 I will start by saying that the current juncture of what we are talking about both as emergency and the kind of violence that we are seeing in public space is something that we need to contextualize that what does it really mean? Is it some goons wreaking havoc in our public space? Is it that a certain kind of behavior has come in the forefront because of social media? It's always easy to blame technology for what is happening because it's new, something which is new must therefore also be related to what is new in technology. Or is it something deeper we are experiencing in our society? And I would start by saying that if we don't understand the nature of public violence today then we would not understand also what the objective of this violence is. That it is not, that it is just political forces which have always believed in strong arm methods getting stronger temporarily and so on. But there is a design which is larger that we need to understand and the design is not just a simple political design but it is really a design at the level of societal reconfiguration. Now why this is so? For doing that I am going to take you a little afar. I am going to take you to the United States where lynching as public spectacle became quite known. It may not be known to us but certainly as a public spectacle it was quite well known. And recently, last 10-15 years, a lot of material has come out which has documented the nature of this violence and how it was actually transmitted, shown and how people participate. And both these elements are important because at that time as well there were technological innovations of a certain kind in society which is the camera. So you have photographs of lynching which were taken, sold and what is even more horrifying transmitted as postcards. Actually they were printed as postcards and circulated all around. And banal messages written in the back of it, oh you know this happened, you can see me here and a circle is drawn around the person's face or yeah we caught him and we burnt him. Things like this, along with how are you, do write back to me and things like that. So very much in the genre of what is social media today, we have the postcards and the camera performing the role of cell phones and Facebook. So this is what also made me think about that it is not the social media which is driving what's happening today. The mode of transmission or the mode of communication is not what is the central message of what is happening but it is something else and we need to really think about that if we want to resist it, combat it and defeat it. So we'll start with things which perhaps we would not have seen so easily which is essentially bodies hanging from trees. Another black back time called degros being hung as a part of lynching. So you have this very powerful poem which was sung by a number of artists. Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the popular trees. Now this is evocative because this was the image which at that time was replicated across postcards. This is what I really want to bring out as you can see somebody has taken a photograph and has written on that something which indicates what he or she thinks is important for being present here. This is the postcards of a similar kind. This on the left is a postcard of a lynching in Dallas. Dallas had at that time a population of 92,000 people. 5,000 people participated in this lynching. 5,000 of a population of 92,000. It's mass participation and that is the significant point that you have to think about. Why did it have this mass participation? What were the people participating in? And again there is a postcard and the postcard is again saying oh you haven't written to me for some time please do write to me and so on. The other photograph that you can see on the right and this was a photograph which again is documented available now in various books. This is if you see closely you will see the people have come well-rested. They have ties, coats, normal. They're talking to each other, pointing at each other and taking photographs. This is normalcy for them and this is again mass participation of a different kind. This is your not mob. This is middle-class gentry coming out to mark their presence in an event which people have been lynched. Now this is the other part of it that they were lynching places in Dallas. That's where lynching would take place. People would not only take photographs, they would also take souvenirs. Something from the body, strand of hair. So this was part of the course and in the record of families these are found routinely. That there is this memorabilia that the family collected and photographs and strands of hair, something else. It's difficult to go through all of these accounts without really feeling sick about how human nature can be perverted. Except for the fact that we are seeing it almost every day around us. So we cannot in that sense feel a sense of distance. Oh that happened there, really bad. We are not like that. When lynchings took place it was a public event. Schools, businesses closed, trains, buses ran, newspapers announced it. So it was always a public spectacle. The lynching was not only well organized, it wasn't quite often spontaneous. It was planned under the full connivance of everybody including obviously the police and the local authorities that the lynching was conducted. Now what is, I would like to move from the background of all this and this is not something which is easy to understand. Why was this being done? Was it just random violence? Was it a sense certain acts are so bad that you had to lynch people? So it's very clear lynching was directed largely at the black population. It wasn't directed at just anybody. It was directed at the black population. And it was directed largely at the men. Of course the Hispanics were killed, some whites were killed and also black women were also lynched. Let's not think that it was just the black men. They came to get the husband or the son, didn't find them. Pledge the wife or the mother. So that was there but the directed really direction was at the black men. What was the backdrop of this? This is the period which happens, this is the period of 1877 to 1850. People have said, some have said 1967 to 1960, 1867 to 1960 if you leave the rough dates out, it doesn't really matter. The broad message is it came post the civil war. Why was this important post civil war? Because slavery had been abolished. So this lynching that we talk about did not happen automatically as a part of normal social events as it were. Something which is aberration with society sometimes did. It was systematic attempt to