THE LAW OF THE MOB

On November 29, Animesh Bhuyan, 23, was lynched by a group of around 50 people in Jorhat, Assam, after he was mistakenly assumed to be responsible for a road accident that injured a middle-aged person on a scooter. The attack on Bhuyan, an All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) leader, was led by a man named Niraj Das, the son of the injured rider and an accused in over a dozen criminal cases, including charges of drug peddling.

- Kaushik Deka

This daylight killing of a youth in a busy market area less than a kilometre away from the police station, has sparked massive outrage in the state. With increasing instances of mob lynching (half a dozen cases have been registered over the past two years) and a history of slow trials, there was a deafening clamour on traditional and social media for instant justice. A news anchor even hectored the Assam Police on television, asking them to show some spine by “using bullets” against Das, by then in police custody. Within six hours of that appeal, Das was found dead in an accident after he allegedly attempted to flee police custody.

The summary ‘justice’ was followed by much jubilation across the state. The police force and chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma were hailed as heroes. Neither the police nor chief minister Sarma himself saw any reason to play down Das’s “accidental death”. On the contrary, at 2.30 am on December 1, less than an hour after the ‘encounter’, G.P. Singh, special DGP of law and order, tweeted: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—Newton’s third law.” If that wasn’t direct enough, Sarma made the government’s intention clear by responding to this tweet with: “Assam will be free of crime and criminal, come what may.”