COMMENTARY
characteristics of the entire population
‘Pathological Normalcy’ and
Mob Violence
Abhay Shukla
The application of the
“pathological normalcy”
perspective is used to examine
the ongoing violence by cow
vigilante groups and recent
lynching incidents. These are not
just isolated “aberrations” arising
among scattered small groups,
but could be viewed as morbid
manifestations of much deeper
disturbances in society as a
whole. There is a need to
recognise the underlying dynamic
of these incidents—the cultivated
shift towards a pathological
culture of insecurity, hatred of the
marginalised, and violence—
without which effective
prevention may be impossible.
Abhay Shukla (abhayshukla1@gmail.com) is a
public health professional and health activist
associated with Jan Swasthya Abhiyan.
12
The essential determinants of the health
of society are thus to be found in its mass
characteristics: the deviant minority can
only be understood when seen in its societal
context, and effective prevention requires
changes which involve the population as
a whole. …
The problems of sick minorities are consid-
ered as though their existence were inde-
pendent of the rest of society. Alcoholics,
drug addicts, rioters, vandals and criminals
… the homeless, the unemployed, and the
hungry, whether close at hand or in the
Third World—all these are seen as problem
groups, different and separate from the rest
of their society. This position conveniently
exonerates the majority from any blame for
the deviants, and the remedy can then be to
extend charity towards them or to provide
special services. This is much less demand-
ing than to admit a need for general or socio-
economic change.
— Geoffrey Rose, Strategy of
Preventive Medicine, 2008
M
odern public health presents
two contrasting approaches to
population ill-health. One is to
regard adverse health events (such as
cases of abnormally high blood pressure,
or malnutrition-related deaths) as outli-
ers, individual cases which need to be
specifically focused upon and dealt
with, largely in isolation from the wider
population. This has been termed as the
“high-risk” approach. Another perspec-
tive is to view these adverse events as
one end of a large population spectrum
(which may include a very large propor-
tion of persons with mildly raised blood
pressure, or majority of children with
mild to moderate malnutrition), hence
the “normal” 1 or “average” population
with very common traits may itself be in
need of intervention. According to the
alternative “population strategy”, extreme
adverse events cannot be understood or
dealt with in isolation. Rather, the extreme
cases represent one end of a continuum.
Hence, to prevent such events, certain
AUGUST 4, 2018
need to be addressed.
The population-based approach has
been articulated by public health experts
like Geoffrey Rose in classic works like
“Sick Individuals and Sick Populations”
(Rose 1985) and Strategy of Preventive
Medicine (Rose et al 2008). Here, it has
been argued that rather than exclusively
focusing on relatively few outliers, much
more emphasis should be placed on addres-
sing the “average” or “norm,” which may
not necessarily be healthy. This article
argues that, contrary to dominant tenden-
cies which tend to regard extreme health
or social-psychological events as problems
in isolation, there is a need to centrally
locate adverse events in the context of
tendencies prevailing in the larger popu-
lation, without which effective prevention
may be impossible. We start by illustrat-
ing the relevance of such an approach by
briefly discussing a classic public health
problem—malnutrition-related deaths.
In the current official view, severe
malnutrition and related deaths are con-
sidered to be isolated events; children with
severe malnutrition are often managed
specially as having an “illness” requiring
treatment with “medicine” (for example,
packaged nutrient paste). However, while
severely malnourished children do require
special attention, this is far from sufficient
to prevent malnutrition deaths. Given the
reality of widespread and growing hunger
and malnutrition, actually the majority
of malnutrition-related deaths take place
among mildly to moderately malnourished
children, since such children are far more
numerous. Among children in rural areas,
41.2% are stunted and 38.3% are under-
weight, while 7.4% have severe wasting
(International Institute for Population
Sciences and ICF 2017), the latter being
roughly equivalent to “severe acute
malnutrition.” Thus, around half of rural
children have some form of malnutrition,
while a much smaller number, around
one in 12, have severe acute malnutrition.
It has been estimated that among the
deaths of children in developing coun-
tries that could be associated with mal-
nutrition, at least three-quarters arise
from mild-to-moderate malnutrition. Only
vol lIiI no 31 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

a quarter of such malnutrition-related
child deaths can be attributed to severe
malnutrition (Pelletier et al 1995). In the
context of Maharashtra, it has been esti-
mated that 74% of excess child mortality
may be attributed to mild-to-moderate
undernutrition (Sardeshpande et al 2009).