reconfigure the racial society particularly of the South which had under force been abolished slavery. It was what the civil war was about. Slavery was abolished. The South did not agree to slavery being abolished. That's why the secession and the civil war. So the response of the South was the response of lynching to re-establish the racial configuration that existed before that which was slavery. So this is again a postcard printed by a pharmaceutical company, a drug company. And this was quite a well-known poem apparently which I wasn't aware of. So this is the only branch of the Dogwood tree, an emblem of white supremacy. Lessons once taught in the pioneer school that the land of white man's rule, the red man once in an early day was told by the whites to mend his way. The Negro now by eternal grace must learn to stay in the Negro's place. In the sunny south, the land of the free, let the white supreme forever be. Let this awarding to all Negroes be or they will suffer the fate of the Dogwood tree. So clear message that it is a message to the Negroes, don't get beyond your slave state. You might have been freed legally but you have no rights. And this is what is being reconfigured post the civil war through lynching. And that is why the lynching and the public spectacle go hand in hand. It's the participation of the white majority in trying to get back the Negroes to their place and also telling the Negroes African Americans today that you have no rights. You might have been freed. We have been forced by the North, the federal government to declare that you are not slaves. But nevertheless, you have no rights. There is no law for you. Whenever we want, we can do whatever we want to you. This is the message that this represents. Now the question is, this is what did it really do? If you see the forced civil war, we slowly see the pushing back of slavery, different rights being established. Okay, but what do we see? We see segregation. So white violence, lynching and mass violence that we were talking about. The public spectacle was to establish the new boundary of segregation, which because of earlier slavery might have been de facto there, but there was no legal segregation. So you get segregated schools, you get segregated spaces. All of this is to reconfigure the racial divide. Now, not through slavery, but through segregation. And this is what you see in the US, that segregation becomes a norm. Even when it is a North, where the segregation is not there in education schools or in public places, there is segregation in the way you live. Blacks lived in different spaces, whites lived in different spaces. And the common argument would be if a black comes into a white community, property prices drop and therefore you don't really want mixed localities. But racism, the reconfiguration of racism in the South, in the American South does not stay the South. It also comes to the North, but in more insidious ways, not in such blatant ways to legal segregation, which is what the US Supreme Court's judgment was. What is it? Equal but separate. That was a segregation basis. Equal but separate. And if you remember South Africa, it was also the same argument apartheid had in the slogan. Equal but separate. Apart from the fact we have 90% of the land and 90% of the money, but that apart. Now, if you see today, the civil rights movement in the United States actually came out of the anti-lynching violence. It came out of segregation. All that combined to create what we now know about is the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, etc. Now post desegregation, which of course was bitterly resisted in the South as you know, the US South. What has happened today? And it's interesting to see how race has reconfigured itself anew after desegregation or after civil rights movement established certain basic rights. That today more blacks have died in police violence in the United States in the year 2015, for example, than did through lynching in the entire period of 1877 to 1951 year. That one in three youths will go to jail once in their lives if you are a black. And 2.3 million people are in US prisons who are black. That's a significant part of the African American men. That's a significant part is directed much more at the men because men they believe can resist and therefore they are violent and therefore the need to discipline them. And if they put up any resistance should took it. So this is the position that we have in the United States. I mean, giving this is a background to show that whether it is lynching as a public spectacle or it is police violence today, it's really the reconfiguration of racial boundaries that at each time have been challenged. In the civil war slave slavery being abolished challenged segregation being abolished and each time it has reconfigured itself to a different kind of violence, but it has reconfigured itself. And that's the lesson that I want you to think about that public violence is not just simply violence, which is of a mob, which is of riots. Public violence, which is a spectacle of this kind with mass participation is actually an attempt to reconfigure society in a particular way. And it is generally a response to certain rights that have been one that have to be quote unquote one back or put back by the dominant community. So it's not simply a story that it was struggle you get oppressed that we understand struggle fight that's clear. But this is actually when you win the fight, you get a new danger. And the new danger then is manifest itself in different ways. And this is what I am taking the southern example, the southern United States to be that there is an objective behind a mass violence. Public spectacles, which have this kind of participation that we are seeing today has an objective, which is not just mindless violence. When it is celebrated through videos transmitted in WhatsApp and on Facebook in different ways, there is an objective that is there. And that's what we need to really look at. Now, I'm getting because it's not a munch. Therefore, I'm getting a little cultured. So I'm reading poetry today, which I normally don't do. So there is the killing the Shambukas. This is drawing its reference really from the strange fruit that poem that we talked about. This is when Rohit Vimula was killed. Then Chandra Mohan wrote a poem. Sealing fans bear a strange fruit, blood on the books, blood on papers, a black body swinging in mute silence, strange fruit hanging from trident. Now, this is the connection that I would like to make that when today you have lynching and a spectacle. And of course, we see lynching is not only a spectacle, lynching is being