What Lynching Of Sadhus At Palghar Tells Us About The Leftists And The Indian State

The gory visuals of blood soaked sadhus desperately clutching on to the policemen for protection from the violent, sticks-wielding mob and the cowardice shown by the cops who practically let the crowd beat the life out of its prey will hound our collective conscience for a long time to come. While anyone who has watched the naked dance of this murder online or on TV is understandably furious and wants all the guilty punished, one section of the society, the left-leaning one, is more worried about the narrative that is shaping around the incident. For the first couple of days, the reports of the lynching incident were consigned to some unglamorous corners and assigned little column inches and boring headlines. It was only after social media took it up and posted over 3,00,000 tweets that the doyens of the left ecosystem cared to respond and the highest officials in the state government were forced to take cognisance. Their first instinct in such a scenario would’ve been to put this news front and centre with alarming headlines about minority persecution and rise of Hindu majoritarianism. It is not the religion of the perpetrators that is infuriating them but the sheer hypocrisy which goes to great lengths to erase the real victims of the majority community while making martyrs out of anyone if they are a Christian or a Muslim. One of the main reasons why this is the case is because in the left’s worldview, every group has victimhood points that they can claim based on factors such as numbers, perceived atrocities faced by them, their separatist tendencies from the Hindu or Indian mainstream, etc. For instance, if you are a Muslim and try to put your country before religion, you are instantly thrown off the pyramid and your group victimhood card is snatched away. While this ideological clash would go on, we should rather train our outrage not at the unworthy leftists but at the Indian State whose representative, the cop in uniform, brushed off the hand that was seeking protection from him. It’s a severe indictment of the weak Indian state which fails at delivering basic public goods of security and justice to millions of people everyday.