Introduction:

Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of hanging) for maximum intimidation.[1] Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society. In the United States, where the word for "lynching" likely originated, lynchings of African Americans became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations.

Etymology:

The origins of the word lynch are obscure, but it likely originated during the American Revolution. The verb comes from the phrase Lynch Law, a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are generally credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch (1736–1796) and William Lynch (1742–1820), both of whom lived in Virginia in the 1780s. Charles Lynch is more likely to have coined the phrase, as he was known to have used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much later. There is no evidence that death was imposed as a punishment by either of the two men. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered Lynch's law to Tories "for Dealing with the negroes &c".

History:

Every society has had forms of extrajudicial punishments, including murder. The legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America. Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early American legal landscape, with group violence in colonial America being usually nonlethal in intention and result. In the seventeenth century, in the context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, lynchings became a frequent form of "mob justice" when the authorities were perceived as untrustworthy.[13] In the United States, during the decades after the Civil War, African Americans were the main victims of racial lynching, but in the American Southwest, Mexican Americans were also the targets of lynching as well.

Lynching in United States:

Lynchings took place in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, most commonly in Southern states and Western frontier settlements and most frequently in the late 19th century. They were often performed without due process of law by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offences. At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of over 1,000 people.

In India

In India, lynchings may reflect internal tensions between ethnic communities. Communities sometimes lynch individuals who are accused or suspected of committing crimes. An example is the 2006 Kherlanji massacre, where four members of a Dalit family were slaughtered by Kunbi caste members in Khairlanji, a village in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra. Though this incident was reported as an example of "upper" caste violence against members of a "lower" caste, it was found to be an example of communal violence. It was retaliation against a family who had opposed the Eminent Domain seizure of its fields so a road could be built that would have benefitted the group who murdered them.[111] The women of the family were paraded naked in public, before being mutilated and murdered. Sociologists and social scientists reject attributing racial discrimination to the caste system and attributed this and similar events to intra-racial ethno-cultural conflicts.