videoed. You have people standing around, people participating in the violence. You have the complicity of the crowd who then claim nothing. They saw nothing. They heard nothing. That it really didn't happen this way. It was actually a small incident. It's just unfortunate somebody died. When all this manufacture, shall we say, evidence is created. And quite often the victims are the ones against whom cases are lodged. This is also the other part of the story that the cases are against the victims' families. They are the ones who are supposed to have been instigating the violence. Or they were cattle thieves. On the other hand, those who are convicted are being garlanded by ministers. There is this public acceptance that this is great deed you have done. You are fighting for something great. So, all this that you see is trying to also give a message. What is the message? And I would argue that what you are seeing is actually what the national movement established in the country. A secular state which had obligation that it would not only protect minorities but also provide affibative action, which is what we call reservation. Now, these two elements that the state has responsibility for a secular country. That the people have to protect the secularism of the country. And that we who have oppressed Dalits for thousands of years, we have the moral and the physical responsibility of providing a safe space and a space which can provide them with education, health and other benefits which a middle class takes for granted. The affibative action that the state had promised in different ways. This is the gain of the national movement. What is the national movement all about? It was the British outsiders. We want an independent economic space. The promise of independence movement was that all the people would benefit. That the peasantry, the main part of the movement, the working people, all of them would benefit. It will be a place which will have in that sense no discrimination against any section. Of course, discrimination was there in society and we know it. Discrimination against caste, discrimination against women, they are all embedded in society. But the constitution we did that at that time that was finally accepted. Also accepted that this discrimination would be removed, would not exist. And the state has a responsibility for it. And my argument is that it is against the constitutional provisions which came out of the national struggle that the right wing at the moment is creating the lynch mob and the lynch mentality as a way of disenfranchising a section of the people. So it is in that sense like in the United States, the pushback came that if you make the slaves free, we'll push back to lynching. After 60 years of the national movement, memory having faded. After dismissing whatever we gained out of the national movement as something which is quote-unquote Nehruvian and not apparently Petalian. We now are entering a phase that we, the certain sections, not we but certain sections would like to roll back history. And rolling back history for them is first disenfranchising the Muslims and then the second which is taking away reservation. Now reservation, taking away may take a little more time. It's not that simple today because if you don't disenfranchise the Muslims first if the Muslims, Dalits and others get together then you have a problem. So what do you do? Turn the gun, turn violence towards the Muslims and try to rally the rest. This was the Gujarat progress, the Gujarat what is called riots. Now riots to me would seem to indicate that both sides participated. These were not riots. There was complicity of the state in terms of mass violence against the minorities, against the Muslims. That's what Gujarat was seeing. Gujarat had seen creeping communal riots and I'm using these riots again wrongly. Creeping communal violence in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, across other towns of Gujarat as well. This creeping violence, what it created was ghettoization of the Muslims over a period. I used to see this in Ahmedabad in Baroda. I used to go to Baroda at that time because as an engineer I was working in some project with the Gujarat State Lixity Board and when it's to go, every time I would find a curfew in some part of Ahmedabad and in some part of Baroda. These are not big communal conflagrations. These were limited violence but it was only. So this limited, continuous violence was configuring the towns into what is today called in Hindustan and Pakistan, India and Pakistan in Ahmedabad and Baroda. In fact, you can't take an auto from a Hindu area to a Muslim area and vice versa because you have to change autos at the border. That's the way Ahmedabad has been reconfigured. That's the way Baroda has been reconfigured. Now this was a continuous process but it culminates in the rights, the Gujarat rights, Gujarat, communal carnage, whatever you want to call it, that this makes clear to the Muslim minorities that you no longer have rights in Gujarat. You cannot vote in Gujarat. If you vote against us, we'll punish you again. So we see the message what the lynching as a public spectacle was doing in the United States, in the South, is the same logic that is operating here. And we did do see that Gujarat Muslims have been disenfranchised in a very fundamental way. Even the main opposition party in Gujarat, the Congress, will not put up Muslim candidates, will not seek directly the vote of the Muslims, will not put Muslim leaders to speak on its platform. You can see therefore the disenfranchising of the Muslims taking place in different ways. And the worst of all, well-meaning liberal Muslim friends who take to platform saying, Muslims at this point must not speak for themselves. They must not put up candidates. They must actually rally behind secular parties. Secular parties is not the issue but they should not voice their opinions. They should stay silent. Now that's the ultimate, where the community decides to keep its voice, lose its voice and disenfranchise itself. And that is the message of the kind of public violence you're seeing today. So I would argue that there are two objectives to what we are seeing in terms of lynching and violence. It's also not that it is only affected to Muslims. When you talk about, for instance, the death row people, largely Dalits and Muslims, almost 75 to 80% of Dalits and Muslims, probably the figures are even higher. This is Una, this is Gujarat riots, we all are familiar with the images. Now what does it actually mean? Let's look at what some of us have tried to set up. It's called hate crime watch. So we are trying right now