Lynching goes further astray

One could say that the lynching was handing 'mob justice' to incorrigible criminals having had a field day thus far without adequate law enforcement in place. The argument is assailable, because a full complement of 300-strong contingent of armed policemen was at hand and actually conducting raids against the bands of robbers. The villagers did well to cooperate with the police insofar as ferreting out the criminals went. They should have left it at that, but they allowed their rage to take the law into their own hands.

Whichever way one looks at it, lynching is no answer to rising criminality in society simply because, it is a rabid expression of morbid lawlessness which can spawn anarchy out of its own dynamic. It is fraught with another danger: innocents could fall victim to it as had happened in the past.

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Today, it is muggers and robbers who are lynched; tomorrow, it maybe anyone with somebody's finger pointed at him in public out of a vicious intent to exact a vendetta on him. Typically, the smashing of a car or the manhandling of a driver or an owner after a road accident can be attributed to the same destructive mob trait. This tendentious pattern of rowdy behaviourism on the part of a minuscule minority has to be checkmated and respect for law and discipline instilled in them.

There is food for thought for politicians, media representatives, law enforcers, sociologists and the civil society to put their heads together and hammer out an effective strategy to combat the menace before it blows out of proportion.