Why This Lynching?
One cannot help a feeling of revulsion when a big, black and italicised headline pops into sight inescapably and declares - 5 muggers beaten to death in Chittagong. Mob violence can be the cruellest thing in the world. An expression of exasperation on the part of the weak and exploited and bullied, a mob can resort to heartless and inhuman use of force perhaps as the individuals forming that do not have singly an access to force as an instrument to penalise or redress a wrong long pestering them. But this is countering sinful thing by another as sinful and perhaps more. And cannot be accepted in a settled society with its laws and universally subscribed mores that keep it together and going. This submission in a body to anger and hate is an insult to man's power to live by head and heart. And once one tries to imagine how one is simply beaten to death, what it takes to be killed by mere beating, one has no way but to be driven to sympathise with the victim.
Only days before four muggers were, can we say, lynched to death in the same city of Chittagong. Are we then in for a pattern of mass resistance to crime? A resistance that comes from a general loss of faith in law and administration and government? We must also then be in for a serious social degeneration not amenable to easy repair. Those that participated in what is traditionally called a 'haturey kil' were also participating in a gruesome crime turning what could be a sober respect for law into something abominable and abhorrent.
Why has this to happen, time and again? We cannot wish resistance to cease and however much we wish so the crime is not going to be eliminated by police action alone. While police effectiveness against such organised crime must improve by miles, social resistance must also grow together with a keener sense of responsibility.
Of the killed ones, one was a student of the local MES college. It can be that the whole gang was composed predominantly of students. The biggest single contributor to student or youth crime is unemployment. The jobs market must improve and expand to involve all young people needing a job. That is a foolproof answer. And in the fashioning of that answer the government has the most to do.
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