The New Face of Terror From Kerala to Bangladesh: How Mob Rule Is Replacing the Rule of Law Across South Asia

He did not die because he broke the law. He died because a crowd decided he did not belong.

In Kerala, a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh was lynched for resembling a “Bangladeshi.” In Bangladesh, Hindu homes and temples were attacked by local mobs enforcing a brutal idea of religious purity. These acts of violence did not unfold in the absence of the state, but in its shadow.

We often imagine terror as organised and external. What is spreading across South Asia is more intimate and more dangerous: violence carried out by ordinary people who believe they are authorised to act. This is not a collapse of law and order but a transformation of power, where sovereignty is quietly delegated to the crowd.

This essay explores that shift—the rise of the sovereign mob—and how majoritarian politics across borders are turning neighbours into executioners and citizens into disposable lives.

 

From the streets of Kerala to the villages of Bangladesh, a terrifying new form of “outsourced” sovereignty is emerging. It is no longer only about state power; it is about the fascism embedded within the social body itself. In the humid reaches of Kerala, a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh—a man from India’s own heartland—is beaten to death. His crime? In the eyes of the mob, he resembled a “Bangladeshi.”

Thousands of miles away, in the heart of Bangladesh, Hindu homes are looted and temples burned as local crowds enforce a brutal code of religious purity. At first glance, these appear to be isolated tragedies, triggered by local tensions or ancient grievances. But look closer, and a more sinister pattern emerges. These are not merely failures of “law and order.”

They are symptoms of a new, borderless political disorder: the rise of the sovereign mob.

 

The Outsourced Executioner

For decades, power was understood as flowing from the top down: the state made the laws, and the state punished those who violated them. Today, across much of the world, the state is no longer the sole arbiter of life and death. Instead, sovereignty has been crowdsourced.

We are witnessing what philosophers describe as the state of exception. When the state identifies a particular group—be it “infiltrators,” “blasphemers,” “minorities,” or “outsiders”—as a threat to the nation, it sends a tacit signal to the majority. It effectively tells its citizens: the law does not protect these people. You may do with them what you will.

In this climate, the victim becomes what Roman law called Homo Sacer: a person who may be killed without the act being considered murder. The Chhattisgarhi tribal labourer in Kerala was not killed because he violated a law; he was killed because, in the fevered imagination of the mob, he had ceased to be a citizen and had become bare life—a biological threat to be eliminated.

Contemporary mob lynchings and ethnic cleansing in South Asia—exemplified by the killing of a Chhattisgarh migrant in Kerala on suspicion of being “Bangladeshi,” other lynchings in India, atrocities against minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the persecution of the Rohingya—cannot be understood solely through traditional models of state sovereignty.

Rather, they signify a rhizomatic spread of sovereign power into the majoritarian social body, operating through a lethal fusion of the logic of exception and micro-fascism.

Linking the Kerala lynching to attacks on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh reveals a cross-border pattern in which violent power is no longer exercised only by the state, but by self-organised mobs acting in the name of majoritarian “purification.”

 

The Logic of the “Outsider”

At the core of this trend lies a political logic that strips certain individuals or groups of legal protection. Within this framework, victims are reduced to bare life. While the ordinary citizen enjoys political life—safeguarded by rights and constitutional guarantees—the lynching victim is cast into a state of exception.

In this zone, the law formally exists but does not apply.

• Bare Life (zoe) vs. Political Life (bios): Sovereign power operates by distinguishing between qualified life (bios—life endowed with rights, citizenship, and value) and bare life (zoe—mere biological existence).
• The State of Exception: A suspension of the normal legal order in which law exists but is rendered inoperative, creating a space devoid of legal protection.
• Homo Sacer: The figure reduced to bare life—killable but not murderable, excluded from human law yet paradoxically included within sovereign power through exclusion.
  In contemporary contexts, this figure includes refugees, stateless persons, and those marked as “outsiders” or “threats.”
  

