A married Hindu woman’s maternal uncle has been lynched to death by her stalker Mohammed Ajlam Nadaf in Darbhanga district of Bihar. Two other relatives of the woman – another uncle and a brother – were seriously injured in the attack by Nadaf and his family.

The incident occurred in Badiya Tol of Ghanshyampur police station area. Nadaf had been stalking and pestering the woman by calling her husband and father-in-law incessantly. The in-laws informed her father about this. When the father traced the number, he found out it belonged to Nadaf.

The woman’s maternal uncles Dharma Kumar, Indal Kumar and brother Suraj Kumar were sitting outside their house on Wednesday. They noticed Nadaf roaming around in the area and asked him why he was bothering their daughter. The matter got heated, and after some time Md. Nadaf returned with almost a dozen family members and acquaintances, almost half of them women: Munni Khatoon, Muslim Najaf, Nazir Najaf, Md. Ashraf, Md. Aslam, Zulekha Khatoon, Chotte Nadaf, Sobra Khatoon, Sakila Khatoon, Pramila Khatoon, Md. Rehmatullah and others.

Armed with sticks and other weapons, this mob brutally attacked the 3 Hindu men, and Ajmal was heard threatening that he would kill Dharma Kumar. After wounding the victims grievously, the group left. The injured men were rushed for treatment to a community health center and then to Darbhanga Medical College. Tragically, Dharma Kumar passed away during treatment, while Indal and Suraj continue to be in a critical condition.

On Thursday, when Dharma Kumar’s body was brought back to the village after post-mortem, angry villagers started protesting in front of the police station. They also blocked a road, demanded that senior police officials visit the spot and grant compensation and a govt. job to the deceased’s family. The prime accused’s house was also allegedly burnt.

Police resorted to lathi charge to disperse the ‘unruly’ protestors and claims to be investigating the matter. Such incidents are on the rise and being reported from all parts of the country. They raise several questions.

Why are such crimes exploding?

How did Muslims, a so-called ‘minority’, become so emboldened to stalk and harass the ‘majority’ Hindus? Its not only teenage/minor girls being groomed, but even married women are being stalked now. What empowers Islamists to gather mobs at a moment’s notice and launch attacks? The constant radicalization by fanatical maulvis and ulema, who drill supremacist ideas into Muslim society and incite hate against Hindus and Bharat, play a big role. Also, such elements have no fear of the law, as they know that an entire ecosystem of politicians, religious clerics, media and elite left-liberal lawyers and activists will come to their aid in case of any trouble. Mentally colonized sections of our judiciary can always be counted on to go soft on criminals under cover of glib terms like ‘restorative justice’, ‘constitutional morality’, ‘anti-majoritarianism’ etc. Media’s innate Hinduphobia and proclivity to whitewash Islamist violence further fuels this sense of impunity.

Why couldn’t the Hindu family defend itself or gather enough people to resist the Muslim mob? A few decades back, any such harassment of a Hindu family would have ensured a collective response from the entire village/locality or at least their extended family. Why has that sense of community and bonding weakened? The much appreciated self-organizing feature of Hindu society seems to have collapsed.

Why are Hindus today so unprepared to defend themselves? Clearly, the secular state and police machinery has made us helpless – on paper, these institutions promise to provide us security, but fail miserably in doing so. If we try to defend ourselves, the same law enforcement machinery comes down heavily for ‘taking law into our hands’, and without the intellectual and legal cover that Muslims receive, our people rot in jail. Secularist indoctrination and increasingly overt Hinduphobia in films and popular culture means that Hindus are fast losing their over-arching Dharmic consciousness and being reduced to atomized entities with a selfish worldview.

The only way out of this rot is to revive Dharma and its conscious practice – our Dharmic organizations need to wake up, or new organizations need to be founded to do this. At the socio-political level, the nature of state has to be fundamentally altered to create a Dharmic civilizational state where all Dharmic panths get special protection and privilege.