The discourse around the mob lynching in Palghar has been muddied right from blaming it on Muslims, calling it a Communist conspiracy to its degradation into an Arnab v/s Sonia Gandhi issue. This haze around the incident ensures that the very act of lynching retains its legitimacy as a perfectly normal act of mob justice. The particularity of the Palghar incident is that the so called Hindus were at the receiving end of it, in addition to inflicting it in the first place.
It is a tragedy that an act as heinous as lynching has availed a degree of legitimacy that what bothers us is its occurence and not the act in itself. And bothers not (only) because of its viral circulation as an object of consumption over social media, but the realisation that it has transcended its destined victim – the Indian Muslim. Instead, a mob can now can also kill Hindus (a very visible saffron robe wearing Hindu at that) over a rumour, which is a deviation from what the normal(ised) act of lynching.
Thus, it has to be infused with all sorts of fake news to ‘drag’ the muslim into the act such that the lynching reverts to its imagined normal – something that adds to the larger project of dehumanizing the Indian muslims.
