This is a guest post by RAMRAY BHAT

The collective conscience of our prominent democracies works in very strange ways. India is yet to come to terms with the killing of a nineteen-year-old Mumbaiite student Ishrat Jahan in an encounter by officers of the Gujarat Police in collaboration with the Intelligence Bureau. Along with three other individuals, Javed Sheikh (for whom Ishrat worked as a secretary), Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar, Ishrat was first announced to have died in police firing and the alleged plan hatched by these four individuals to assassinate prominent politicians of India, thereby thwarted. Inquiries at the level of the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate court as well as by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as directed by the Gujarat High Court confirmed what had been suspected all along, that Ishrat had been murdered in cold blood while she was in police custody.

On the other hand, airwaves in the United States have been abuzz with the shooting of a seventeen-year-old African American student Trayvon Martin, at the hands of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community in Sanford, Florida. An unarmed Trayvon was walking back home from a grocery store in the rain. He was followed by Zimmerman, first in a vehicle and then on foot. Zimmerman pursued him even after he had contacted the police and had been specifically advised not to take the matter further. Following an altercation and scuffle, Zimmerman shot Trayvon with a gun he had acquired to fend off a dog. The police, who arrived on the spot immediately after, accepted Zimmerman’s version that Trayvon had attacked him and that the former had shot the latter in self defense. Zimmerman was let off the hook. Six weeks after the shooting, an increased attention from the media and protests from the local community led to Zimmerman being arrested and brought to trial. Within a month or so of the trial, a six-member jury pronounced him not guilty of second-degree (unpremeditated) murder and manslaughter.

The two cases are set apart in time and space, and by situation. There are however, similarities between these two tragedies that need to be highlighted and analyzed. The first and the most important one is that the action taken by the representatives of the state into how and why these deaths took place, was the result of much-protracted and tenacious efforts by the families of the victims with help from concerned activists, civil rights leaders and anti-establishment sections of the media. The state by itself, acted initially in a hostile manner delaying and denying attempts to seek justice. This was achieved through various ways including, but not limited to, bureaucratic stalling and propaganda.

Ishrat was killed in June 2004. Her family claims that the Gujarat State Police grilled them for hours when they went to retrieve her body. The police also strongly discouraged them from investigating the matter further. It was only in 2006 that the Gujarat High court admitted the application by Ishrat’s mother, Shamima Kausar stating that the death of the her daughter was a result of a staged encounter. This was after the Mumbai police took their time to come to the conclusion that Ishrat had no criminal or antinational record of any sort. As late as in 2009, a Gujarat metropolitan court confirmed Shamima’s assertion that the encounter was indeed a fake one. The Gujarat government challenged this ruling in the High Court, which set up a special investigative team (SIT). The SIT agreed with the metropolitan court’s conclusion and was ordered by the High Court to file a fresh FIR with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), whose probe also concurred with the SIT and the metropolitan magistrate’s ruling. While all this was taking place, Ishrat’s family had to bear the malicious tag of having borne “India’s first woman terrorist”. Their largely Muslim neighborhood in a Mumbai that has been residentially ghettoized along religious lines since the riots of 1992, was labeled a haven for foreign-motivated antinational agents.

Trayvon Martin’s murder took place in February 2012. George Zimmerman was released the very next day without any charges against him. With reportage on this killing picking up gradually, the district police chief Bill Lee issued a statement defending his inability to arrest Zimmerman, saying there was no evidence to dispute what Zimmerman had claimed: that he shot dead Trayvon out of self-defense. This, even though forensic report later showed no sign of Zimmerman’s blood or DNA upon Trayvon or his effects. Trayvon’s father Tracy Martin, dissatisfied with the accepted official narrative of his son’s death got in touch with a civil rights attorney and aided by human rights activists tried to garner the attention of the national media. Within a couple of months Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. In June of 2012, police chief Bill Lee was fired from his job and Zimmerman’s trial began. Presided over by a jury consisting of six women, five white and one of unspecified minority, the state trial resulted in the acquittal of Zimmerman, triggering massive protests from all corners of the United States.

A second common feature in the two cases is the manner in which sections of the mainstream media and commentariat have reacted to these two killings and have even conspired with the establishment to influence the trajectories of the cases. What seems uppermost to those analyzing the death of Ishrat, is whether she held affiliations to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani terrorist organization. Nobody admits that the whole motive behind raising the LeT bogey is to morally absolve Ishrat’s murderers of their dastardly act. And yet the motive is what seems to be more important than the act. As a result, Ishrat has been executed, time and again in news studios, in radio discussions and on newspaper pages. This has been done through questioning her moral credentials: how she kept her company or how she registered in a hotel, to linking her up with Kashmiri separatists, or worse, with LeT on the basis of fourth-hand information supposedly emanating from an imprisoned double agent and by using media and state apparatuses to leak information peripheral to Ishrat’s murder.

In the tragic death of Trayvon, it again boils down to the same ploy: justifying the action through any means, any rationale, however outrageous it may be. Which is why Trayvon’s school delinquencies were dredged up, his “gangster wannabe” attire were emphasized and reemphasized, and he was called a “criminal” and a “mugger” to imply he had it coming. Civil rights leaders who took up his cause were labeled “hustlers” and “pimps”. The glee-and-gloat in the conservative sections of the US media upon the acquittal of George Zimmerman had never been this cacophonic even during the murders of African-Americans in segregation-era Mississippi or the state-led targeting and assassinations of Black Panther Party members during the Black Power movement.

The trials of the killing of Trayvon Martin and Ishrat Jahan thus turn into their own trials. Following a proclamation of their guilt by an opiated clique with vicious interests and a myopic vision, they are then subjected to repeated executions in public. Such phenomena are symptomatic of a larger devolutionary trend within our societies.  This trend is characterized by an increasing prejudice: prejudice against race, against skin color, against religion, against caste, against communities and against languages. Those who bear the brunt of these prejudices keep moving on, hoping for a more just tomorrow; one where fallouts of profiling do not get swept under the carpet or worse, justified by fascist narratives. When such unfortunate incidents do take place, they only serve to remind us that the appointment of representatives from minorities as de jure heads of our state, hailed in both India and the United States as a marker of the triumph of liberalism, rings hollow at the end of the day. It is perhaps fitting then that poll after poll rates a demagogue like Narendra Modi as the most popular among prime ministerial candidates of India. To turn a quote attributed to Kautilya on its head: Yatha praja tatha raja.  On the brighter side it is futile to be apprehensive about Modi’s polarizing capabilities. What can he do to a society that is already incorrigibly polarized?

(Ramray Bhat is a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, with interests in politics and culture)