A climate of impunity emboldens the perpetrators of public murder to post real-time videos online.

Hate has consequences. And those who propagate and promote that hate must bear responsibility for its entirely predictable consequences.

hate crime, hate crime India, dalit violence, caste violence, Tabrez Ansari, Tabrez Ansari death, Tabrez Ansari death video, Jharkhand lynching case, Hindu Rashtra, BJP government, indian express — Obviously, the business of teaching lessons is incomplete without the question of lessons learnt. (Illustration by Suvajit Dey)

Having been a teacher for close to half a century, I feel entitled to comment on the novel pedagogic practices that are emerging in our blessed country. After all, all kinds of people are now in the business of “teaching a lesson”. I am, of course, referring to the reported beating to death of Tabrez Ansari, allegedly on suspicion of theft, in Jharkhand. Ansari was reportedly tied to an electric pole, and beaten for approximately four hours. Four hours — just try and wrap your head around that. The electric pole was on a public street, albeit at night. Still, factor in bystanders, passers-by, spectators, jhal-muri vendors, and of course the heroic “teachers”, beating a bound man. The video of this act of performative violence, this spectacle, shows children, on their way to, or from, mere conventional “lessons”; giggling women, probably out to buy vegetables; men hard at work spitting tobacco juice, exhorting the dying man to look into their mobile cameras to give them a good shot, just an ordinary day. So ordinary that the police turned up alright, but only when the man was nearly dead. Still, they took him to a doctor — who failed to notice the head injury that apparently killed him. Eventually, four days later, they even took him to the hospital, where an ECG confirmed that there was no life in that bloody, battered body. He — it? — was taken to another hospital but Ansari remained stubbornly dead. A minister of the state government suggested that the whole incident was a conspiracy to malign the BJP government — in which case Ansari must have been part of the conspiracy — because dying like that, remaining dead, certainly gives the government a bad name. He may be dead, but he’s practically seditious!