Mob-justice, Subjectivity, Power, and Some Reflections
A Librarian and a middle school Social Science teacher named Abu Younus Mohammad Shahidunnabi in my native country, Bangladesh was beaten and burned to death earlier today, as he allegedly humiliated Islam, the religion of the majority of people in the country. He allegedly touched a shelf with his feet that had the Quran, the holy book of Islam, during an argument with a group of people at a mosque in a suburban city.
I read the news this morning but did not feel much impacted by it, as by now, I view it as part of the “normality” of my native country. In the recent past, Islamist extremists in Bangladesh attacked and killed a series of writers, publishers, sexual minority leaders, human rights activists, and students. Some are my friends and acquaintances.
Growing up in Bangladesh, as members of the minority population, my parents always made me and my sibling extra-cautious about our safety, as we were aware of the intensity of the perpetuation of religious fundamentalism in the society where we were growing up. Bangladesh, being a monolithic and a predominantly mono-racial and mono-ethnicity-based nationalist country, possesses a diversity of religious and ethnic population groups, where the largest part of the population are followers of Islam, as their religious faith. While the country since its inception in 1971 as a People’s Republic, inherits the tension between the Hindu and Muslim populations and the complex context of casteism in the Indian subcontinental region, the Muslim population holds the hegemony of power in the territory of Bangladesh. Although the 1971 war of independence upheld the high vision of a secular society, due to the long absence of democracy and good governance, religious extremism took the center in the society and in politics, while religious coherence and coexistence of diverse views have been pushed to the margin.
This evening I came across a social media post that went viral. The post was written by an ex-student of the slain teacher/librarian. The note was written in the form of an obituary that shared some personal memory of the ex-student with the slain teacher/librarian, along with his formal picture hanging on the wall of the school library. When I got to read the name of the unknown man, who was only a stranger to me a moment ago, and saw his picture, learned that he was an alumnus of the Department of Information Science and Library Management of Dhaka University, my alma mater, it finally hit me hard. I started feeling distraught. I collected the name of this person from his student’s social media post, because no news media mentioned his full name. Some mentioned him by his nickname, which is Jewel, some mentioned his partial name, while some simply mentioned him as “a man.”
This is how subjectivity affects us at a personal level when an unknown human being, who was portrayed by the news media as an anonymous entity, becomes immediately a relatable soul. I started feeling I knew him. I uttered #sayhisname, just the way I uttered the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in recent months because I believe it is essential to know the name of a slain individual, who encounter extrajudicial killing anywhere in the world. It is important to recognize that he or she had a life, a family, a social identity like the rest of us. By uttering a person’s identity, we acknowledge his/her existence on this earth, around us, in our society, in our community, in our neighborhood.
The news media used the word “mob” to describe the crowd that collectively tortured Mr. Shahidunnabi to death. The word “mob” does not help to visualize the faces of the people who beat Mr. Shahudunnabi to death and then burnt him, rather objectifies these human entities. I tried to visualize the faces. Who are these people? What gave them the authority, the state of mind to physically hit the man in a violent, incessant manner? What enabled them to take the decision to burn his dead-body? My mind searched the answer and told me in a repeated fashion, “power.” It is an acute sense of “power” that enabled a group of collective entities to conduct this action together. What is the nature of this power? What source generates this power? Again, the inquisitive mind in me searched the answer and responded, it is the State. How, in what manner a State enables the execution of public lynching of a citizen? What was he accused of? According to the people who acted collectively against him, he humiliated their religion, their doctrine, their faith in their creator. It is noteworthy, this doctrine of faith happens to be the doctrine of the majority in the country, the privileged, the absolute supremacists in the society that already is unaccountable and coercive in nature and large in number. The State enabled these human entities to own their absolute power individually and collectively, which allowed them to conduct torture on a man who they identified as a dissenter.
When we think of the deaths of Mr. Shahudunnabi in Bangladesh and Mr. Floyd in the USA, it is important to understand, a mob is not simply an angry group of people when it violently acts against one human being. A police officer is not solely a man the moment he engages in actions like putting his knee on the neck of an ordinary citizen until he cannot breathe. In each case, there is a context of power, a context of one or a group of individuals’ sociopolitical privileged positioning in the existing power structure that enabled them to perform the act. In the context of Mr. Shahudunnabi, it was not simply the “ crazy love of religion” of the mob that made them conduct the fanatic act, rather it is their collective stand in the sociopolitical space where they live, convinced them to believe that they are unequivocally powerful and supreme, where dissenters of any form or shape would not have the right to live. In the context of Mr. Floyd, it is neither the racial identity of the police officer nor any biological and/or essentialist characteristics of his race that made him conduct the cruelty. Rather, his position in the State machinery that enabled the intersectionality of his racial identity as a White man and his position of authority as a police officer to practice the power of engaging in physical coercion on a Black man, who do not have equal access to power in the State machinery.
Social Science facilitates us to understand our societies as multidimensional fluid constructions based on access to resources by certain individual and collective entities, where the States take the role of the ostiary. The indelible culture of impunity in the judiciary system warranted by the State machinery in the countries that have a preexisting poor practice of governance enables the privileged and the hegemonic population group to be engaged in taking justice into their hands, and perform violent acts of coercion.
Understanding the power structure of a society increases the chance of working on the foundation of a more just and equitable society, where, in the time of social tension, people engage less in labeling, stereotyping, and/or name-calling others in real-life and virtual encounters. Discussing more the power dynamics and the positions of privilege in society help to create the conduct of social accountability for the entire community, as the community shares the distribution of resources. Being aware of the social power structure helps the citizens of civil society to save lives from random and systematic acts of violence, in both physical and virtual forms. Critical ability in deconstructing the society where we live increases the coexistence of diverse beliefs, faiths, lifestyles, and thought processes. Building on these behaviors helps us to learn live and to let live. In the current world, there is no alternative but to engage in self-reflecting civic discourses and to enhance the learning of cultural sensitivity and mutual empathy in the education system to build a nonviolent civic mass. For that, there is no alternative to say the slain individuals’ names again and again. That is the first stepstone of ensuring justice, the first exercise of empathy for another humankind.
Author: Reshmi Chowdhury is a Sociologist and a Public Health Researcher.