to get some figures in terms of what is available in the English papers and we try to put something together. What is called hate crime in 2009 and 2018? The numbers are smaller mainly because we have not tapped into the regional press. It's really what quote-in-quote what's called the national press is printing. But the figure is very clear that large part of it is directed against Muslims and then against the Christians. The figures are very, very clear and the perpetrators are again very clear who they are and what are the causes are also very clear. It's either eating cow or across religious boundaries, marriage or what is called conversion. All of these leads to such kind of violence. So very clear hate crime violence that we have at the moment we can document. Now my purpose of all this is not to say that you know this is what's happening and give a scientific quote-in-quote scientific explanation of what's going on. The real issue is how do you resist it? So the first sign of resistance is for us to understand which I think most of us do that if we don't stand up today for others we'll obviously not be able to stand up when they come for me, when they come for you. So that I think message most of us have. But I think the real message that we have to have is not what happens when there is violence. I do agree that there is violence which is directed against a certain community, community, against certain people. It's very difficult to be there at the spot. We can't because it's happening in a very, very distributed way and the enemy has the ability to mobilize shall we say, attacks at any point. So you cannot therefore have a boundary which you can defend. The boundary is everywhere. So that's not going to happen. But what is it that we can do? And I would argue that we need to provide defense of what of the victims. We need to rally to the defense of the victims both in terms of support and in terms of legal defense. I think what we don't seem to understand is that not only are the victims today have to suffer the consequence of the violence. They are the ones who are being taken to courts. They are the ones who have to go from courts to courts seeking for bail, fighting the case and it can go on for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years. This is the legal system. And if we do not provide a structure of support to them, what we are going to do is to of course raise the counter-communal forces and that counter-communal forces is to play completely into the hands of the right. The BJP's biggest victory is if they can drive the Muslims all to the Jamaat camp in which case they have won. So this is the threat that we have today that the secular forces, those who believe they are secular, if we are not able to come in the support of the victims, if we are not able to build structures which can provide not only support but legal defense of the victims, if we are not able to follow up of the cases of those who have been participants who have been the perpetrators of the violence, if we are not able to do this, then it will be very difficult to save our secular space only by rallying behind certain political parties or casting our vote against them. It's not enough to speak. It's not enough to go and vote. I think the time has come that we have to express our solidarity physically in terms of checking up. Have their fires been fired? Going and asking the police, why have their fires not been fired? Creating a kind of support group which will legally defend those who are being hounded after the violence so that they drop the cases. Must also understand why these counter cases are lodged. So police will say, People just make up both sides. You just get together. This is also what we saw in Gujarat. You want to come back to the village? Drop your cases. Don't give witness. Surrender. Then you can come back. So this is the basic message and I again go back to what was the message of the lynch law. That is the message that was there. That surrender you stay but you stay at our suffrage. This is the message which we have to contest and we can contest this today only if you are able to stand beside the victims and fight with them both legally, socially and politically. I know it's a hard task. It's a hard task because we have never thought we'd come to this part. This is not what we had organized ourselves for. We had organized ourselves for struggle of the workers, struggle of the peasantry, struggle of the rights of different sections, struggle of the rights of the Dalits, communal harmony. This was supposed to be our slogans. We were fighting for a different future. We were not fighting in defense. We were really fighting for what we thought was the future but unless we could defend the present we will not be able to advance and I would therefore ask all of us including me that if whatever platform we are in, whatever institution we are in today how can we do small things which help in creating legal defense, social defense as well as political defense for the communities that may attack. If this task we do not do we will not be able to deal with the larger political task of combating the right and then the task for the right will be made easier because it will splinter each of us, each of the groups, each of the identities and identity politics if once it takes root if we fight on the basis of our identities then the majoritarian discourse really wins and that is also the part of the right being offensive to consider ourselves as only as identities. So we consider ourselves as Hindus, Muslims, this caste, that caste and so on we do not think in terms of climate we do not think who is benefiting out of this current dispensation who with all the things that happen Mr. Modi's victory, all the globetrotting he did ultimately Sadhanis, Ambani's so that world hasn't changed, Choksi's that world hasn't changed. It's not a demand that some of our friends make in terms of identity politics that it's alright if there are capitalist if there are poor, if there are landless labour as long it is equitable among caste so what you are saying is if I also get representation in the bourgeoisie I'm okay but that's not our battle so that is the basic problem that we have that once we splinter in terms of identities and ask for essentially representation the politics of representation and the politics of emancipation are going to be completely different so I would also submit that response to this kind of majoritarian violence cannot also be in terms of identities it has to be in terms of getting everybody together and isolate those who want to configure society differently by using public value