Trust in the secular state’s ability to dispense justice has rapidly diminished. Contrary to the judiciary’s self-image as the ‘last ray of hope for the common man’, SC’s judgements like commuting death sentence of a child rapist and murderer with bizarre justifications like “every sinner has a future” have greatly eroded trust in the institution.

In a shocking case from Bihar, a serial rapist Mohammed Sagir (35), who had served jail time in the past, was lynched to death on Thursday by an angry mob after he was accused of raping a 9-year-old girl. Sagir’s family has accused a Muslim family consisting of Abbas, Firoz, Rukshana and others for the murder.

As per Katihar Sadar sub-divisional officer Om Prakash, the lynching happened after the 9-year-old girl was raped on Wednesday. The child was sleeping with her mother inside the house, when Md. Sagir took her away.

“He first brought the victim to his house before taking her to a remote location to commit the crime. She called out for aid as he raped her. In the meantime, the victim’s mother awoke and began looking for her child in the village. Soon, other villagers also began searching and they reached the crime scene after hearing the cries,” the police said.

The angry family members of the victim and other villagers caught hold of Md. Sagir the next morning, tied him to a tree and assaulted him in broad daylight as other onlookers, including children, watched. There are reports that a village panchayat ordered the thrashing, and Md. Sagir was still barely alive when police took him away.

It is claimed that one local resident justified the horrific assault, saying, “When the state fails its duties, it is served by the citizens.”

“We went there right away to rescue the accused after hearing about the incident. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died. Sagir was a serial rapist. He had previously served jail term after being convicted on similar offences” said an investigating officer.

Now, Md. Sagir’s family is saying they want ‘justice’. While it is true that such mob lynching has no place in any civilized society, the current situation on the law & order front in Bharat- especially in ‘secular’ states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Kerala, Rajasthan – is atrocious. One can’t help but empathize with angry citizens in some of these cases. People in large swathes of the country today look upon the police and courts as mostly corrupt and apathetic.

Failure of secular state and its institutions

We claim to be an IT power, but still lack a proper system to monitor and share information across jurisdictions on sex offenders. Victims of sexual crimes still face extreme apathy and insensitivity while submitting complaints or giving testimony. But most importantly, why do rapists and molestors get bail/parole/sentence commutation so easily?

Let’s see some examples – Tinku Anwar, arrested for rape and blackmail, got out on bail in just 2 months and immediately went on to stab the survivor and her husband in Kota, Rajasthan. Imran raped and murdered a 7-year-old visually impaired child in Delhi after getting out on bail in an earlier case of raping a minor. Out on bail rape accused Mehboob, Jaamil, and others killed the mother of the rape victim in Kanpur.

In the recent Ankita Singh murder too, co-accused Mohammed Naeem had been jailed for an earlier POCSO case where he kidnapped and forced a minor to convert to Islam – but he was let out on bail and then proceeded to assist Shahrukh Hussain in burning Ankita alive.

The sister of the Telangana veterinarian who was gang-raped and murdered near Hyderabad had demanded that law should be amended to ensure that accused in rape cases do not get bail. But will such common-sense appeals by citizenry be heard by our milords?

While appeals to higher police officials and MLAs/MPs at least get the wheels of justice turning, howsoever imperfectly, our higher judiciary has gained a notorious reputation of dismissing distraught citizens’ appeals and playing to the left-liberal gallery instead. The wait for justice is a never-ending one – even when lower courts hand out speedy verdicts, victims and their families know that the convicts can still weasel out by abusing the appeals system, especially if they manage to get representation from NGOs/lawyers that exercise outsize influence over higher judiciary.

Selective outrage over ‘lynchings’

As this lynching was carried out by a Muslim mob and in a ‘secular’ state, you can rest assured that English-language media and the lawyer-activist Lutyens’ lobby will maintain a studied silence or somehow try to spin this to blame Modi.

The only thing Modi can be blamed for is not initiating much-needed police reforms from day one. He tried to reform the judiciary and end the opaque collegium system (result of a naked power grab by judiciary in 1993) by bringing the NJAC bill in 2015, but that was summarily struck down by the SC as ‘unconstitutional’. If he had tried any major police reform to end the politicization of police and raise its standards, there too the usual suspects would have raised howls of protest that ‘federal structure is being violated’. We have already seen how multiple Opposition-ruled states are now refusing to cooperate with central investigative bodies like CBI and NIA, and have placed crooked cops in key positions.

Actually, rapists being lynched is not uncommon – many such cases have been reported from the North-East too, and usually go under the radar of ‘national’ media. Here are some examples –

Meghalaya – Harun Sheikh (42), accused of raping an 8-year-old girl in Meghalaya’s South Garo Hills district, was thrashed to death by the girl’s father and others in August, 2020.

Nagaland – In 2015, Syed Farid Khan, a 35-year-old second hand car dealer from Assam, was arrested for raping a 20-year-old Naga woman and locked up in Dimapur Central Jail. A mob running into several thousand raided the jail, got Khan out, paraded him naked, and killed him in full public view. Nagaland is almost 90% Christian.

Arunachal Pradesh – In 2018, an irate 1000-strong mob, dragged two men accused of the rape-and-murder of a 5-year-old out from a police station in Tezu town in Lohit district and lynched them.

Assam – In July 2019, quack healer (kabiraj) Hussain Ali (45) was lynched by a mob in Assam’s West Karbi Anglong district for sexually abusing two girls.

Cattle thieves active along the porous Bangladesh border of several North East states are routinely lynched – such cases have been reported from Tripura, Meghalaya, Assam, Manipur.

But the only lynchings that are discussed by our elites is when desperate Hindu villagers try to resist the deadly beef mafia, or when poor Hindus (from mostly OBC and SC communities) catch a thief red-handed and thrash him before handing him over to police. Then all hell breaks loose, and NYT/BBC too get in the act.

Conclusion

The harsh reality is that our current democratic system is broken. Multi-party politics has fractured our polity along multiple fault-lines such that building consensus on issues of national significance or working as per a long-term vision is literally impossible. Our polity can’t even agree whether an Islamofascist, terrorist state like Pakistan is an enemy or not!

Our elite is so mentally colonized that they have become conduits for all sorts of foreign agendas and #BreakingIndia forces. This HINO (Hindu in Name Only) elite looks down upon the ordinary Hindus just like the British colonizers did – as subjects that need to be ‘civilized’. This supremacist, undemocratic outlook drives all their actions and is also how the judicial elites justify their unaccountability.

We need a unity government of strong, proven leaders from all regions who are committed to the timeless Dharmic ethos of Bharatiya civilization. With public backing, these leaders need to renew the Constitution, establish a new Republic and then govern for a lengthy period – free of the endless intrigue, traitorous machinations and bickering that is a staple of our electoral politics today. Otherwise, our descent into even more chaos is guaranteed, while nations with stable and ‘authoritarian’ governance systems like China and Vietnam continue zooming past.