Don’t club Kathua, Unnao with religion. God-fearing men across all religions rape
From Europe and America the news has come of Christian priests raping young boys inside Catholic churches. I haven’t investigated how prevalent it is in other Muslim countries, but I have often read in the newspapers of Bangladesh about Imams raping children in mosques, of a teacher at a madrasa raping a four, five, or six-year-old girl student inside the madrasa.
Now I’ve been told that some people brought an eight-year-old girl into a temple in Jammu and gang-raped her. One of the accused is Sanji Ram, who had the responsibility for looking after the temple. His relatives as well as two police officers, their friends, kept the eight-year-old girl imprisoned inside the temple and raped her. The girl used to take horses out to graze in Jammu. When one of her horses was lost, she went looking for it in the jungle, which is when the gang of rapists captured her and imprisoned her in the temple. After raping her for several days in succession, the valiant heroes smashed the girl’s head in with a rock and murdered her.
Had the girl been a Hindu and not a Muslim, perhaps those men would have captured, imprisoned, raped, and finally killed her in exactly the same way. Both the poor and the rich know that killing the poor usually reduces the chances of trouble. I don’t believe that those men would have allowed the girl to walk unscathed in the jungle had she been a Hindu.
A rape takes place in India every 14 minutes. Hindu men rape Hindu women every day. They don’t spare anyone, from old women to one-year-old children. Muslim men rape in the same way. They don’t spare any women of any age. Those who rape are usually not interested in the name, address and religion of those they are raping. They’re only concerned with the body. Or they only consider the ‘valiance’. There is no lack of people in the world who think barbarity is bravery.
Raping the women of the enemy is nothing new. Like elephants, horses, land and houses of the enemy, their women too are considered property.
Subjugating the adversary by raping the women is an age-old practice. After killing the Jewish people in Arab lands, Prophet Mohammad had distributed the Jewish women amongst his militant companions for their pleasure. Pakistani soldiers raped two hundred thousand women in the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Both the troops and their victims were Muslims, but resistance was a bigger factor than religion. The Pakistanis looted and pillaged the homes of Bengalis and set them on fire, and raped the women. The war provided an opportunity.
To be honest, there is no war between Hindus and Muslims in India. It is true that some people are trying to provoke a conflict, but the conflict has not reached the proportion where Hindus will rape Muslim women in droves or vice versa. Hindu men have raped Hindu women a hundred times more than they raped Muslim women. It’s the same story with Muslim men. It is not as though either of them has vowed to rape women of the other religion alone. They do it when they get the opportunity.
Had Hindu men never raped Hindu women, I would have assumed the Hindu males of Kathua raped the eight-year-old girl because she was a Muslim. If Muslim men only raped Hindu women, I would have concluded that the war between Hindus and Muslims is increasing.
But society still has Muslims like Imdadul Rashidi, who did not want to start a riot by attacking his son’s Hindu murderers. There are still Hindus like Yashpal Saxena who prefer to forgive the Muslim murderers of his son rather than avenge his death. The Indian subcontinent needs Hindus like Yashpal Saxena and Muslims like Imdadul Rashidi.
In Uttar Pradesh, an 18-year-old woman has accused an MLA named Kuldip Singh Sengar and his brother of raping her. As many of us know, rape is not sexual intercourse, it is muscle power, male power.
It has not yet been proven whether MLA Kuldip Sengar has raped the woman from Unnao. But he did not rape the woman because he is a BJP MLA. He did it because he is a man. The powerful make arrangements to cover their tracks. And it is not a custom to punish the powerful.
The Kathua rape is being called communal, and it is being said that the rape in Unnao took place only because it was a BJP MLA. I believe that the rapists in both cases did what they did because they are men.
A patriarchal society has taught men that women are nothing but objects of gratification. Therefore there is no crime in gratifying themselves with women’s bodies in any way they please – no matter what their religion or age, what their caste or their lineage, rich or poor. And men have the right to humiliate them, to torture them, to crush them. Which is why men rape them. One rape every 14 minutes.
Rapes will continue unhindered in temples, mosques, churches and pagodas because the custodians of these ‘holy’ places are all God-fearing men. God-fearing men do not consider raping girls a sin as they are well-aware that everything – notwithstanding Ishwar or Allah or Bhagaban or their respective religions – is undeniably misogynous.