 

The Rise of “Micro-Fascism”

Unlike the macro-fascism of the twentieth century—organised around dictators and centralised states—micro-fascism is embedded in everyday social relations. It thrives within the social fabric itself, manifesting as a desire for order, purity, and domination. Micro-fascism functions through rigid binaries (pure/impure, insider/outsider, believer/infidel), collective paranoia, and the identification of internal enemies. It operates through decentralised, self-organising groups—mobs, vigilantes, neighbourhood enforcers—that seek to impose an imagined moral order. It is not merely political; it is deeply social and psychological.

 

From Monolithic to Rhizomatic Sovereignty

Classical theories of sovereignty centre on a single authority that decides the exception. In the age of mass politics and digital contagion, sovereignty fragments and diffuses. It spreads laterally through society, forming a rhizomatic network of power. In majoritarian democracies, sovereignty is no longer monopolised by the state. It is collaboratively exercised by mobs that do not oppose state authority but function as its shadow extensions.

 

1. The Kerala Lynching: Rhizomatic Sovereignty in Action

The victim—a poor tribal migrant from Chhattisgarh—was transformed into Homo Sacer through this new sovereign logic. The lynching mob did not challenge state authority; it performed a state function—border policing, counter-infiltration, “civic purification”—without formal mandate.

The state’s rhetoric of “illegal infiltration” provided the ideological script. The mob became the enacting body. This violence was not rogue or aberrant. It aligned with the ideological project of a dominant majoritarian consensus, operating as a vigilante extension of dispersed nationalist sovereignty. The victim’s body became the terrain upon which sovereignty declared: you do not belong. The mob organised itself around paranoid binaries—Us versus Them—driven by rumour, fear, and a desire for purification.

This was not centralised command but a contagion of affect, spreading through digital and physical networks until it crystallised into lethal violence.

 

2. Hindu Minorities in Bangladesh: Life Under Diffused Theocratic Sovereignty

The plight of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh reveals a structurally similar phenomenon. Here, the state often appears ambivalent or complicit, allowing a de facto state of exception to persist socially.

VIDEO | Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh: Bajrang Dal stages protest near Board Office Chowk over Hindu man’s lynching in Bangladesh. #BangladeshViolence #BangladeshCrisis

(Full video available on PTI Videos – https://t.co/n147TvrpG7) pic.twitter.com/sUzNmhfrpM

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 23, 2025

The sovereign power to reduce a Hindu citizen to bare life—through blasphemy accusations, pogroms, or forced displacement—is exercised by local mobs, extremist groups, and community enforcers. Persecution is sustained not only by formal politics but by a societal micro-fascism—a desire for religious homogeneity expressed through everyday intimidation, economic exclusion, and ritualised violence. As in Kerala, these actors do not operate outside power.

They are affiliated with a hegemonic majoritarian project, deciding who belongs to the religious nation and who remains a Homo Sacer in waiting.

 

3. Correlation: The Transnational Rhizome of Majoritarian Sovereignty

These phenomena are interconnected nodes within a transnational network of identitarian sovereignty.

In India, majoritarian mobs aligned with nationalist ideology act as sovereign agents. In Bangladesh or Pakistan, majoritarian Islamist social formations assume the same role. In one context, the exception targets the “infiltrator”; in another, the “non-believer.” The underlying logic is identical.

This produces a self-reinforcing cycle: persecution in Bangladesh fuels paranoid nationalism in India, which then legitimises violence against marginalised Indians misidentified as external threats.

The Chhattisgarhi tribal labourer becomes a surrogate sacrifice in a transnational drama of sovereign power.

 

The Age of Affiliated, Networked Sovereignty

Viewed together, these dynamics reveal a new paradigm:

• Sovereignty is networked, not pyramidal.
• The state is a node, not the centre.
• Micro-fascism is the operating system.

This is a transnational biopolitical regime in which lives are assessed, categorised, and rendered disposable according to majoritarian projects.

Homo Sacer is produced wherever these rhizomes take root. The deaths of a tribal labourer in Kerala and of minorities in Bangladesh are not isolated crimes.

They are symptoms of a new political landscape—one in which sovereignty has escaped the palace and the parliament and migrated into streets, social media feeds, and murderous mobs, all claiming the sacred right to decide who counts as human and who is reduced to bare life.