The Daily Fix: What are authorities doing to clamp down on child lifting rumours on social media?
The Big Story: Lynchistan
On Tuesday, a beggar woman was beaten to death by a mob in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad. The victims was chased down by nearly 50 people and assaulted, with the mob screaming “you are a gang of child lifters”. Initial reports suggest that the lynching was driven by social media rumours doing the rounds over the past few days in the locality.
This is not a one-off case. On Friday, a similar rumour led to a lynching in Chhatisgarh’s Sarguja district. On June 2, a man was lynched in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district. On June 8, two men were pulled out of their car and lynched by a mob in Assam. On June 14, a similar murder was reported in West Bengal’s Malda district. Similar rumours have in fact spread across most of India, leading to assaults and murders across multiple states.
One part of this horrific stream of violence relates to specific local factors in each case which drove the mob to action. However, there are also a number of factors that tie these instances of ferocity into a nation-wide pattern. For one, the violence is fuelled by the existence of rumours spread over social media. Rumours are not new to society but the wide adoption of tools such as WhatsApp have made them more menacing than ever, allowing them to spread across vast areas in very little time. This pathology is not limited to child lifting rumours and has also been observed in lynchings related to cow slaughter hysteria, for example.
The other common factor across many of the crimes is xenophobia. While rumours provide the background, the existence of a person who does not seem to be from the community often provides the spark for violence. In Tamil Nadu, for example, targets of lynchings have often been north Indians. In West Bengal’s Malda, a Bihari man was assaulted by a mob on June 22 on the suspicion of trying to kidnap a child and the June 8 Assam lynching was also driven by baseless rumours of Bihari child lifters. In May, Muslim cattle traders were lynched on rumours of child theft.
Even as this red stain of violence spreads across India, the authorities have mostly reacted to happenings once the violence has occurred. This is, of course, how traditional policing has always worked in India, with the assumption that the punishment will act as a deterrent to society. However, this model is getting increasingly strained given the existence of social media and widespread mobile phone adoption that allows each and every person to broadcast rumours at a scale never seen before in history. In June, the Assam Police launched a helpline to crowdsource hate messages being spread on social media. Authorities across India need to think along these lines to fight this lynching epidemic. Policing will now increasingly have to formally take into account the spread of social media and work to combat its misuse.