[It
has become the year of the lynch mob in India. Dozens of people have been beaten to death, often in cold blood, by
crowds of bored young men who alternate between booting someone in the head and
taking a selfie. Suggestions of whom to kill rip so fast through villages via
social media, especially WhatsApp, that no one seems able to stop them.]
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari
Kumar
 |
|
A
political poster in Hazaribagh, India, featuring an image of Jayant Sinha,
a
government minister who draped garlands on eight men convicted of
beating
a Muslim man to death. Credit Saurabh Das for
The
New York Times
|
HAZARIBAGH,
India — Jayant Sinha is a
Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey.
Born and raised in India but minted in the
United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston area. His American
friends say his politics were moderate, maybe even progressive.
Then he returned to India.
He ditched the suits he had worn as a partner
at McKinsey & Company, an elite management consulting firm, in favor of
traditional Indian kurtas. He joined the governing Hindu right political party
and became a member of Parliament and then a minister, leading Hindu parades
and showering worshipers with flower petals from a helicopter.
This month, he also feted and garlanded eight
murderers who were part of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an
unarmed and terrified Muslim man to death. His embrace of the convicted killers
has become the political stunt that Indians can’t stop talking about.
Across the country, the images of Mr. Sinha
draping wreaths of marigolds around the men’s necks have started a conversation
about whether the state of Indian politics has become so poisoned by sectarian
hatred and extremism that even an ostensibly worldly and successful politician
can’t resist its pull.
It has become the year of the lynch mob in
India. Dozens of people have been beaten
to death, often in cold blood, by crowds of bored young men who alternate
between booting someone in the head and taking a selfie. Suggestions of whom to
kill rip so fast through villages via social media, especially WhatsApp, that
no one seems able to stop them.
In this atmosphere, some conclude that Mr.
Sinha might actually win votes for his maneuver.
“He’ll get some benefit,” said Rajiv Kumar, a
homeopathic medicine salesman and one of Mr. Sinha’s constituents. “I don’t
agree with what he did; it’s only going to encourage more lynching. But Jayant
was concerned his party would dump him, and this will help.”
Mr. Sinha says he now feels horrible about
garlanding the convicts.
“In a highly polarized environment, this
became a spark and I regret giving the spark,’’ he said in an interview. “I
wouldn’t do it again.’’
For decades, a center-leftist political
organization, the Indian National Congress, dominated politics.
But four years ago, India’s political
landscape was wiped clean. The Bharatiya Janata Party, with its roots in Hindu
supremacy, won overwhelmingly, and the party’s top figure, Narendra Modi, became prime minister. Mr. Modi promised to
stoke India’s go-go economy, and he recruited Mr. Sinha, who had built a small
fortune in the United States as a consultant and hedge fund manager, to help
him.
It didn’t hurt that Mr. Sinha’s father was a
senior member of the Indian Parliament and the Bharatiya Janata Party. With Mr.
Modi’s backing, Mr. Sinha easily won the election to take over his father’s
seat. He was made a finance minister and then a minister for civil aviation, a
post he still holds.
The territory his life spans is dramatic. Mr.
Sinha, 55, owns a beautiful home in Chestnut Hill, a posh enclave outside
Boston, where his wife still lives. He has degrees from some of the world’s
best universities, including the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi,
India’s capital, and Harvard Business School.
But the area he represents, centered in the
bushy town of Hazaribagh (which means “a thousand gardens”) is poor, troubled
and socially conservative. Lying more than 500 miles east of New Delhi in the
state of Jharkhand, it is home to coal mines, Maoist rebels and land-grabbing
gangs.
Like so much of India today, Hazaribagh is
more polarized between majority Hindus and minority Muslims than it has been in
a long time. Many people here support Hindu vigilante groups, especially the
so-called cow protectors who hunt down those who break Hinduism’s taboo against
killing cows.
It was one such vigilante group that swarmed
Alimuddin Ansari, a Muslim trader, in Mr. Sinha’s constituency last year. A
rumor spread that Mr. Ansari was transporting beef, and a mob dragged him out
of his van and beat him. Police officers eventually pulled him away, but he
died a few hours later from internal injuries, officials said.
His family is now broke.
“My life is doomed,” said Mariam Khatoon, his
widow. She sat in a plastic chair in a ramshackle house, the concrete
foundation cracking beneath her feet.
From cellphone footage — the culprits
gleefully shot pictures of themselves hitting Mr. Ansari — investigators
identified 12 culprits and a court sentenced all of them except a juvenile to
life in prison.
But a higher court recently granted an
appeal, saying the evidence was flimsy. And where did eight of the men go the
moment they were granted bail? Mr. Sinha’s house, where he was waiting with
plates of sweets and wreaths of marigolds.
There is still a mystery about how Mr. Ansari
died. A lawyer representing some of the convicted lynchers said that, yes, the
mob had roughed up Mr. Ansari but that it was actually police officers who beat
him to death, in custody. The lawyer pointed to photos that have been
circulating on social media that show Mr. Ansari looking alert and apparently
not badly injured as officers led him away from the mob. The trial court had
heard many of these arguments and rejected them.
Mr. Sinha said he was helping the convicts
because there was “no evidence” that they killed Mr. Ansari. He has actively
supported their legal defense, paying several hundred dollars to one of the
defense lawyers and connecting this lawyer to an experienced attorney friend to
craft a persuasive appeal.
He celebrated their release from jail with
sweets and flowers, he said, to show how happy he was that they “got a fresh lease
on life.”
But Mr. Sinha concedes that he never made a
condolence call to Mr. Ansari’s widow, who is also his constituent. He said it
was too dangerous to visit her, an excuse that raises questions. Her scruffy
little house sits on a quiet lane. And with his ministerial security detail,
it’s hard to imagine anyone in that neighborhood bothering Mr. Sinha.
National elections are scheduled for next
year, and Mr. Sinha might have been feeling vulnerable. He has hewed to the
political right since his time in the United States, but in today’s India, his
right may not be right enough.
Neither he nor his father came up through the
ranks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu ideological group
that molded Mr. Modi and other top members of his party. Recently, Mr. Sinha
had been taking heat from a former lawmaker in his constituency who said he was
not doing enough to help the convicted killers.
“There was a lot of resentment toward
Jayant,’’ said Abhijit Sen, a senior journalist in Hazaribagh. “Those others
forced him to act.’’
Mr. Sinha insisted that he had tried to stay
out of the case because it was so divisive. But after he studied the files, he
said, he became convinced that there was much more to it than initially
reported. He regrets the garlands but not helping the convicts.
“For me, it’s simply a matter of justice,’’
he said.
But the criticism keeps coming.
A group of retired civil servants demanded
that Mr. Sinha resign, saying he had essentially issued “a license to kill
minorities.”
And a recent letter to the newspaper The
Indian Express was headlined: “Despicable Act.”
