#dnaEdit: Faceless culprits

The lynching of an alleged rapist by a huge mob at Dimapur in Nagaland is a shocking instance of the failure of government machinery. The incident is distressing on several counts. The alleged rapist, 35-year-old Syed Farid Khan, hailed from Assam, and it has been speculated that his ethnicity was one of the reasons that fuelled the vigilantism. Not only did the mob take the criminal justice delivery mechanism into its own hands, they marched through the city streets and laid siege to the central prison. What followed was a display of unprecedented mob barbarity. Khan was stripped, paraded naked on the city streets, stoned, tortured, and hung from the city’s iconic Clock Tower. Explaining this kind of extreme mob violence in terms of avenging rape is difficult. The latest National Crime Records Bureau statistics reveal Nagaland as recording the lowest number of rape cases in the country — just 31 cases in 2013 — which translated to a very low rate of just 2.8 cases per lakh population.

It is unclear why the administration failed to disperse the mob or spirit the prisoner away before hordes of people descended on the prison. The state government has responded by suspending the deputy commissioner, superintendent of police, and the jail SP for “failing to control the situation”. The government has announced its resolve to arrest all those involved in seizing Khan from prison and lynching him. If the State is sincere about upholding justice and the rule of law, it must make these arrests even in the face of local opposition and tribal sentiments. But the enormity of this task already stares the Nagaland government in the face. Two days after the incident, the administration is still not in a position to lift curfew because the situation continues to be tense. It is an unfortunate reality that despite several decades of India’s rule, much of the North-East continues to be under the grip of xenophobia. Bengali-speaking settlers are looked upon with suspicion in much of Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. In the competition for land and jobs — both scare commodities — the growing perception that outsiders are stealing opportunities from locals, has led to a deep polarisation that provides fertile ground for stoking violence against minorities. Last September, a similar incident of lynching was reported from Nagaland’s Phek district where the alleged rapist was a Manipuri man.

The Centre can ill-afford to view this as an internal matter of a state. Massive protests have reportedly erupted in Assam’s Barak Valley from where Khan hailed. Political parties like the AIUDF, who count Bengali-speaking Assamese among its supporters, have demanded a CBI probe. Given the history of recent Assam-Nagaland border tensions and violence, the possibility of the situation getting out of hand cannot be ruled out. As a first step, the Union home ministry must prod the respective state governments into ensuring the safety of the lives and property of Nagas living in Assam and Assamese living in Nagaland. Mainland India cannot put off any longer a sustained engagement with the North-East. At one level, the Centre assuages protectionist sentiments with Inner Line Permits but has allowed local administrators and politicians to get away with large-scale corruption. Anti-India insurgencies haunt most of the North-East states and the Army is a constant presence in people’s lives. Few or no mainstream media outlets report from these parts. Under these circumstances, the democratic experience has been less than satisfactory for most citizens. Societies gripped by protracted periods of conflict, tend to lose respect for legal processes, minority rights and human rights over time. Resolving one without solving the other is impracticable.