This idea of “collective punishment” turned into a genocidal orgy when Hindus and Muslims who had been neighbours for generations murdered each other in the run-up to Partition in 1947. Since then, (leaving aside, of course, the killing of tens of thousands of people in Nagaland, Manipur, Kashmir, Hyderabad, West Bengal by the State security apparatus) we have the phenomenon of mob justice — essentially, of majority populations turning on minorities. Whether it is the killing of several hundred Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir by armed militants in the 90s, or the massacre of thousands of Sikhs by mobs in Delhi in 1984, or thousands of Muslims and Dalits all over India in pogrom after pogrom, or the phenomenon of lynchings — all of it has become so much a part of what is increasingly being accepted as “normal life”. But all this frenzy is usually, in one way or another “allowed” to happen by those in power. It could not and would not happen otherwise. We have all learned that mass killings and election campaigns are often closely linked. Masses of ordinary people don’t just spontaneously turn into monsters. They turn into monsters when they know they can get away with it. A lot of work goes into making that happen. And that work has been happening for decades. It didn’t just start now. But today it happens at speed. So many of our 24-hour TV channels, so many newspapers, so many school textbooks, so many carefully chosen appointees in institutions of learning and in courts of law are so busy orchestrating bigotry and hysteria on a mass scale.