5 highlights
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“The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint”. – Hannah Arendt
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In December 1996, 61 Dalits were massacred by the Ranvir Sena (the private militia of upper caste landlords) at Laxmanpur Bathe village in the Arwal district in the Magadh region of Bihar. The massacre was part of a cycle of killings and retaliations by left-wing ultras, Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML) and Ranvir Sena.
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Arvind N Das’ seminal study of contemporary Bihar in his slim book The Republic of Bihar (Penguin, 1992) has still to be bettered as a classic of journalistic analysis in India
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The moment the news of the Ranvir Sena chief’s assassination broke out, I was clear about one thing. I considered the incident and the violent backlash as the first serious 21st century test (the first ever for private electronic news channels) for how the national media reports and analyses Bihar
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In a region with deep historical roots and complex socio-cultural formations like Bihar, the settled narratives of market economy and the wonder drug of ‘development’ can only give you the IMF’s view of the region. Mob violence sometimes tells you something, sometimes tells you something less