This story stayed with me longer than most, not because it is exceptional, but because it is brutally ordinary once you strip away the comforting labels. A man arrives in a new place with nothing but a piece of paper, an address and the quiet hope that work will follow. 5 days later he is dead, beaten by people who did not understand his words, his language or his presence. The moment he could not explain himself fast enough, he ceased to be a person and became a category: thief, outsider, Bangladeshi, threat. That is all it took.
What killed Ram Narayan was not poverty or even crime. It was opacity. He was unreadable. He did not speak the right verbal/nonverbal language, did not fit the mental shortcuts people rely on to decide who belongs and who does not. In moments of fear, societies do not fall back on law or ethics - they fall back on pattern recognition. When patterns fail, violence fills the gap.
There is a direct line between this lynching and the broader global obsession with identity, passports and belonging. We tell ourselves that documents, nationality and labels create order. In reality, they create the illusion of control. The man was killed not because he lacked papers, but because the people confronting him did not recognize him as “one of us.”
What I find most unsettling is how easily even “progressive” societies slip into the same reflexes they condemn elsewhere. Kerala’s economy depends on internal migrants. Its demographic decline makes them indispensable. And yet, at street level, they remain provisional humans, tolerated as labor units but never fully integrated as equals. This is not unique to India. Europe does the same. So does the Gulf. So does every society that celebrates mobility in the abstract and panics when it appears at the doorstep.
From an economic and political perspective, this contradiction will only deepen. States need migrants to sustain growth, stabilize labor markets and compensate for demographic decay. At the same time, in the society fear and resentment are allowed to fester. The result is a system that invites people in structurally and rejects them socially.
There is a false narrative that has survived for centuries: that belonging is natural and exclusion is rational. In reality, belonging is learned and exclusion is instinctive. When societies stop actively cultivating the former, the latter takes over by default. No amount of branding as “progressive” changes that.
Ram Narayan’s death will be framed as an aberration, a few bad apples, a tragic misunderstanding. That framing is comforting and it is wrong. It is not a blip. It is a stress fracture in a system that depends on mobility while refusing to internalize its human consequences. As long as migrants are seen primarily as economic inputs rather than vulnerable individuals navigating unfamiliar worlds, these stories will repeat, quietly, until one day they are no longer shocking at all.
