Media maintains double standards in its understanding of mob lynching

Media is a powerful weapon used to shape and mold opinions and narratives. The cases of mob lynching in India present the best examples of how effective the media can be. In the past few years, it has been seen that Lutyens’ media instantly labels incidents of mob lynching as Hindu/Saffron terror and always looks for a religious and casteist angle in unfortunate and despicable lynching cases.  If the victim turns out to be Muslim and incident happens in a BJP-ruled state, ample amount of coverage is given to the incident and it is presented as if s/he was lynched for his/her religious beliefs. Manufactured outrages come up claiming that minorities are not safe in India. Junaid lynching case is a perfect example of this where the mainstream media gave a religious angle to a scuffle over train seat and a huge manufactured outrage ensued.

Recently, 23-year-old alleged cow smuggler- Sagir Khan- was beaten up by a mob in Alwar district of Rajasthan, just like Rakbhar Khan, but this time there is no outrage from Lutyens’ media and self-appointed guardians of the society because there is now a Congress government in the state. The journalists affiliated to the Congress ecosystem seem to have stopped noting the incidents of mob lynching in Rajasthan.

The digital portals affiliated to the Congress ecosystem have not highlighted this time the religion of cow smuggler because now their favorite party is ruling the state.

Popular Twitter user Ankur Singh has completely exposed the hypocrisy of the cabal in one of his Twitter thread.

Now, no one appears to be targeting the Congress party or asking for Sonia Gandhi’s comment on the Alwar mob lynching incident which has happened under the Congress rule.

https://twitter.com/iAnkurSingh/status/1079461286277046272

Almost every media house employed the same template and avoided highlighting the religion of the suspected cow-smuggler. They always under-report violence against Muslims in states where there is a friendly government of theirs. It is very clear that the media does not care about the plight of Muslims, what matters to them is peddling of an agenda against the BJP, and bringing their favorite party to power.

Media uses mob lynching as bait, at times to peddle their nefarious agenda. In mob lynching cases, if the victim is a Dalit Hindu then liberal media, with all its might, media tries to portray the unfortunate incident as if the victim was lynched because of his caste. On the other hand, if the victim belongs to a Hindu upper caste and is lynched by people belonging to any other community then no coverage is provided and even lip services become rare. The fourth pillar of the Indian democracy is acting as propaganda machinery of leftists and religious fundamentalists. As it is the fourth pillar of democracy, it should work with sensibility and responsibility towards the society and the nation. By terming the incidents of mob lynching as Hindu Terrorism, saffron terrorism, Brahimnvaad, Brahmin terrorism, Hindutva violence etc, media only exposes its bigotry and hatred against Hindus.

Sick people remain sick irrespective of their religion and castes. The reason behind the violent behaviour of mobs can be traced in the concept of Deindividuation. One of the explorers of Deindividuation phenomenon, Gustave Le Bon, in his work ‘The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind’ characterized his posited effect of crowd mentality, whereby individual personalities are dominated by the collective mindset of the crowd. He viewed crowd behaviour as “unanimous, emotional, and intellectually weak”. Le Bon theorized that a loss of personal responsibility in crowds leads to an inclination to behave primitively and hedonistically by the entire group. This resulting mentality, according to him, belongs more to the collective than any individual, so that individual traits are submerged. When people lose their sense of individuality and get submerged into a group for whatever reasons, they act violently and all the fear of law and order vanishes. A crowd provides an individual a mask to hide behind it.

But the semi-educated and propagandist media leave no stone unturned in order to present unrelated lynching cases as ‘hyper-nationalism’ and ‘cow vigilantism.’ Mob lynching and mob justice is unacceptable in any civilized society and using mob lynching for settling political and ideological scores is equally unacceptable. Dadri case of Akhlaq was used to target PM Modi, right-wingers and the entire Hindu community. The focus was less on ensuring justice but more on making political capital out of it. However, media is not targeting the Congress for recent mob lynching case for their own ideological reasons and bias. Media’s mentality is more dangerous than the frenzied mob. There is no difference between mob justice and a kangaroo court run by the media. Mark Twain has said, “There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’ speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.”