Digital Bombs of Mob Violence

Social media rumours fan a medieval barbarity within us. This time it’s Assam.

- Dola Mitra in calcutta

PEOPLE in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district—like in most parts of the state—have grown up hearing stories about the ‘xopadhora’, the Assamese word to describe a child-lifter. ‘Xopa’ means both a gag and to gag someone and ‘dhora’ is to catch. In remote Assam, where superstition has a firm grip on the populace, the telling and re-telling of xopadhora horror tales has given birth to a ghastly creature in imagination—described variously as having long, braided hair and flashing eyes which hypnotise little children before he catches hold of them and devours them.

On June 8, when Nilotpal Das, a 29-year-old sound engineer, and his friend Abhijeet Nath, 30, a businessman, set out to visit a popular tourist spot in Karbi Anglong’s Dokmoka—about 180 km from state capital Guwahati—they had no idea that the area was in grip of virtually generated paranoia: messages claiming that a group of child-lifters had entered the area from Bihar had gone viral on social media and WhatsApp.

Even if they had known, would they have thought anything of it? It was just an online rumour after all. But as other examples from the last two months have shown us, hysteria has rendered the absurd as hard fact, bringing out the worst manifestation of fear—brutal violence. The ‘child-abductor’ lynchings have come almost like a wave: a 52-year-old transgender in Hyderabad, a 26-year-old youth in Bangalore, a 55-five-year-old woman in Tiruvannamalai district in Tamil Nadu, all lynched by mobs gone paranoid over social media and WhatsApp rumours in the month of May itself. In all these places, the victim fell into an ‘outsider’ category.