Sarajevo’s Sniper Tourism & Lynching Videos: Consuming Cruelty In India

The notion that humans have killed other humans for pleasure, thrill, or spectacle — outside the rules of military necessity — is not new. The allegation that emerged from the Siege of Sarajevo, however, sounds almost implausible in its cruelty. During the war, foreign visitors allegedly paid to be taken to Serb-held hills overlooking the city, where they were handed rifles and allowed to shoot at civilians. The 2022 documentary Sarajevo Safari described this not as combat but as leisure.

Italian prosecutors, who reopened the case in 2025, describe the alleged phenomenon as a war crime that belongs in its own category—not killing for strategy, not killing for ideology, but killing for pleasure. What unsettled investigators was not only the violence, but the psychology behind it: cruelty reframed as recreation, murder stripped of purpose and recast as spectacle.

It is tempting to seal this story inside Balkan history. The geographies are different; the technologies differ as well. But the impulses that made sniper tourism possible—the pleasure of domination, the exhilaration of transgression, the complicity of spectators, the moral comfort of impunity—are not unique to a hillside in Sarajevo.

In India, those impulses now surface in everyday public life. They animate videos capturing lynchings of Muslims as digital trophies. They animate crowds that gather around communal violence as if attending a neighbourhood performance. They animate the fandom cultivated around police encounter killings, where the state itself becomes a performer in a theatre of violence.

India today is not a war zone. Yet it has incubated a culture in which violence is increasingly designed to be watched.

Lynching Videos as Digital Trophies: The Grammar of a New Kind of Spectacle

A video from Ramgarh in Jharkhand begins almost cinematically. Alimuddin Ansari, a man in his early forties accused of transporting cattle, is forced to run in circles as a crowd confines him with sticks. The camera follows closely, maintaining focus as blows rain down. Someone shouts, “Zyada clear se dikha.” Another tells the man filming to come around from the front. The choreography is unmistakable—this is not documentation; it is direction.

Footage from the 2017 lynching of Pehlu Khan in Alwar, Rajasthan follows a similar pattern. As Khan falters, a hand appears in the frame, pointing triumphantly toward him, guiding the camera like a news anchor directing a broadcast.

In parts of western Uttar Pradesh, police quietly admit that lynching videos often help identify perpetrators. Privately, however, officers acknowledge a deeper truth: the filming is frequently as important to the perpetrators as the violence itself.

Digital forensics teams across Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad describe lynching footage as having a recognisable production logic. There is a clear beginning—the capture; a centre—the humiliation and beating; and an end—the triumphant pose or final blow. The camera serves as both witness and amplifier. Violence intensifies because it is being filmed.

These videos circulate through predictable pathways: closed WhatsApp groups linked to cow-protection outfits; district-level Facebook pages; Telegram channels run by young men who collect videos of violence as symbols of masculine prowess; and, occasionally, police circles where the footage is forwarded “for awareness.”

What emerges is a world of trophies. The video becomes evidence of dominance. It performs ideological loyalty. It becomes a token of belonging. Like any trophy, its value lies in display.

Sniper tourism in Sarajevo was a grotesque indulgence of elites. Lynching videos in India represent a democratised, digitised version of the same impulse—cruelty engineered for spectators, not justice.

The Politics of Pleasure: Why Violence Entertains

Behind these spectacles lies a political psychology that is neither accidental nor apolitical.

The young men who record lynchings or cheer demolitions are not merely violent; they are performing a version of masculinity that the political environment rewards—strength demonstrated through domination, identity affirmed through cruelty. Violence becomes the cheapest route to masculine affirmation. Majoritarian power becomes emotional currency.

Spectacular violence reinforces majoritarian entitlement. Mob pleasure is tied to the systematic dehumanisation of the victim—most often Muslims or Dalits. The spectacle becomes a rehearsal of majoritarian citizenship: who is allowed to hurt, and who must endure it.

The shared confidence that nothing will follow—no FIR, no trial, no institutional reprimand—turns violence into something closer to sport.

The sniper tourists of Sarajevo acted because they knew there would be no consequences.

