In times when whataboutery has become almost a default setting for argumentative one-upmanship, any exercise in communal labelling of crime is vulnerable to counter-narratives. Last week, for instance, when a 25-year-old man Sanjeev (alias Sajjan) was allegedly killed by men belonging to a different religious community in a mall in West Delhi after his elbow accidentally hit one of the accused while dancing at a party, parallels were drawn to suggest the media’s different treatment of the Ballabhgarh train incident in June this year in which teenager Junaid Khan was allegedly killed by men belonging to a different faith following an altercation over a seat in the train. Neither of the two was a hate crime, though a number of media reports projected the latter as an instance of it.  The driver of violence in both the cases was banal and prosaic, and hence, less interesting for public consumption. But, for all practical purposes, the everyday violence of individual against individual is more disturbing and seminal. More on that later.