, and state excess did not begin with the killing of Akhlaq. Riots, caste-based atrocities, and even an imposition of dietary taboos have a long and disturbing history in India. But few people celebrated riots or advocated disenfranchisement. Rarely, if ever, did people record their crimes and take pride in humiliation. Often, communities made their own uneasy accommodations with each other. The point was to move past a flashpoint, not keep the flame burning. And there was no crowdfunding to award those who were accused of lynching people.

Since Akhlaq’s death, what was once new and disturbing has become more commonplace and less shocking.  Or, perhaps, the UP police had the wrong people and now want to set innocent men free. But did they ever really look for the right ones? Maybe now some crimes are only crimes depending on the victim.

The writer is commissioning editor, The Indian Express. 

aakash.joshi@expressindia.com