Just a few weeks ago, string of Whatsapp rumours warning locals against alleged child abductors in the Jharkhand area made its rounds. In a matter of days, as many as seven people were lynched by a rage-fuelled mob. Clothes were ripped, faces disfigured and lives were lost in a tragic triumph of animalistic urges over better sense and the truth. But this was not a one-off. In the last three years alone, an 18-year-old in Kolkata was killed by an angry crowd on the suspicion of being a mango thief, a Tanzanian woman was beaten and stripped by a mob in Bangalore for a crime she had nothing to do with, a man in Dimapur accused of rape was lynched inside a prison, and dragged out for the world to see by close to 10,000 locals, and a man in Dadri was killed because he was suspected to have eaten beef in what has become one of the most divisive and defining incidents of the early Modi government’s reign. These are just the cases that managed to win a news cycle.

With such incidents clearly on the rise, it’s imperative we start asking tougher questions of ourselves and our governance. It’s irrelevant whether mobs attack guilty or innocent people with the intention of serving ‘justice’; the truth of the matter is, anarchy cannot be allowed to reign. The courts of law exist to transcend the passions of individual human emotion to deliver more objective truths and solutions, and we as citizens need to let them do their job. In a bid to encourage the same, activists and students in Delhi have initiated a campaign demanding that laws be introduced against mob-lynching.

A committee has been set up to work on a draft legislation that can be presented at the parliament. The draft calls mob lynching to be made a non-bailable offence with a time-bound trial. The convicts are to get life imprisonment and police who fail to control the situation must be suspended with a judicial inquiry instituted upon them.

The committee consists of Columnist Tehseen Poonawalla, social activist and lawyer Jignesh Mevani, JNU Students Union vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora and the former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar have set up a committee to work on the draft legislation, which they intend to present in Parliament. Actress Swara Bhaskar and veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar have also spoken up against the rising trend of mob lynching. The draft is expected to be completed on July 11,2017, which marks one year of the Unda incident of the Dalits being flogged on account of skinning a dead cow. There also plans to stage a massive protest on the same day.

“The need of our times is a specific law to deal with vigilantism. The government must make lynching a non-bailable offence with punishment up to life imprisonment,” said Poonawalla, who petition the Supreme Court for a ban on the vigilante group, adding, “The local police officer, in whose jurisdiction lynching took place, must be suspended immediately and a judicial inquiry must be initiated against the officer. If the government fails to enact the law in the stipulated period, we’ll lead farmers, cattle grazers and dairy farmers to the PM’s house and will leave the cattle there.”

“People are at their lowest point when they engage in mob violence. And any society in which this is acceptable is at its lowest point too,” said actress Swara Bhaskar, comparing lynching to bullying.

This could hopefully prevent the country from collapsing into a pseudo-anarchy where people become the law while the government sits back and does nothing, supporting only some groups behind-the-scenes. If this proves to be a successful campaign, balance could be restored in the country and spur action on behalf of the government as well.