Hence, isolating a few cases of extreme
malnutrition, while minimising moder-
ate and milder forms of malnutrition
associated with widespread hunger, is
an approach that is bound to fail. This is
because most malnutrition deaths occur
among children with less severe forms
of the problem, and also since significant
numbers of moderately malnourished
children keep falling into severe malnu-
trition. In fact in many tribal and rural
areas across India today, malnutrition is
the norm and effectively the entire
child population is at risk. Hence, the
high-risk approach, focused only on a
few severely malnourished children, is
fundamentally constricted and flawed.
Instead, there is need for an approach
that recognises deprivation of entire
communities, which would involve tack-
ling the population at multiple levels of
causation. This may range from dealing
with the agrarian crisis and preventing
forced displacement, to promoting rural
employment and food security, com-
bined with strengthened access to public
health and nutrition-related services,
along with promotion of improved child
feeding practices within the household.
As Applied to Social Psychology
Parallel to public health, such a population-
based approach has been proposed in the
area of social psychology. This important,
though neglected, approach to mental
health has been based on the understand-
ing that modern societies inherently
produce mental stress and distortions in
behaviour on a large scale. Hence, Erich
Fromm (1991, 2010) talks of a “sick society,”
to which being well adapted may not be
a sign of mental health. This line of analy-
sis has been further developed by Carl
Ratner (2018) who argues that the tradi-
tional biomedical model, which regards
the psychologically unhealthy in isola-
tion from “normal” society, is completely
inadequate. Such narrow approaches need
to be replaced by an understanding of
Economic & Political Weekly EPW AUGUST 4, 2018
widespread “pathological normalcy” in
the current society which is linked with
ubiquitous mental stress induced by so-
cial conditions. It is this widespread
mental pathology among the “normal”
population that anchors more severe
forms of abnormal psychology.
Pathological normalcy explains abnormal
psychology in new terms. What we call men-
tal illness is largely rooted in the pathologi-
cal normality of society and psychology …
Normal forms of pathology always surround
and underlie abnormal, extreme forms. Ab-
normal behaviour is neither discontinuous
with, nor anomalous to, normal behaviour.
Extreme, abnormal violence is an outgrowth
of normal violence. (Ratner 2018)
In fact, the main problem may not be
isolated instances of abnormal behaviour,
but rather the underlying “pathologically
normal” social conditions.
Extreme unusual events receive the most
attention. People believe that extreme,
abnormal behaviour is the most fearful
threat to normal social life … The truth is
the opposite: rising normal pathology is
more destructive, and it produces increas-
ingly abnormal behaviour. (Ratner 2018)
Given this background, this article
applies the “pathological normalcy” per-
spective to examine ongoing violence by
cow vigilante groups and the recent
lynchings in India, which might not just
be isolated “aberrations” arising among
scattered small groups, but should be
viewed as morbid manifestations of much
deeper disturbances in society as a whole.
Disturbed Populations
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
This classic song by Abel Meeropol is a
scathing reminder of the large-scale
lynchings of African–Americans in south-
ern US during the early and mid-20th
century. Unfortunately, in our world,
lynchings and mob violence are not a
matter of the past, as testified by the on-
going spate of mob violence in India.
Murderous mob attacks mostly on Mus-
lims suspected of “cow killing” by self-
appointed gau rakshaks, and recent inci-
dents of lynching of innocent outsiders
suspected of “child lifting” across the
country, are the most visible forms of
such mob violence.
vol lIiI no 31
COMMENTARY
A critical question needs to be answered
here: Why have such lynchings dramati-
cally increased in the last few years? Is it
just a case of certain random individuals
behaving irrationally, or is there a deeper,
sinister rationality at work? The striking
symbolism in the song “blood on the
leaves and blood at the root” reminds us
that the causation of such violence
should not only be nailed on immediate
factors; rather, its bloodstained roots
may lie much deeper.
An analysis of cow vigilantism-related
violence between 2010 and June 2017
shows that 97% of these attacks have
taken place after the Narendra Modi–led
Bharatiya Janata Party government
came to power at the national level in
May 2014. Out of the 28 persons who
were killed, 24 were Muslim (86% of all
deaths). Such cow vigilantism-related
violence has been reported from 19 of 29
states (Hindustan Times 2017). In the
case of these lynchings supposedly
related to “cow-protection,” certain political
leaderships at state and national levels
are clearly promoting an atmosphere of
hatred towards Muslim communities,
apparently combined with providing
informal assurance of immunity to the
offenders. Recently, no less than a union
minister (hailing from Jharkhand) gar-
landed and felicitated eight convicts
who were involved in lynching a Muslim
cattle trader. In this situation, there is no
doubt that communal majoritarian poli-
tics is aggressively propagating an at-
mosphere of generalised hatred and vio-
lence targeted at Muslims, to reap short-
term political gains. The propagation of
such social attitudes seeped in hate and
suspicion is creating a poisonous “new
normal” which then becomes a fertile
ground for mob violence.
