Tyranny of Mob Justice and Moral Policing

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote. Yet injustice rarely announces itself as tyranny. More often, it arrives disguised as righteous anger, collective morality or instant street justice.
In March 2015, Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old religious studies student in Kabul, argued with a shrine caretaker over his sale of superstitious charms. Enraged, the vendor falsely accused her of burning the Quran. Within minutes, an incensed mob beat her to death, ran her over with a car, and set her body ablaze while bystanders filmed on their phones and police watched passively.
Farkhunda’s murder illustrates how swiftly misinformation overrides the foundational doctrines of law: the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) and natural justice. Rooted in Roman jurisprudence, natural justice rests on two pillars – audi alteram partem (hearing both sides before passing judgement) and nemo iudex in causa sua (ensuring an impartial adjudicator). When a crowd appoints itself prosecutor, judge and executioner, both pillars collapse.
History shows that when assumption triumphs over evidence, tragedy follows. During the 1692 Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts, mass fear led courts to accept unsubstantiated accusations, resulting in over 150 arrests and 20 executions. Similarly, in the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama, racial prejudice led an all-white jury to sentence eight of nine Black teenagers to death on fabricated testimony.
Today, this same impulse haunts Bangladesh through two intertwined crises: moral policing and mob violence. Moral policing begins when self-appointed gatekeepers impose rigid personal codes onto public life. As highlighted by The Daily Star in October 2026, such overreach ranges from stopping an athlete at a Dhaka Metro station for wearing shorts to immigration officers interrogating Nepal-bound women over their attire, an intrusion that prompted a High Court order. Research by the Centre for Governance Studies (CGS) further shows how self-styled moral guardians have normalised public harassment of women.
When intolerance fuses with collective aggression and weak institutional trust, it escalates into lethal mob justice. While Amnesty International recorded 555 mob violence victims in Nigeria over a decade, Bangladesh’s recent trajectory is equally alarming. According to October 2026 reports in The Business Standard, while the Home Ministry reported 63 mob incidents and 40 deaths between January and September 2026 (a 41 per cent drop year-on-year), the independent Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) documented at least 187 deaths across 398 mob attacks during those same nine months, following 168 deaths in 292 incidents in 2025.
Behind these numbers lie harrowing tragedies across Bangladesh. In September 2024, Tofazzal Hossain, a mentally challenged man, was beaten to death at Dhaka University over unproven theft suspicions on the same night Shamim Ahmed was lynched at Jahangirnagar University. In December 2025, garment worker Dipu Chandra Das was lynched in Mymensingh’s Bhaluka over an unverified blasphemy rumour that investigators found baseless. In April 2026, a mob killed Sufi leader Shamim Reza Jahangir and torched his Kushtia shrine, and in October 2026, Wahiduzzaman Shamim was lynched in Satkhira, with an accused openly boasting about the murder online.
Why do ordinary citizens surrender rationality to the herd? Psychologically, human brains rely on heuristics, cognitive shortcuts evolved for rapid survival, and emotional snap judgements driven by fear or rage. Culturally, groupthink silences dissent. Philosophers have long warned against this blindness: Plato's Allegory of the Cave shows how people mistake shadows of ignorance for reality, while Kant, Mill, Aristotle, and Kierkegaard emphasised that genuine morality demands rational inquiry, universal principles and standing by truth over the crowd.
In the digital era, sensationalist media and viral algorithms pour fuel on these biases. Following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, online sleuths falsely identified missing student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect, tormenting his family before discovering he had died by suicide. With studies showing that 59 per cent of viral social media news is accepted uncritically, a single unverified post can turn lethal in minutes.
Breaking this cycle of impunity requires urgent action on three fronts.
Restoring institutional trust and legal awareness: Citizens must respect constitutional protections under Articles 31 and 32, while courts and police must operate transparently so people trust due process over street vengeance.
Practicing responsible journalism and digital restraint: Media outlets must prioritise fact-checking over clickbait, and social media users must verify inflammatory claims before sharing.
Enforcing strict accountability: Beyond forming police anti-mob squads and cyber monitoring units, authorities must enact dedicated anti-lynching legislation, ensure speedy trials, and prosecute every perpetrator without political shelter.
Ultimately, a society’s civilisation is measured by its restraint. A judgement devoid of truth, logic and evidence is not justice at all; it is merely a new form of tyranny disguised as righteousness.
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The writer is a tech entrepreneur