Gangster Vikas Dubey is an upper caste Hindu, but no law-abiding Hindu cried foul over his arrest

After a five-day run, dreaded gangster Vikas Dubey has finally been arrested from Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. He is the main accused in the killing of eight policemen in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh last week.

Vikas Dubey is a notorious gangster charged in sixty criminal cases including serious offences like murder, kidnapping, extortion and rioting. While he has been arrested you will not see anyone invoking his caste, that is, Brahmin identity and presenting him as a victim. This is rather unusual because we have been used to criminals getting entitled with a deep sense of victimhood and religious identity.

If we rewind by a couple of months when Hizbul terrorist Riyaz Naikoo was slaughtered by the security forces, we would remember how the entire left-liberal ecosystem was sympathising with Naikoo.

India’s mainstream media outlets and terror romanticists couldn’t stop making a benign mathematics teacher out of a brutal terrorist.

The same thing had happened when another Hizbul Commander, Burhan Wani was killed in 2016. Even then the elitist intelligentsia suffered from definitional issues.

Barkha Dutt tweeted, “Burhan Wani Hizbul commander, son of school headmaster who used social media as weapon of war, killed in Anantag. BIG STORY.”

Victimhood can also translate into victim-bashing especially when the victim is a Brahmin. So, when Kashmiri Pandits tried speaking up about the heart-wrenching barbarity that they had to go through in 1989, there were attempts to dismiss the victims as elites.

Dutt said, “In fact, history has turned full circle for the Kashmiri Pandits. Today hapless victims, they were once privileged elites of the valley. They may have been a minority but at that time, they had monopolised government jobs, plum postings and other such social benefits…” 

Victimhood as such is not limited to Kashmir, nor is it limited to the idea of religion alone.

Therefore, when an ex-AAP Councillor Tahir Hussain was booked for involvement in the gruesome anti-CAA riots in Delhi in February this year, his religious identity was raked up.

AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan had said, “Today, Tahir Hussain is being punished because he is a Muslim. Perhaps the biggest crime today in India is to be Muslim. It may also be proved in the coming times that Tahir Hussain has committed the violence in Delhi.”

And why just Tahir Hussain, even Sharjeel Imam who had said, “The Chicken’s neck belongs to the Muslims, that area is dominated by Muslims,” has his own set of supporters.

In fact, the entire narrative of Maoist sympathisers across the country is based on the idea of painting a particular class- the so-called Upper Caste Hindus as the aggressors and the deprived classes as the victims. 

Such narratives of victimhood and notions of brutal retributive justice are then used to support Naxal elements that want to overthrow the Indian State. The deprivation of the Adivasis and Dalits has been relentlessly used by elements both within and outside the so-called Upper Castes fold to protect radical Islamist elements in Kashmir and gangsters or murderers elsewhere.

But when a Vikas Dubey is arrested, we are happy that no one comes out to protect him. A gangster, after all, deserves no mercy whichever caste or religion he may come from. The might of the Indian legal system must prevail and the question of caste or religion shouldn’t arise.