Regarding attacks on suspected “child
lifters,” between January 2017 and July
2018, 33 people are reported to have been
killed. These have been a product of 69
cases of violence, which have also led to at
least 99 persons being injured (Saldanha
et al 2018). These lynchings have taken
place across at least nine states, ranging
from Assam to Maharashtra, and from
Jharkhand to Tamil Nadu (Indian Express
2018). These lynchings are also a recent
phenomenon, and have spiked sharply
13
COMMENTARY
in 2018, with 24 of the deaths having
occurred in the current year. Prior to 2017,
only one such incident was reported in
2012. Certain common patterns seem to
be emerging; in 77% of these incidents,
fake news disseminated through social
media was instrumental in spreading
rumours (Saldanha et al 2018). Many of
the victims were migrants, and some be-
longed to minorities; suspicion and in-
tolerance towards “outsiders” seem to
have played a key role. There also ap-
pears to have been marked failure of local
administrations, which in most cases
did not intervene in a timely manner to
quell the rumours or protect potential
victims from inhuman violence.
The large number of both kinds of
lynching incidents across the country
seems to reveal a deep, extremely dis-
turbing, common pattern: rumours are
spread and rapidly propagated often
through social media; mobs of hitherto
“normal” people plagued by suspicion
suddenly congregate, and aggressively
take the law into their hands; the suspects
are summarily assumed to be guilty,
usually without a shred of evidence, and
are condemned to death, no less; the
local police are either unaware, too late
to intervene, or turn a blind eye; and
later the entire incident is labelled as an
unfortunate, isolated occurrence, noth-
ing more than a local disturbance.
Given this pattern, we would recognise
that these “final links in the chain of
causation” are significant, and do merit
specific forms of intervention, but our
analysis cannot end there. We urgently
need an alternative approach to under-
stand and deal with this deeply worri-
some and inhuman wave of mob violence
across India. Instead of reducing these
killings to simple law and order incidents,
or just blaming a few groups of people
for being irrational, we need to recognise
the widespread, corrosive social pathology
that is being brewed in state after state,
the simmering cauldron from which
these violent incidents keep springing
like malignant, bursting bubbles.
Drivers and Implications
Analysis of complex phenomena like
lynchings is fraught with the risk of specu-
lation, since their causation stretches
14
across so many levels: psychological,
cultural, social, political and economic.
However, with some reflection, we can
try to identify a combination of key under-
lying processes and factors, which have
been promoting a deeply vitiated “patho-
logical normalcy” among the general
population in the past few years, which
appears to underlie such recurrent vio-
lent incidents. Proceeding from the as-
sumption that we are dealing not just
with a few deviant or disturbed indivi-
duals, but rather with seriously dis-
turbed populations and underlying neg-
ative systemic shifts, we begin to see a
complex, unfolding interplay of determi-
nant processes involving both society
and the state.
The first determinant is deep, genera-
lised popular discontent and diffuse anger
which seems to be a spreading malaise,
especially across rural areas and small
towns of the country. We should keep in
mind that practically all recent lynchings
have taken place in villages or smaller
towns. If we seek the underlying causes
of the diffuse anger underlying rising mob
violence, do not the deepening agrarian
distress, continued and rising unemploy-
ment, ongoing involuntary displacement
and dispossession, dismantling of public
services, and withdrawal of the welfare
state have a significant role to play?
The second dynamic has a sinister
aspect. Major sociopolitical forces which
today hold state power across the majority
of the country, and also wield significant
social influence, recognise that rising
mass discontent could become a threat to
their continued dominance. Hence, the
widespread anger among ordinary people
is now being systematically directed
towards even more marginalised targets,
particularly poor Muslims. This vigilan-
tism is actively encouraged by members
of the political leadership, apparently
combined with an implicit promise of
immunity. Ministers who swear by the
Indian Constitution publicly congratulate
and encourage murderers convicted of
hate crimes, while their supreme leader-
ship conveniently remains silent. Although
this dangerous dynamic has the potential
to unleash a massively destructive, down-
ward spiral of violence and social disrup-
tion, such social polarisation is being
AUGUST 4, 2018
ruthlessly promoted in an extremely
short-sighted manner, to yield political
harvests in the next election.
