I was watching a video podcast by Kunal Kamra about intolerance and the topics discussed were really eye-opening and made me think about some problems I have witnessed personally. So here it goes:
For a very long time, I have been apolitical. But no more.
We Indians have been proud for generations about being tolerant. But no more.
Its time to end the intolerancy being practiced by certain factions.
Its time to end the passivity about how we consume news.
This is yet another calm minded person losing it because he has seen enough.
The problem
Although there are various things that are wrong and can be made tolerable by slightest actions, I am going to talk about one.
The mob mentality that is taking us back to decades in terms of development and education levels.
It is no less dangerous as a person shouting against our country. A mob could be a cause and effect of it.
A mob has no mind, they work as a zombie that wants to break anything that comes infront of it. You & I are not safe when a mob breaks out. I need to go no farther than the person who got lynched by a mob, hired to raise awareness against the same mob mentality.
Why you should care?
There have been countless cases where mobs have lynched a wrong person that I don’t even need to go there.
Consider for a moment, you are standing in a big crowd in a state fair. You want to cross the road, but it is so overwhelming that you need to cut across of them if you want to reach to the other side. You wait for some time to find an opening to go through, but you find none, since it’s not a disciplined car stack. So, you decide to randomly cut across the crowd as you are out of patience. You put your hands ahead to cut the crowd and make your way forward. Suddenly, a man, who presumes that you are a molestor trying to get a feel of his wife, stops you. He gets hold of you and starts creating a scene and shouting about you being a sexual predator. You are alone and you do not have any defense, since it’s a gray area and balance can shift any way.
There could be a sensible person who may turn the tide in your favour, but there is this other horrendous possibility that there could be a person strong enough to incite a mob against you and get you beaten up. Your heart is racing, since it could go either way and put a huge dent on your personality forever. You say a few things in your defense but that doesn’t budge anything in your favour. The people watching have a choice to make now. They can get all the frustration collected inside of them and pour it on you, or they can let you go. You are totally on their mercy. You could be labelled all sorts of things that can stay with you for your whole life. Do you feel me? Isn’t that a situation that you wouldn’t never want to have a first hand experience.
I was in such a situation years back and it still is most haunting situation I have ever been in. I was lucky and I am really thankful to that crowd who gave me a chance and left me unscathed. But really I had no control over the situation.
If you felt the situation, you should also fear the on-growing count of such cases in the last few months, be it in the name of cow-killing, or child-trafficking, or rape-accusations. The trend is dangerous and deserves the same levels of sympathy as one would give to a rape victim.
Its really frightening to know one maniac person has the capability to incite a mob, using morphing these days and that should make us shudder since any of us can become a victim quite easily.
The other side
And this doesn’t go only for physical mobs, an online mob, a mob of haters can have a devastating effect as well. Take for example the cases of Kanhaiya Kumar and Sunil Kumar, a BJP MLA(just search Google with the term ‘sunil kumar bjp god’). Kanhaiya Kumar was hounded after the news broke out. But what happened with Sunil Kumar. There are two things that I found wrong:
- The obvious one, the contrast between actions taken against their quite seemingly similar impacting words.
- While researching about it, there was no news about what happened after the FIR was lodged against Sunil Kumar. I couldn’t find any news regarding this after it was reported about an FIR against him on Jan 24, 2018. Probably getting justice was too boring in the view of our vibrant media to report.
Now, Kanhaiya and Umar Khalid still are recipients of hate speech(online and offline) and the mob mentality that has already colored them as anti-nationals. They didn’t get a proper platform to discuss and remedy this, and might not lead a normal life now. I would include a link to the video where they do get to voice their opinions and you would realize how quickly there were judged by our online mob. Even if they were wrong, we judged them so quickly that chances of getting rid of that blot is seemingly impossible now.
The impact of online mob is as dangerous as a physical mob. The mob shielded behind social networking layers do penetrate the moral shell and can make or break society as well.
Aftermath
I really respect our Prime Minister for the positive policies that have been introduced in his term, but dear Prime Minister, we don’t need a mandir, when mandirs are nothing but a business place these days.
We don’t need a mandir, when our mann is not in our control and being controlled by whatsapp forwards.
We need a system that can incite fear in people so that they don’t join a mob just for fun.
A system where their actions being part of crowd are not condoned. The gau-rakshak team mostly made up of RSS factions, have no part in society and their fatal actions have resulted in a lot of fear. Government need to curb such self-righteous groups.
From our end, as citizens and netizens, we should be really discrete and mindful of what we are sharing online. Now that we have proof that social networks can be used to influence people’s behaviours, the height of which is individuals/parties winning elections.
Educating the person serving such forwards about what possible impact that news can have if its a fake one. People need to understand the fear of being on the receiving end of a mob. Then only we can expect a change for the better.
References:
Interview with Kanhaiya and Umar Khalid.