The lynching of a man at Singhu, at the site of the farmers’ protest on the Delhi-Haryana border, the brutality of the hate crime captured and replayed on video, calls for the full force of the law to step in. The victim, Lakhbir Singh, an SC labourer who belonged to a village in Tarn Taran, was reportedly accused of an act of desecration by his killers, allegedly a group of Nihangs, who tortured him and tied the mutilated body to a police barricade.
Any matter of desecration resonates widely and deeply in a state where the lines between religion and politics have always been molten and where it also stokes the caste faultlines. But the thugs and lumpens who purportedly filmed their victim’s dying moments cannot seek any cover. They have played judge, jury, executioner, and the state must urgently identify them and bring them to book. That’s not going to be easy given the tangle of crossed wires.
The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), the umbrella body of farmers’ unions that is leading the protest in the states and at Delhi’s borders, has condemned the killing and sought to distance itself from it – both the Nihang group and the
deceased have no relation with the Kisan Morcha, it has said. That is not enough. The farmers’ movement and its leadership must look the crime in the eye, and own up to the serious questions it raises. They are well aware that a mobilisation that lasts this long – the protests against the Centre’s three farm laws began in Punjab last year in June, moving to Delhi’s borders that November – always carries a risk of being distorted from within, as much as it courts the state’s ire.
The onus is also on the SKM. It will need to find ways of sending out the unequivocal message that the farmers’ movement will not brook violence or countenance the weaponisation of religion. Pitching a wide tent may have been useful to it, amorphousness may have helped it to grow. But incidents such as the lynching on Friday demand the setting of boundaries that cannot be breached. Ahead of the assembly election, all sides, the farmers’ movement, the political parties in Punjab and the governments in the state and the Centre have the responsibility of restraint. The
2015 Bargari sacrilege case continues to actively churn politics in the state. Punjab’s hard-won peace is at stake, and a bunch of thugs not be allowed to hijack it with their show of brutality.
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