Perpetrators in India act because they know there will be an audience—and that is precisely the point.

Violence increasingly functions as electoral theatre. In states like Uttar Pradesh and Assam, encounter figures are folded into campaign speeches. In parts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar, processions engineered to provoke confrontation double as political signalling. Violence here is not a breakdown of democracy but one of its communicative tools. This is not spontaneous brutality; it is politically curated spectacle.

None of this is accidental. India has incubated a culture in which violence resonates because it is visible, and visibility is politically useful.

The sniper tourist’s thrill came from knowing that killing could be experienced as entertainment.

India’s thrill comes from knowing that violence, once performed, circulates—and circulation confers meaning, belonging, and righteousness.

Pogrom as Spectacle: Public Violence as a Community Event

If lynching videos represent India’s handheld theatre of cruelty, communal flashpoints have become its stadium. The shift is stark: large-scale violence that once carried a veneer of secrecy now erupts in full public view, with spectators gathering in ways that resemble audiences more than bystanders.

In Northeast Delhi in February 2020, men climbed onto rooftops with phones held high, recording petrol bombs, street battles, and homes set ablaze. On the streets below, attackers posed with rods and sticks as others filmed. Video after video shows spectators—old men, schoolboys, vendors—observing the violence with the detached interest of people attending a spectacle. The riot did not merely unfold; it performed itself.

In Khargone in 2022, after a Ram Navami procession escalated into violence, crowds gathered on terraces to watch Muslim homes burn. In video footage, people cheer as flames rise—some shout encouragement, some add commentary, many simply hold up phones.

The demolition drives that followed in Nuh in 2023 and Haldwani in 2024 exhibited the same public appetite: spectators applauding bulldozers, recording the destruction of homes, circulating clips with regional pride.

The political choreography of many Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti processions has similarly shifted. These processions increasingly resemble theatre troupes moving through minority neighbourhoods—music systems blaring provocative songs, choreographed gestures designed to provoke, and audiences lining the routes to watch confrontation unfold.

In these moments, the line between participant and spectator dissolves. The spectacle depends on both. A riot without an audience is merely violence. A riot watched, filmed, and forwarded becomes a statement.

The spectacle does ideological work. It encodes hierarchy into public memory. It communicates who belongs, who must submit, who rules the street.

This is the same psychological architecture that made sniper tourism conceivable. One does not need to pull the trigger to participate. Watching is participation.

Encounter Fandom: The State as Performer, the Public as Cheering Crowd

The same dynamic extends upward into the actions of the state. In Uttar Pradesh, encounter killings have become a visible feature of policing since 2017. Press notes are issued promptly. Photographs of seized weapons are circulated. Since 2017, more than 180 people have been killed in police encounters, the vast majority young Muslim men or Dalits. Each killing triggers a micro-cycle of celebration.

Posters appear in marketplaces congratulating encounter specialists. Social media accounts track officers’ “records.” Local leaders reward police with garlands. The language is explicitly competitive: “strike rate,” “target neutralised,” “record tod diya,” “zero tolerance hits”—phrases drawn from sport, gaming, and military cinema populate both official press releases and neighbourhood gossip.

In Meerut, an officer who shot several alleged gang members was featured in a mural outside a juice shop, depicted like an action hero. In Assam, a photograph of a man shot in the leg while allegedly trying to flee police custody circulated as evidence that the government had “restored fear” among criminals. In Telangana, during an earlier cycle of encounters, police officers received applause like film stars at public events.

This is not incidental. The state understands that visibility enhances legitimacy. The encounter is designed not only to eliminate an accused criminal but to broadcast state power. It is a theatre owned and controlled by the state.

The public response mirrors the dynamics of lynching videos and pogrom spectatorship. People cheer not because they have verified guilt, but because the spectacle affirms a sense of order and masculine governance. In the spectacle economy, the encounter killing becomes the state’s contribution to recreational violence—cruelty carrying the imprimatur of authority.

Again, the logic parallels sniper tourism. The moral calculus shifts from “is this right?” to “does this satisfy a desire for dominance?” The encounter is not justice. It is performance.