Bidar lynching: Police's citizen outreach on fake news ineffective, State must rope in NGOs and cyber-savvy volunteers

S Murugan, Inspector-General, Gulbarga range, is unable to fathom the anger of the mob that lynched one person and injured three others in north Karnataka’s Bidar district on the suspicion they belonged to a gang of child-lifters. “Why this anger?” Murugan wondered. “It is very disturbing to see people get so violent. Also, because of a build-up over social media, people are on the edge.’’ [caption id=“attachment_2869294” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. PTI[/caption] The four friends, one of them a Qatari national, were returning to Hyderabad after attending a social function in Bidar, 150 kilometres from the capital of Telangana. When they stopped for tea near a school at Murki village around 4.30 pm, they saw school children heading home. Salham Eidal Kubaisi from Qatar was carrying some foreign chocolates that he started distributing to the students. But some people near the school grew suspicious and raised an alarm that strangers were luring the children with chocolates. The police said what added to the suspicion was that the chocolates tasted different from the Indian chocolates, which led to the fear that they were laced. And almost simultaneously, messages were circulated on WhatsApp about a gang of child-lifters on the prowl in Murki, leading to a significantly large crowd gathering in no time. The four men sensed a risk to their life and fled in their vehicle but by then people in the crowd at the school had taken their photographs and videos and circulated them on WhatsApp. The messages, which said a gang of child-lifters had fled from near the school and had to be stopped, were extremely provocative. The impact was instantaneous. Even as people chased them on motorbikes, villagers blocked the road to Hyderabad. In order to avoid it, Mohammed Azam who was at the wheel and driving at a high speed, swerved, hit a culvert and one of the motorbikes.  The vehicle fell into a ditch, after which the mob pulled out the passengers. Azam, 32, a software engineer with Google and the father of a two-year-old child, was lynched. The injured, after initially being admitted to a district hospital, are now being treated in Hyderabad. The police have arrested 32 people, including administrators of two WhatsApp groups, who sent out the messages. The phones have been seized and sent for analysis to the cyber crime cell. The police said women were also part of the mob. If the inability to control lynchings is not bad enough, what should worry India is that Asaduddin Owaisi’s party, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) has alleged that Muslims are being targetted in lynchings, whether it be by cow vigilantes or mobs. “The message that is going out is that Muslims are being targetted in the name of mob lynching. Hindutva forces are behind this,’’ said Ahmed Balala, MLA of the party from Malakpet constituency in Hyderabad. Balala is wrong. The chocolates in the Bidar episode were offered to Muslim children and the attackers were both Muslim and Hindu. There is no pattern, so far, to suggest members of a particular community are being targetted in the non-cow vigilantism lynchings. Though it did not help matters that Union minister Jayant Sinha earlier this month garlanded seven cow vigilantes convicted of lynching a Muslim meat trader in Ramgarh in Jharkhand. But the fact that Owaisi’s party is stringing together such a communal narrative is dangerous because it essentially plays into the hands of those who want to use WhatsApp as a communication tool to create fissures. What has also shocked the Bidar police is that this incident occurred despite a sensitisation programme they initiated after incidents of lynching were reported from other parts of the country. The police now admit that the outreach clearly has not been effective enough to prevent people from falling prey to rumours and fake news. This incident, which brings the tally of lynchings to 31 in the past four months across the nation, has adjoining districts in Karnataka, Telangana and Maharashtra concerned. The Jogulamba Gadwal district in Telangana, which has been at the forefront of making constabulary in every police station interact regularly with villagers to warn them against fake news, is worried that the Bidar visuals could now be used to string together a fresh narrative of child-lifting. “The Bidar footage could be circulated over WhatsApp, so we need to keep the interaction with people going. Mob psychology gives the crowd an unusual sense of courage. And here you have social media exploiting pre-existing tendency to indulge in mob violence,’’ said Rema Rajeshwari, Superintendent of Police, Jogulamba Gadwal district. The latest incident also shows that WhatsApp’s print media splash this week had no effect. What the State needs to do now is involve NGOs and cyber-savvy volunteers to educate people in rural and semi-urban India about responsible messaging and how to not fall prey to rumours. India cannot afford to have more blood on her hands.