A third, linked dimension is the delib-
erate, relentless promotion of an environ-
ment of suspicion and hatred among the
populace, directed at selected “others”
and propagated primarily through social
media. To drive the normal towards a
pathological direction, a culture of deep
insecurity and fear of the “other” is pro-
moted, and “public opinion” is funda-
mentally reshaped. When a personality
no less than the national president of the
ruling party calls upon social media “ex-
perts” associated with his party to act as
“warriors,” this becomes a call to unleash
verbal violence on a massive scale, be-
cause history knows of no war without
violence. This “virtual violence” is being
used to drum up genocidal hatred on a
social scale. Given leave by their leaders
to act in this manner, these “warriors” stop
at nothing, abusively trolling any oppo-
sitional voices, and not even sparing a senior
leader of their own party when she devi-
ated from their script of hatred. This
“normalisation of violence” is definitely
playing a role in inciting ordinary people,
creating an environment where actual,
physical violence against the “other”
becomes only one further justified step.
It should be remembered that genocides
first originate in the minds of individuals
before being enacted on the streets.
A fourth aspect of pathological normal-
cy is critical weakening of public confi-
dence in the state, linked with the with-
drawal of the welfare state from various
spheres of life. Instead of the state being
perceived as some kind of beneficent
entity with a positive presence in society,
it is appearing in popular consciousness
as more and more of an external and de-
tached entity, limited to imposing sanc-
tions. This impression of an “absent, un-
wanted state” may be encouraging vigi-
lantism, ordinary people being embold-
ened to take law into their hands when
faced with perceived threats.
Here, we find relevant the recently
issued comprehensive orders in Tehseen
S Poonawalla v Union of India and Others
by the Supreme Court of India (2017), on
a contempt petition which seeks to curb
mob lynchings across the country. While
vol lIiI no 31 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

directing central and state governments
to take measures to control propagation
of inciteful messages through social media,
the order also proposes day-to-day trials
by fast track courts in lynching-related
cases. Going further, the Supreme Court
has urged Parliament to draft a new
legislation to effectively deal with mob
lynching. Significantly, towards arrest-
ing the shift of the social milieu towards
a disturbed normal, the Supreme Court
order opines:
Rising intolerance and growing polarisation
expressed through spate of incidents of mob
violence cannot be permitted to become the
normal way of life or the normal state of law
and order in the country.
Hence, while immediate factors related
to lynching incidents must be addressed
through appropriate legal and adminis-
trative measures, in parallel we must
recognise the underlying dynamic: the
cultivated shifting of the “normal way of
life” towards a pathological culture of
deep insecurity, hatred of minorities and
marginalised groups, and tacit or active
approval of violence by forces in power.
The violent “fringes” are not arising in a
vacuum; they are firmly anchored in the
newly configured “mainstream.” Hence,
when the “normal” mass of people is be-
ing systematically pushed in a distorted
direction, it is time to generate power-
ful, society-wide mobilisation to chal-
lenge and reverse such processes.
In this situation, along with ensuring
effective investigation and conviction of
persons or groups responsible for specific
instances of lynching, social organisations
and progressive forces must contribute
towards addressing the deeper dynam-
ics responsible for this situation. This
may include providing positive channel-
isation to current popular discontent,
through mass mobilisations around basic
socio-economic issues, linked with a trans-
formative vision; energetically exposing
the known, powerful political forces
which are seeking to turn society upon
itself violently in order to maintain their
hegemony; and systematically countering
the daily poison of communal hatred being
poured into our minds through social
media, which needs to be exposed for
what it is being used for: as fertiliser to
breed inhuman violence. And, in parallel,
Economic & Political Weekly EPW AUGUST 4, 2018
COMMENTARY
public institutions and services need to As a noun, it has had the meaning “usual state
or condition,” from 1890 (www.etymonline.
be reclaimed and made effective, since no com/word/normal).
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1 Normal does not necessarily mean desirable or rashtra, Pune: SATHI.
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Review of Urban Affairs
January 13, 2018
Urban Jungles: Wilderness, Parks and Their Publics in Delhi —Amita Baviskar
Living in a Category: A History of India’s ‘Census Town’ Problem from Colonial Punjab —William J Glover
Migration, Caste and Marginalised Sections: —Debolina Kundu,
Inequality in the Coverage of Basic Services in Urban India Arpita Banerjee
NNURM as a Window on Urban Governance: —David Sadoway, Govind Gopakumar,
Its Institutional Footprint, Antecedents, and Legacy Vinay Baindur, Madhav G Badami
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