A classed understanding of mob violence as witnessed in the current Indian scenario.

By Sohini Saha

Groundxero | Feb 15, 2026

We are witnessing a moment of normalisation of mob violences across India. Not only that the frequencies and number of incidences are on the rise today, but what concerns me is the growing normalisation of it. Although not all mob violences get media attention or are documented, we are being witness to a steady rise in violent mobs that lynches and kills humans, particularly members of the minority communities. The lynching of a Bengali migrant worker in Odisha to the lynching of a northeastern student in Dehradun, or the lynching of a dalit man in Kerala, all speaks about a proliferation, especially in the last 10 years (Salam, 2019), of angry mobs across Indian states whose victims are primarily people belonging to religious, caste, class and ethnic minority communities.

While a certain section of the population conveniently remains silent on these mob violences, there is another section of the population who strongly comes forward to condemn these acts. However, what remains common between these two sections is the way they perceive the “mob” as an “other” to themselves. Thus, those who perpetuate silence considers the “mob” as an unknown, unaccountable crowd and thereby relegates it as a singular sudden momentary incident detached from larger politics. They remain unbothered by what they  consider as a ‘sad’ incident of violence much akin to an accident that, according to them, does not reflect  any pattern or politically charged attacks on minorities. On the other hand, those who come to strongly condemn these mob lynchings also consider the “mob” as an “other”, detached from them and located safely outside their liberal circles. This distancing of the “mob” by these two groups is where I locate the seeds of violence. In this piece I extend a classed understanding of mob violence as witnessed in the current Indian scenario. Those who lynch and those who get lynched can be seen as belonging mainly from the marginal class groups while those on the other side, who come to “respond” to these violences, either through silence, indifference or condemnation, belong to the dominant classes, primarily the middle class.

Mobs are temporary, disorderly, emotionally charged gatherings of people. Yet across the states the violence perpetuated by mobs hold on to a pattern, a pattern of violence against minority communities. Ziya Us Salam spoke about the substitution of communal riots with lynching as an ambiguous tool to avenge against minority communities. However, these deaths are often sidelined as “accidents” and not “pre-planned” (Salam, 2019: 52). In the documentary on “Encountering Hate” (2025) by Lalit Vachani, the son of a lynched man narrates how his father was killed not because of any personal enmity with an individual motive but because the mob targeted any Muslim and his father was the first one they confronted in that area. Thus, anyone could have been a target, it was “accidently” his father who became the victim. This language of ambiguity and uncertainty of a lack of individual motive behind the violence that reduces their deaths to “accidents”. Yet no one interrogates the larger “collective” motive of attacking a community which is pre-planned and executed. This leads to the perpetuation of mob violences as ambiguous singular accidental incidents.

While in the last ten years we have witnessed these violences on Muslims and Dalits (Salam, 2019), the last two years have seen a steady rise of information of these incidents against a section of Bengali speaking individuals who are labelled as ‘Bangadeshis’. However, the targets of mob violence to be specific are not any Bengali speaking individual, but particularly those belonging to class, caste and religious minority communities and are in most cases migrant workers. Amidst these, one often overlooks the class factor embedded in these violences. Tracing a commonality among the victims of mob violence documented in these years will reveal the working class/marginal class position they occupy. The nature of occupation (migrant workers) also speaks of their marginal status making us see how those who are lynched have occupational and class positions that go unnoticed. I argue it is this class factor that keeps the rest of the population safely away from these assaults. Beyond the religious and ethnic minoritization then, there is a further process of minoritizing the dalits, muslims and the tribals by virtue of their class position. Lynching then becomes specific to a community who belong to the marginal class position and thus outside the elite circles. This positions them further as erasable publics who cannot be accounted for, spoken for, protested in favour of or saved from.

On the other hand, the mob too are seen and perceived as a non-elite section, unruly & uncivilized group of masses who cannot be accounted for. Their position also remains outside the elite communal circles, whose elitism makes them perceive the lynchings as distanced from their own communal mindset. The liberal language of communal politics separates the lyncher/mob from the elite communal group who although furthers the marginalization of the dalits muslims and adivasis on an everyday basis, does not resort to the unruliness of the mob. They are thus safely placed in their homes and the political discussions centering on TV debates. They actively cultivate the mindset of hate through their liberal language of rights. For example, in a middle class setting in Kolkata, there are often conversations that perceive government hospitals and public healthcare as places increasingly dominated by suspicious “outsiders” or the so-called “Bangladeshis”. It has to be noted that public health care is mainly accessed by the poor and marginal caste, religious, ethnic communities. This narrative of “outsiders” renders them further vulnerable. Simultaneously, public healthcare has always been perceived through a classed lens, perceived negatively as “freebies” for marginal communities that make these places already an unlikely place of visit for the middle and upper middle classes. This rising hatred in the name of rights of insiders over suspicious outsiders and a general distancing from the working/marginal class concerns works together, gains traction and instigates the larger crowds to act against. This everyday production of hate circulates and reaches those who resort to mob violence.

