How was Chongtham Vikram Singh killed?

The reports and the police are, on the face of it, clear on the facts. On Sunday night, at around 11.30 pm, the 55-year-old musician from Manipur — lead guitarist of Phoenix, in the ’80s — asked a group of young men to not make noise outside his home in Kilokari village in south-west Delhi. A heated argument turned violent, and Singh was beaten brutally. He died at Holy Family Hospital. Seven young men, all under 36, have been arrested, and the police have promised “prompt and lawful action”.

Why was Chongtham Vikram Singh killed?

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There is no clear answer to this question. Unfortunately, there are several plausible reasons for a man to be killed in India, in what should have been a routine interaction in a neighbourhood. While there is no way to be certain about why this happened, the plethora of believable scenarios is a social tragedy, a deep failure all on its own.

Could Singh’s home state, his ethnicity have contributed to his killing?

Crimes against people from the Northeast, routine discrimination in housing, racial slurs — none of these is rare in Delhi or, for that matter, across several metropolises. Prejudice is routine in India. You can be assaulted, insulted and even killed for being a Muslim on a train, a Christian accused of “forcible conversion”, a Dalit bridegroom who dares to ride a horse and, of course, for looking “different”. There is, of course, little chance of knowing the many subliminal currents that drove the mob to beat and kill a middle-aged man for complaining about the noise. But a question worth asking is: Would his fate have been different had his home state been different?

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Maybe Singh was a victim of the angst and anger of those facing bleak futures, a despair in which he had no authorship. The young men who assaulted him were reportedly delivery “boys”, and some worked at a nearby dhaba — a class of gig workers that has no future laid out, no career growth in the offing. They could be, like so many in this country, people who face violence not as an event but a quotidian part of life — in rude customers, aggressive bosses, poverty, and so much else. Their anger found a blameless victim, and their circumstances, if they are indeed terrible, provide neither justification nor absolution — they must be punished by the due process of law. But such anger as posited here isn’t an aberration.

Perhaps to understand the uncertainty of the “why”, it might be worth looking again at the tangible, horrific — and unsurprising — truth about the “how” of the murder. What, really, did Chongtham Vikram Singh do? Merely request a lower volume from people being loud. At worst, he may have admonished them. The path from this routine friction, found in every neighbourhood, to violence was all too short. Just as it is in disputes over parking, land, and many other imagined slights. The law, even at its best, can only kick in after the fact. And that’s where our country, and we, the people, fall short.

Between the many whys and the single how of a murder in Delhi, there’s all the anger, inequality, bigotry and dehumanisation that we accept every day. And a man who made great music, and taught it to others, is a victim of that collective failure as well.

The writer is associate editor, . aakash.joshi@expressindia.com