Taking stock of Dimapur lynching

Whatever the primordial wild instinct, explained in novels of Conrad and Golding, that the hysteric mob of Dimapur in Nagaland, a northeastern state in India, manifested while dragging out an under trial rape accused from the Central Jail and his lynching on 5th March, our eyes have been wide opened trying to absorb the shock and getting some answers to that horrific act.

So far the narrative is that the victim, Sayed Sharifuddin Khan, a thirty-five years old trader in Dimapur was accused of rape by a Naga girl. The punch line of the narrative was that the “rapist”, who was also an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”, got his punishment in a country where the justice delivery system is very slow.

When the medical examination report of the rape victim came out, it gave a negative answer. There was no trace of rape on her body. Further, the CCTV footage of the hotel where the incident had allegedly happened also send a clear picture—both the girl and the accused were seen in normal stature. Nor Sayed Sharifuddin Khan was an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, his father was a retired IAF personnel from Karimganj, Assam while two of his brothers are still serving in the Indian Army and he was married to a local Naga woman.

Then what made the people of Dimapur so impatient to create a kangaroo court and do the lynching ?
The answer is politics—dirty, heinous politics and the long process of collaboration of militants, criminals and anti-social elements with an ethnic tinge that culminated in together to create this savagery. Ever since the all-powerful Chief Minister Neiphu Rio was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2014, there has been a power struggle in Kohima. Rio’s successor, T R Zelliang has been facing pressure from his fellow NPF party members and had a no-confidence motion in January this year.

The dissident group is headed by a leader who is an ethnic Sema. In Dimapur, the only commercial town of Nagaland, the Semas are in the majority. It is learnt that this Sema leader, along with militants, anti-socials and criminals incited the crowd to go wild in order to create a law and order breakdown in the state to bring down Zelliang’s government…

The bid for supremacy by Semas, in form of militancy, criminal and anti-social thugs and their bonhomie with politicians have led to a situation which has been waiting for a chance and since the ‘rape victim’ was a Sema it got a perfect launch pad.

But what sort of a society does the Dimapur lynching reflect. I think the Naga civil society will give an answer. The insurgency-hit state, which has not witnessed a single exchange of bullets between the NSCN (IM) and the security forces since the 1997 ceasefire, should retrospect and come to terms with the reality. The Church in Nagaland is the unifying factor for all the conflicts. It has been largely responsible for the reduced number of violence among the people in that state. Now the Church can play an important role to reign in the frenzied masses so that lynchings like Dimapur do not get repeated.

By: Sazzad Hussain