Two Muslims Lynched In Two Different Cities Of The World Incited Two Different Reactions
By Abdul Rashid Agwan
31 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
A small community of Afghani students of Jamia Millia Islamia observed a protest in the university campus on 26 March, against the lynching of a twenty-eight year young woman, Farkhunda, on the false charge of desecrating the Quran in Kabul a week back. The demonstration comprised candle light vigil, resolution demanding justice to the deceased from the government of Afghanistan, a theatrical recreation of the gory event of beating the innocent woman to death and the like.
This is not an exclusive event in itself. Demonstrations and vigil events have been organized right from the capital and many cities of Afghanistan such as Bamyan, Balkh, Herat and Daikundi to different parts of the world. Afghans living in France lightened candles to pay tribute to Farkhunda. Greece, USA and London also witnessed demonstrations of Afghans and other sections. Students in Bishkek, capital city of Kirghizstan protested to condemn her brutal murder.
In a distant place, a Muslim boy of the same age, Syed Farid Khan also known as Syed Sarif, was lynched in Dimapur in India on the false charge of rape on March 5, exactly two weeks before the killing of Farkhunda, by a mob of thousands of enraged youths, including hundreds of girls, who were mobilized by associates of Naga Students’ Federation on the pretext of rape of a Naga girl by an alleged ‘Bagladeshi infiltrator’, although she is a relative of the deceased. The NSF was carrying on a state-wide protest against ‘infiltration’ and its sympathizers have manipulated a make-believe case of ‘love Jihad’ for fueling fire in the campaign.
Both these incidents occurred 2,537 km apart, in a gap of two weeks, but followed the same dire script. The black Thursday, false charge on an innocent youth, police remains complacent, the youth beaten to death and the dead body dragged to a distance with all humiliation. Finally, the Dimapur miscreants stringed the undignified corpse of Sarif on the fencing under the Clock Tower Junction of Dimapur city and those in Kabul charred Farkhunda’s mutilated body on the bank of Kabul River. In Kabul, the mob was instigated by a vigilante of religion and in Dimapur by a group of nationalist vigilantes.
In spite of striking similarities between the two closely occurring incidents, the reactions they aroused are quite asymmetrical and parti pris.
BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, CBC, Newsweek, CNN, Time, Huffington Post, Telegraph and many other western media groups instantly reacted on the Kabul event and highlighted small or larger demonstrations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The media did not react in a similar way in case of Dimapur lynching event. This can be compared by searching “Kabul Lynching” and “Dimapur Lynching” on Google, which comes out with 8,31,000 ‘results’ on internet in the former case and 4,12,000 ‘results’ in the latter one, almost half of the former.
In a New York Times column, Joseph Goldstein and Ahmad Saqib wrote on Farkhunda’s ignominious death and commented, “The divergent responses (on Farkhunda being beaten to death) trace Afghanistan’s struggle between its commitment to conservative Islam and the Western notions of individual rights and due process that have been slow to take hold over the past decade.”
While commenting on the Farkhunda killing , C. Udaya Bhaskar writes in his column of Indian Express thus, “Tribal societies exhibit levels of discrimination and cruelty that go against the canons of the modern liberal order and an increasingly misogynistic interpretation of the Quran is becoming the norm.”
There is no such learned comment is available in media on a similar incident in Dimapur, except a hint in New York Times’ story that 90% population of Nagaland is a tribal population. Why media and experts have avoided to stigmatize Dimapur miscreants as members of barbaric tribes and as “savagely” as the media would like to pose the society of Afghanistan from the western spectacle along with its belief system?
Gorden C. Olsen writes in his book that Nagaland is "the only predominantly Baptist state in the world” where 90.02% of the population peruse Christianity. Huge churches bedeck the horizons of Kohima, Dimapur, Mokokchung and other urban localities. The political, economical and social space in the state is mainly dominated by Christians and their beliefs.
Does it make any difference to judge the cultural milieus of killers of Kabul and that of Dimapur as the instruments of their madness? For media it is YES but from an objective assessment it is NO. If a ‘bad culture' succeeds in instigating a heinous crime at one place then a callous crime of the same nature at another place should be deemed product of an equally ‘bad culture' there. But, vigilantism of the two different places has been seen at variance.
