No Drab Stuf: Assam Police Takes Creative Route To Tackle Mob Violence, Rumour-Mongering

The Assam Police have launched digital campaign warning offenders against churning rumours and posting hate messages on social media, as the department has issued creatively-worded public advisories strictly cautioning those who incite and participate in public violence. The move comes just prior to similar directions given by the Supreme Court on Tuesday to sensitise people against inciting and participating in “horrendous acts of mobocracy”.

The police in the Northeastern state with its multiethnic population released two messages through two posts on social media and said that more are to follow in the days to come. The images used in the campaign have been designed and developed by a senior Assam police officer who has a background in theatre and is media-savvy. He is being aided by three young advertising professionals, each working from separate nodes in Guwahati, Delhi and Mumbai.

Assam’s current director general of police, Kuladhar Saikia, had sanctioned the use of creativity in the social media campaign. A reputed writer, he has won the Sahitya Akademi award (in 2015) for short stories. While many police departments have a digital presence, their social media accounts read like boring and inert bureaucratic message boards. That way, this Assam police initiative appears to be the first creative use of social media handles of a government body in the country. Abroad, in the US, bodies such as its spy agency, CIA, have a strong social media campaign that is based on wit and creative posts on global current affairs. The FBI posts messages historical trivia in between posts on the agency's work and other announcements.

The first message of the Assam police was put up last week. On July 13, which was a Friday. The post said “What does your weekend look like? Because we may have to plan ours, if it’s with us.” The image that was tweeted with this post said, “Sharing rumours/hate messages online can enable you for a date with us in nearest police station this weekend.” 

Four days later, on July 17 (Tuesday), came a second message. It said, “Mobs have many heads but sadly no brains. There is no offence that can justify the actions of a mob.” An image below it said “Mobs may not follow the law. But the law will follow them.” The next is scheduled for the coming weekend.

Some have criticised the use of English in the images in a state that largely communicates in the Assamese language. The Assam police said that it has posted their messages in Assamese on Facebook and the texts on the images for the campaign are being translated to Assamese.

The Assam police are now planning to use such campaigns as a ‘positive engagement with citizens’. Called ‘Nagarik Mitra’, it literally means citizen’s friend. Senior police officers in the state are eager to launch their official social media handles which requires a lot of time to engage with the people.

The police campaign against mob violence and rumour-mongering comes in the backdrop of several developments. It’s being implemented also amid a nationwide debate on the alleged role of social media in triggering mob lynchings. The messages that have been blamed for the lynchings contained a common composition of falsely accusing people of being human traffickers who kidnapped children.

Rumours and Lynchings

Last month, young Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath were in an SUV on their way to a waterfall in Karbi Anglong when they were allegedly accused of being child traffickers. The police have claimed that a large mob attacked and killed the two men based on that false belief. 

Similar incidents have taken place around the country. Last week, Karnataka reported a group of tourists being lynched after they were accused of being child traffickers. In that incident, the men had reportedly stopped to offer children chocolates that one of them had purchased while he was returning to India from West Asia where he works. Some of the villagers who saw that accused them of being child traffickers and the men fled in their car. Their photos and the false messages were sent through an internet messaging service to the next village, where a makeshift roadblock stalled their car. The police arrived after the mob assaulted them but was unable to handle the mob which killed one of the men.

The police have claimed a link between social media and the lynchings in several incidents, but this has been widely criticised. The police believe that social media messaging services were used to spread rumours and hate to incite mob violence. Many point out that this is being done to regulate social media whereas the real culprit could turn out to be basic hatred. They have said that the police have to prove that the messages must show how a specific incident was used to mobilise people into a violent attack.

Supreme Court directs special courts

On July 17, the Supreme Court also condemned mob violence while deciding a batch of multiple petitions filed against the mob lynchings against Dalits and Muslims by ‘cow vigilantes’. In the final judgement, Supreme Court Chief Justice Dipak Misra noted that “No act of a citizen is to be adjudged by any kind of community under the guise of protectors of law.”

The country’s apex court has listed preventive, remedial and punitive measures to tackle mob lynchings. This includes compensation to victims and special courts that shall separately try these cases and award maximum sentence to perpetrators. The apex court also recommended a special law against lynchings and directed the police superintendent of every district to monitor rumour mongering and prevent mob violence.

Rumours of a mob

It is interesting that on the day the Assam police’s messages went up and the Supreme Court gave its directions, there was a buzz about mob lynchings close to the border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. In this case, the police had to battle rumours about a killing that an officer says was not a lynching.

There were rumours that a local mob from Arunachal Pradesh had crossed the border and attacked a man of Nepalese origin and killed him in Balipara in Assam’s Sonitpur district on July 16. The buzz was that the man who was killed was a worker in a Patanjali-owned botanical garden in Arunachal’s Sijusa in East Kameng district and that there were multiple fractures on his body and had been killed by a spear. The rumours claimed that the locals were resentful of jobs being given to ‘outsiders’.

However, the police gave a different account based on its survey of the crime scene and medical evidence. “Amar Bahadur Sonar, 50, a cook in the botanical garden, was attacked multiple times by a sharp weapon on his body between 4:30 AM and 5:00 AM on July 16,” said Vikas Kumar, superintendent of police in East Kameng district. “The post-mortem report has not yet been submitted but a doctor made preliminary observations that it appeared to be a person known to the victim who had attacked him with a sharp weapon (possibly a sickle) multiple times.”

Kumar said the area has no history of mob violence or lynching and this incident was not one of lynching by a mob. Recently, there were rumours that people from Arunachal Pradesh were being stopped in Assam and this also spread in the area. Kumar had to reach out to his counterpart in Sonitpur, who denied these incidents and reported that there was no such incident.