Polarised

[Mathew Moothasseril]

Minister feting lynch mob? India recoils in disgust
Published on: 10:13 pm, July 22, 2018 by: mattersindia.com



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By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
Hazaribagh: — Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from
Harvard. He worked for McKinsey.

Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found
wealth and success in the Boston area. His American friends say his
politics were moderate, maybe even progressive.

Then he returned to India.

He ditched the suits he had worn as a partner at McKinsey & Company,
an elite management consulting firm, in favor of traditional Indian
kurtas. He joined the governing Hindu right political party and became
a member of Parliament and then a minister, leading Hindu parades and
showering worshipers with flower petals from a helicopter.

This month, he also feted and garlanded eight murderers who were part
of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an unarmed and
terrified Muslim man to death. His embrace of the convicted killers
has become the political stunt that Indians can’t stop talking about.

Across the country, the images of Mr. Sinha draping wreaths of
marigolds around the men’s necks have started a conversation about
whether the state of Indian politics has become so poisoned by
sectarian hatred and extremism that even an ostensibly worldly and
successful politician can’t resist its pull.

It has become the year of the lynch mob in India. Dozens of people
have been beaten to death, often in cold blood, by crowds of bored
young men who alternate between booting someone in the head and taking
a selfie. Suggestions of whom to kill rip so fast through villages via
social media, especially WhatsApp, that no one seems able to stop
them.

In this atmosphere, some conclude that Mr. Sinha might actually win
votes for his maneuver.

“He’ll get some benefit,” said Rajiv Kumar, a homeopathic medicine
salesman and one of Mr. Sinha’s constituents. “I don’t agree with what
he did; it’s only going to encourage more lynching. But Jayant was
concerned his party would dump him, and this will help.”

Mr. Sinha says he now feels horrible about garlanding the convicts.

“In a highly polarized environment, this became a spark and I regret
giving the spark,’’ he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t do it
again.’’

For decades, a center-leftist political organization, the Indian
National Congress, dominated politics.

But four years ago, India’s political landscape was wiped clean. The
Bharatiya Janata Party, with its roots in Hindu supremacy, won
overwhelmingly, and the party’s top figure, Narendra Modi, became
prime minister. Mr. Modi promised to stoke India’s go-go economy, and
he recruited Mr. Sinha, who had built a small fortune in the United
States as a consultant and hedge fund manager, to help him.

It didn’t hurt that Mr. Sinha’s father was a senior member of the
Indian Parliament and the Bharatiya Janata Party. With Mr. Modi’s
backing, Mr. Sinha easily won the election to take over his father’s
seat. He was made a finance minister and then a minister for civil
aviation, a post he still holds.

The territory his life spans is dramatic. Mr. Sinha, 55, owns a
beautiful home in Chestnut Hill, a posh enclave outside Boston, where
his wife still lives. He has degrees from some of the world’s best
universities, including the Indian Institute of Technology in New
Delhi, India’s capital, and Harvard Business School.

But the area he represents, centered in the bushy town of Hazaribagh
(which means “a thousand gardens”) is poor, troubled and socially
conservative. Lying more than 500 miles east of New Delhi in the state
of Jharkhand, it is home to coal mines, Maoist rebels and
land-grabbing gangs.

Like so much of India today, Hazaribagh is more polarized between
majority Hindus and minority Muslims than it has been in a long time.
Many people here support Hindu vigilante groups, especially the
so-called cow protectors who hunt down those who break Hinduism’s
taboo against killing cows.

It was one such vigilante group that swarmed Alimuddin Ansari, a
Muslim trader, in Mr. Sinha’s constituency last year. A rumor spread
that Mr. Ansari was transporting beef, and a mob dragged him out of
his van and beat him. Police officers eventually pulled him away, but
he died a few hours later from internal injuries, officials said.

His family is now broke.

“My life is doomed,” said Mariam Khatoon, his widow. She sat in a
plastic chair in a ramshackle house, the concrete foundation cracking
beneath her feet.

From cellphone footage — the culprits gleefully shot pictures of
themselves hitting Mr. Ansari — investigators identified 12 culprits
and a court sentenced all of them except a juvenile to life in prison.

But a higher court recently granted an appeal, saying the evidence was
flimsy. And where did eight of the men go the moment they were granted
bail? Mr. Sinha’s house, where he was waiting with plates of sweets
and wreaths of marigolds.

There is still a mystery about how Mr. Ansari died. A lawyer
representing some of the convicted lynchers said that, yes, the mob
had roughed up Mr. Ansari but that it was actually police officers who
beat him to death, in custody. The lawyer pointed to photos that have
been circulating on social media that show Mr. Ansari looking alert
and apparently not badly injured as officers led him away from the
mob. The trial court had heard many of these arguments and rejected
them.

Mr. Sinha said he was helping the convicts because there was “no
evidence” that they killed Mr. Ansari. He has actively supported their
legal defense, paying several hundred dollars to one of the defense
lawyers and connecting this lawyer to an experienced attorney friend
to craft a persuasive appeal.

He celebrated their release from jail with sweets and flowers, he
said, to show how happy he was that they “got a fresh lease on life.”

But Mr. Sinha concedes that he never made a condolence call to Mr.
Ansari’s widow, who is also his constituent. He said it was too
dangerous to visit her, an excuse that raises questions. Her scruffy
little house sits on a quiet lane. And with his ministerial security
detail, it’s hard to imagine anyone in that neighborhood bothering Mr.
Sinha.

National elections are scheduled for next year, and Mr. Sinha might
have been feeling vulnerable. He has hewed to the political right
since his time in the United States, but in today’s India, his right
may not be right enough.

Neither he nor his father came up through the ranks of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu ideological group that molded
Mr. Modi and other top members of his party. Recently, Mr. Sinha had
been taking heat from a former lawmaker in his constituency who said
he was not doing enough to help the convicted killers.

“There was a lot of resentment toward Jayant,’’ said Abhijit Sen, a
senior journalist in Hazaribagh. “Those others forced him to act.’’

Mr. Sinha insisted that he had tried to stay out of the case because
it was so divisive. But after he studied the files, he said, he became
convinced that there was much more to it than initially reported. He
regrets the garlands but not helping the convicts.

“For me, it’s simply a matter of justice,’’ he said.

But the criticism keeps coming.

A group of retired civil servants demanded that Mr. Sinha resign,
saying he had essentially issued “a license to kill minorities.”

And a recent letter to the newspaper The Indian Express was headlined:
“Despicable Act.”

(Source: Newyorktimes)

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*GATHER THE SCATTERED*

Fr Mathew Moothasseril
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INDIA