CALCUTTA, 4 January 2005 — Seven robbers were battered to death by an angry mob when they tried to loot a passenger bus at Kadamtala, 90 km from Calcutta, in broad daylight. West Bengal Director General of Police Shyamal Dutta said that policemen rushed to the spot on hearing about the highway heist but even the men in uniform could not stop villagers and commuters from killing the badly-outnumbered criminals with iron rods.
But there was nothing unusual about last week’s lynching. Blood thirsty mobs baying for bandits’ blood are becoming a common feature of the West Bengal countryside.
Nearly 100 criminals have been lynched to death in various such incidents in 2004. In the last few years, mob action has claimed more lives in the state than in any other province, according to National Crime Records Bureau statistics.
Last week, a gang of criminals boarded the bus brandishing revolvers and shotguns in North 24 Parganas district. When the passengers raised an alarm, the robbers fired in the air. But the driver stopped the bus in a busy rural market and pleaded for help. Soon hundreds of villagers pounced on the bandits. All the seven were killed on the spot even as the police helplessly watched the bloody scene.
Despite widespread public concern over ordinary people taking the law in their hands, the government insists that lynching is not a law and order problem.
Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya describes lynching as a “sociological problem which must be handled by elected rural bodies like panchayats, rather than the police.” Recently, the administration invited sociologists and psychiatrists to study the problem and recommend measures to check the grisly trend but the initiative did not produce results.
A cyclist was beaten to death after he accidentally splashed mud on bystanders while crossing a puddle in a Calcutta suburb. In Howrah, a top CPM leader’s nephew was dragged out of his car and killed by a mob in broad daylight. His crime: his vehicle had brushed against a rickshaw in the congested locality. A six-year-old girl was killed when a mob stoned her car after it ran over a goat in South 24 Parganas district. The child’s death created a storm but the culprits are yet to be arrested.
Official records reveal that the vast majority of lynching victims are bandits who commit robberies, rape women and kidnap people for ransom in far-flung areas.
Police stations in rural areas are generally under-staffed and corrupt policemen are often in league with criminals.
The villagers say that if they hand over a robber to the police, he would bribe his way to freedom and commit crimes again. So they kill him.
The late Nripen Chakraborty — Tripura’s Marxist chief minister who was expelled from the party — once said that most vigilantes in West Bengal are Marxist cadres. Hence the police doesn’t arrest them for taking the law in their hands. The comments cost him dearly.
“The tendency among common people to deliver instant justice reveals their lack of faith in the judicial system, just as custodial deaths point to slackening faith in legal methods among the police. But it is not clear whether ordinary people are following in the footsteps of the police or the law enforcers are taking a leaf out of the common man’s book,” said Arun Prokash Mukherjee, retired director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.