The fact remains that had the Farid Khan’s family not been a respectable patriotic family, which came to light only after the fateful event, his case would not have received whatever space it had enjoyed with a slight media sympathy, particularly in India. His father served in Indian Air Force for 20 years as a military engineer and one of his brothers was killed in the Kargil war in 1999 and two others are presently serving in the Indian Army.
Those who lynched Farkhunda were ordinary, hardly educated Muslims who could have been easily swayed by a ‘Molvi’ on his personal grudge against her. But the vigilantes of Dimapur were Christian students, properly educated under the mission and convents of a ‘Baptist state’ and presumably trained to believe in the rule of law and the lessons of Christian forgiveness. Their racist orientation is evident from the fact that they dragged only Farid Khan alias Sayed Sharif from the jail, sparing his alleged accomplice Nikavi alias Ngukav, who was also there, being their fellow religionist.
Undoubtedly, the west has its own tradition of mob lynching of innocent men and women on the pretext of “witchcraft” and “black brute rapist”. The latter phrase has derived from the southern American white people’s appellation to blacks whom they abhorred on racial grounds. Many incidents similar to Dimapur are on record in the history of the region. In 1916, a flash mob of white ‘civilized’ population of Waco (Texas) burned a black worker on the concocted allegation to have killed wife of a white man. In Dimapur the phrase has been twisted as “IBI brute rapist” wherein the abbreviation stands for Bengali speaking people of Nagaland who are considered by the natives as ‘Illegal Bangladeshi Infiltrators’.
Perhaps, people of North-Eastern states of India including those living in Nagaland would have felt highly perturbed on hearing the news of Nido Taniam being beaten to death in the national capital on 30 January 2014. Nido was a resident of Arunachal Pradesh and the son of a legislature of his home state.
Amy Louise Wood notes in her book, Lynching and Spectacle, that around the turn of the 20thcentury the most sensational lynching events took place in fast urbanizing areas of USA. That shows that mob fury has nothing to do with Islam and Muslim society in case of Farkhunda or for that matter to Christianity and the Baptist culture in case of Dimapur. It has nothing to do with tribal cultures as well, both in Afghanistan and India, which are known for their respect to woman or dignity of man.
Social activists planted a pine tree on the riverbank spot where Farkhunda’s body was set alight. But, no such memorial seems possible in Dimpaur in the other episode.
President of Afghanistan has condemned the barbaric incident of his country but there is no such reaction from the Indian president in case of Dimapur episode.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley (now the union Finance Minister) said on Twitter on the death of Nido Taniam beaten to death by seven youths, "The death of a north-east student in New Delhi after being beaten up is barbaric and condemnable.” He chose to keep silence on Dimapur incident, which was carried out by a mob of thousands of agitators.
The chief ministers of Nagaland and Assam deplored the violent incident and resolved to cooperate with each other to assuage increasing tension among the citizens of these states on Sarif being an Assamese.
It has been remarked that Farkhunda’s “brutal death touched the collective consciousness of the citizens of Kabul. Her coffin was carried by women activists, an act perhaps never before witnessed in conservative Afghanistan.” But no such arousal of conscience and civilized remorse could be noted among the people of Dimapur or their nationalist supporters in Nagaland and elsewhere.
So, Kabul and Dimapur remain in two distant worlds of penitence on a human loss.
Coming back to the Jamia campus, Saeeda Shirzad, an Afghan student of this central university, remarked while paying tribute to Farkhunda, “The manner in which she was killed does not behoove a civilized society like ours, it was gruesome and we were here to demand justice for Farkhunda and fight against violence, extremism, and brutality in our country.”
Saeeda Shirzad accepts failure of her people. But, the question arises, are the Christians prepared for the similar failure of their fellow believers at Dimapur in creating a civilized response to a law and order situation? Are those who are sustaining the bogey of infiltration ready to endorse their civilizational failure on the anvil of a political movement?
An Afghan activist said, ““We are ashamed that we could not defend Farkhunda.”
Should we anticipate similar voice from any activist of Dimapur or elsewhere for Farid Khan?
The gory events of Kabul and Dimapur expose modern hypocrisy where both civilizational zeal and barbaric spree are going hand in hand, where religions fail to stimulate respect for human dignity in their followers and where the rule of law is yet not honored by those who are supposed to be its vouched guardians.
(Contributor is an activist, writer on contemporary issues and author of many books including his recent thought-provoking work “Islam in 21st Century: The Dynamics of Change and Future-making”.)
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