A series of incidents across the nation in the past two days are testing the patience of civilized society. In two incidents in Punjab, linked to holy Sikh shrines, two men were lynched on suspicion that they attempted to commit sacrilege. In Kolkata, crude bombs were hurled and injuries caused to many during the voting for the civic polls. In Kerala, in a mix of religious and political passions, one leader each of a pro-Muslim and pro-BJP outfits were done to death in retaliatory strikes. All of these reveal one fact – that social divides are deepening while the political class keeps dividing the people and fishing in troubled waters.
The Punjab incidents, prima facie, have no political link. But, this cannot altogether be ruled out as assembly elections are approaching. In one incident, at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, a youth was pounced upon, taken to a room and lynched after he forced his way close to the sanctum sanctorum and attempted what looked like sacrilege. In the past, such attempts had happened and they turned out to be acts of mentally disturbed men – or, the courts ruled so. The second incident, by a ‘migrant’ youth elsewhere, is described by the police as a simple case of theft inside the gurdwara, while the man was lynched on suspicion of it being sacrilege. He was executed in police presence. Religious sensitivities are high in Punjab, where minority Sikhs are often restive for one or other reason. The farmer agitation was handled by the Centre with kid-gloves because it did not want to rub the Sikhs – Punjab farmers forming the vanguard of the agitation — the wrong way. Police too have its hands tied when handling tense situations there.
The two murders in Kerala, involving suspected RSS and SDPI goons, have the potential for communally dividing the society down the middle. The first murder was pre-planned, the second a retaliation in a matter of less than 12 hours at a distance of 10km, in Alappuzha district. The first murder itself was seen as retaliation to some earlier murders suspectedly by the SDPI, a militant Muslim outfit with strong funding and political ambitions. Chances are that both sides will lose more lives in similar strikes though ban orders have been clamped on the region for two days. In Kolkata, there was large-scale violence after the assembly polls and the ruling Trinamool Congress is doing its best to stonewall BJP forays in West Bengal. The bomb-attacks in civic polls are new instances. All these are against the set democratic traditions of the nation.
