Poetry of a lynch mob

The writer is editor of business and economic policy for Express News and 24/7 khurram.husain@tribune.com.pk

A part of me died when I saw the footage of that lynch mob in Sialkot doing its gruesome business.  A part of me will never live again.

It’s very tempting to go into an inspired rage after viewing that footage, and blame it all on “ourselves”.

But let’s also ask ourselves this question:  is this the first time a lynch mob has ever hunted down its human prey? It might be the first time we have seen actual video footage of such an incident, but lynch mobs have burned people alive in Karachi after a botched cell-phone snatching or armed robbery attempt. Many years ago, a mob in Gujranwala stoned some youths to death just for being Ahmadi. No pictures or footage of these incidents ever surfaced but the descriptions are chilling.

Lynch mobs have hunted down and brutally killed black people in the American south within living memory, simply for the crime of talking in a manner that displeased somebody. They have chased “Muslim-looking” youths in Moscow. They also ruled the roost in revolutionary France, and South Africa has seen its fair share of “necklacing”, the practice of placing a burning car tire around somebody’s neck and watching them burn as the rubber melts itself all over the body.

I know the footage is hard to look at but such things happen in our world, have been happening for centuries, and will continue to happen. People who stood around and filmed the violence without even thinking of intervening are just as much a part of the larger dynamic that makes a lynch mob as those who actually wielded the clubs. Some kind of common perception of the gruesome ritual unfolding before them unites all the spectators to this spectacle of blood.

It’s like how we have grown accustomed to watching an animal get brutally slaughtered, its throat slit and its blood drained out while it screams in agony. A cloak of commonly shared values prevents us from seeing the visceral violence that we silently observe, and then eat the victim! I must admit a part of me died when I first saw a goat slaughtered in front of me as a young child, and I couldn’t sleep for days after that.

I don’t mean to equate the two directly. Clearly, lynching a human being is a crime and a sin of infinitely greater proportions than slaughtering an animal. I only mean to draw attention to how we tend to become inured to gruesome violence by entering into a shared set of values, a universe of cultural signifiers that somehow explain the violence away.

I don’t know what went through the minds of those who stood and watched as the two youngsters were bludgeoned before them. But I’ll bet it had something to do with a perverted idea of justice. That combined with a sense that this somehow does not concern us, that it is a matter between those doing the beating and those being beaten.

But something held that mob together in its silent duplicity with a monumental crime, something held them all transfixed to the bloody spectacle before them. And I’m willing to bet that it has something to do with failure to see justice around them, and a large disconnect with society and its problems. I’m willing to bet, unless otherwise argued, that what held the lynch mob together in this instance, as in so many others, is a vacuum of justice and politics. Somehow, this incident was able to pass itself off as justice to them and that is what held them at bay. And somehow this mob believed that things that happen in their society have nothing to do with them, that destiny befalls us its unjust fruits with a capriciousness and a violence that we can only behold, never even think about trying to understand, least of to tame or control. Something tells me this event, and others like it, are products of disempowered populations who have been left to the mercy of arbitrary power exercised through individual whims. And that is what makes some functional sense of politics and justice central to making sure such incidents never happen again.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 26^th, 2010.