'Whatsapp lynchings' are common in India

The argument

The argument explains the Palghar killings by reference to a pattern that does not require police involvement in order to occur. Before the incident, rumours were spreading around the area that children were being kidnapped in the night. These rumours were largely spread via WhatsApp. The medium matters to the explanation: a rumour circulating on a private messaging service reaches people through contacts they already trust, arrives with no source that can be checked, and travels faster than any correction could follow it. Lynchings occurring due to rumours spread on WhatsApp is not new in India, and the weight of the argument rests on that being a recognised phenomenon rather than a description invented for this case. There have been many other prominent lynchings in recent years. Prominent examples include a 2,000 person mob murdering a software engineer who was offering chocolate to local children, believing him to be a child kidnapper, and five men killed in a nomadic community by a crowd of thousands because they were seen talking to a six-year-old. What those cases share with Palghar is the structure of the event rather than its details. In each, a circulating rumour about child abduction supplied a ready interpretation, an unfamiliar person was read into it, and a crowd large enough to act without any individual having decided to did so before anything could be checked. None of them requires the participation of the authorities in order to be intelligible. That is the basis of the conclusion. If mob killings of this kind arise from rumour, suspicion of outsiders and the speed of the medium carrying both, then the explanation for Palghar is already complete without invoking the police. On this account the police have nothing to do with the lynching. It is, sadly, a not unusual incident of a type the country has seen repeatedly.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold the police were complicit reply that the prevalence of WhatsApp-driven mob killings does not by itself exonerate the officers present. The specific charge concerns what police did at the scene — accounts indicated that officers were present as the mob attacked and, critics argued, failed to intervene effectively or even handed victims to the crowd. That such lynchings are common speaks to a general phenomenon; it does not answer whether, in this instance, the police discharged their duty to protect those in their custody. Complicity is assessed by conduct on the day, not by base rates.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That WhatsApp rumours commonly trigger lynchings explains the mob's motive, not the conduct of the officers present, which is what the complicity charge concerns. [Rejecting P2] The Palghar case fitting a general pattern does not establish that police at this scene acted properly; critics point to their alleged failure to protect the victims. [Rejecting C] Complicity turns on what the officers did or failed to do on the day, so the commonness of such killings cannot by itself settle that they were not complicit.