However, when mob violence occurs, the people responsible for furthering these narratives remain aloof from the lynchers who are then reduced to mere uncivilized groups resorting to violence. These violences are also justified in the name of fueling the anger of a certain class of people who for their love for their community or country can resort to violence. The mob becomes that ambiguous population, always uncertain yet also certainly resorting to violence. Therefore, I distinguish between two forms of violence – one the material and immediate that the mob unleashes, and the other violence that is cultivated through elite communal language of citizenship rights, public healthcare etc. However after every lynching the two becomes separated; while the immediate and the material become evident, the backdrop of such violence remains unaccounted for.

In the same way, those who come to condemn the attacks, consider the mob as the unruly uncivilized masses and thereby separates themselves from the mob. A language of class is used to classify these groups consisting of trollers and lynchers, who are perceived as steeped in blind faith and ideology without education, backward in their mindset and thereby deserves to be kept at bay and never to be taken seriously. On the other hand, in their everyday parlance this group of condemners are part and parcel of the dominant liberal middle class who have rarely thought of the marginal class groups, the working classes. In their protests, while they are eager to challenge the ideologies behind such violences, rarely would one find any mass mobilization for the affected marginal classes. Thus, the protests from the liberal civil society at large are mostly driven towards a critique of the ideology than the support towards the victims and survivors of mob lynching. There are also areas in which the communal mind merges with the secular-liberal mindset when the question of religion emerges. Thus, one would find debating circles opening debates on hindutva ideologies, counter mobilization on social media against the trolling “bhakts”, but not many would walk on the roads demanding justice for the migrant workers killed in mob lynching. In all these years of rising mob violences, can we recollect a single mass protest demanding justice for those who have been lynched? The fight for justice is often a lonely one fought by the family members of those killed or a lone activist. Lalit Vachani’s documentary “Encountering Hate’ (2025) focuses on the families of lynched victims and survivor and their fight for justice in villages of Uttar Pradesh. The documentary traces a lawyer, families of victims and survivors of mob violence and their journey towards claiming justice that is mired in false promises, threats, and closing of cases.

The recent lynching of Bengali Muslim migrant workers also points towards their occupational and class background which makes them a target. For example, the lynching in Kerala of a 31 years old dalit man named Ramnarayan Baghel, a migrant labourer, caught in suspicion of theft and lynched to death. But the assault was not merely on theft but also on suspicion of his identity as he was repeatedly questioned if he was a Bangladeshi. The nature of this lynching point towards a strange amalgamation of caste, class and Bengali-speaking identity showing the interconnectedness of marginalisation. The death was so brutal that it even shocked the autopsy surgeon (Groundxero, Dec 22, 2025), however, there was hardly any protest or mobilization for the same. But consider on other hand one of the recent mobilizations for demanding justice in the R.G. Kar movement that took place in Kolkata in 2024. While the civil society actively demanded justice, the same could not be said for the migrant worker deaths. The difference and hierarchy perhaps lay in the classed body of the victims. The brutally assaulted body of a dalit working class migrant or a Bengali speaking Muslim migrant worker did not fuel the anger of the people.  However, the Bengali community at large did not remain completely aloof from this. Although they came to protest against Bengali language’s equation with Bangladeshi by citing Tagore and other literary figures, the silence around the lynchings particularly, based on the same language issue, could be noted. This stark difference or rather indifference of the civil society at large spoke of the elite nature of protests which takes into account the language but not the language speaking individuals who are lynched.

I come to end this piece with the reflection that the “mob” is not distinct from “us”. Whether it’s the elite communal mindset or the elite liberal/secular mindset that classifies the mob as an “other” to itself, located safely in a classed, uncivilized, ruthless violent ambiguous group. Yet these violences are cultivated slowly, in and through our silences, indifferences and several everyday communal and liberal sensibilities, based on rights, education, religion, secularism, etc. This classed character is also sustained by social media which although becomes a platform for visibilizing the mob violences and incidences of atrocities, not every incident generates outrage or becomes part of the spectacle based politics. For example, while the online outrage against a police document equating Bangla with Bangladeshi became a spectacle, it also aided in erasing or sidelining the very people who were implicated in that incident. The classed nature of outrage invisibilized the experiences and harassment of the eight individuals on being suspected to be illegal immigrants, while the debate on Bengali language dominated our social media feeds.

In the same manner, while the Wow Momo warehouse fire was visibilized on social media, it was also subdued and erased through the spectacle created out of the Olypub incident. One can observe how the internet erupted in voicing the Olypub issue in which a man raised a complaint against a waiter for serving him beef instead of mutton. Over the past few days, there have been several incidents of communal mob violence on migrant working class alongside the brutal fire that killed the workers in the Wow Momo warehouse. But nothing seems to move the privileged section of the city population more than the question of secularism, food choice and identity. Thus, it became more a question of food choices, cosmopolitan Kolkata, secular and communal identity that was at stake and not the arresting and harassment of the waiter. The waiter became the ground on which the communal and secular waged their wars. It is this that unites the two distinct groups (communal and the secular) who although wage their battle against one another on social media, yet their choices of concern remain urban and privileged class centric.

Salam, Z. U. (2019). Lynch files: the forgotten saga of victims of hate crime. Delhi: Sage

Sohini Saha is an academic.

Feature image courtesy: Centre for Study of Society and Secularism