Taslima Nasreen is a celebrated author and commentator.
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The Print
Beyond Misogyny. Untangling Kathua And Unnao: A Response To Taslima Nasreen
Taslima Nasreen is wrong. The rapes in Kathua and Unnao were about more than misogyny.
Taslima Nasreen is not alone in
wondering why the religious identity of the raped and murdered child of
Kathua is being invoked while discussing the crime. Similarly, she fails
to understand why the political affiliation of the accused is being
referred to in the case of the rape of a girl at Unnao. Jammu and
Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh, in this case, are united by the thread of
brutalisation of their girls.
Taslima would like us to believe that it
was only misogyny which drove the men at Unnao and Kathua to rape the
girls. For her, the fact that the accused in Unnao crime being a leader
of the BJP is not relevant. He did not rape the girl because he was a
leader of the BJP, she says. She is absolutely right. But can we ignore
the fact that the complaint of the victim was callously ignored simply
because the accused is a leader of the party which is presently ruling
Uttar Pradesh? And the party is BJP. The source of power that the
accused wields is BJP.
Had it not been so, her father would not
have to pay with his life for the audacity of the girl and her family
to go public with their complaint. Had the accused been only an ordinary
citizen like the victim, probably the police and the administration
would have reacted differently. In this case, despite the public
demonstration of the aggrieved woman and her family, neither the police
nor the state government moved. It was only after the intervention of
the High Court of the State forced the police to act. It was obviously
the assurance of the patronage of the Party and the government which
emboldened the accused and encouraged
the police to victimise the woman and her family further. That the
administration and the government did their best to protect the accused
is so evident that only the eyes of Taslima Nasreen can miss it.
As in the case of Unnao, the facts
don’t tell you everything about the horror the eight-year-old child had
to go through in Kathua. What happens before and after the ‘fact’ is
crucial to comprehend its meaning. Let us start with the after in the
Kathua ‘incident’. The girl child could not be traced even after seven
days of her disappearance. Nothing abnormal about that, we could say.
After a long string of failed searches, the police subsequently found
her dead body. Even the normal investigation started only after an
agitation by the members of the community to which the child belonged.
When the post-mortem report came and the special police team started its
investigation, the trouble began. The leader of the police team is a
Hindu. But the presence of a Muslim in his team who was chosen by him
only was made an issue. So, first time, a religious angle was introduced
in this case not by the victims but by the supporters of the accused.
We are talking about the ‘after’. When
the police team finalised its report and was about to submit it in the
court, the supporters and members of the community of the accused
decided the report was biased against Hindus, that the credentials of
police team were doubtful and there was an anti-Hindu bias in the whole
report.
Please remember, this allegation had not been made by the family of the victim.
They had not expressed suspicion against anybody. The agitation after
the recovery of her body did not say that she was killed because she was
a Muslim. The investigation revealed a conspiracy hatched by a man who
is held to be deeply resentful of the Muslim Bakarwal community. The
report connected the dots and presented a chilling narrative— How a
long-nursed hatred against a community can lead one to commit an
unspeakable crime!
This was only a report of the police and not a judgment of the court. It is possible that the case built by the police falls apart in the court and the accused are found not guilty. But
the lawyers of Kathua and Jammu decided that it was a part of an
anti-Hindu conspiracy. They created a ruckus in the court and later led a
violent protest against the police. It is true that the accused did not
commit the act on the command of the ruling BJP. But the two Hindu BJP
ministers thought it necessary to intervene and demonstrate their
support to the accused. They even trashed their own government. A
minister of the central government justified the agitation of the
lawyers of Kathua and Jammu calling it an expression of popular
sentiment in the area.
Let us continue with the ‘after’. Another character makes her entry in the drama. The
counsel, herself a Hindu, appearing on behalf of the family of the
murdered child was threatened, called names and declared anti-Hindu. She
felt so scared that she had to move the Supreme Court praying for her
safety. The court had to order the State government to ensure security
both for the family and the lawyer.
Now the ‘before’. It can also be taken
as a coincidence that the child belonged to the nomadic Bakarwal
community. It can also be another coincidence that a campaign of
resentment against the community was going on in the area. Fear was
spread among the local Hindu population that the Bakarwals would
gradually outnumber them. It is again a coincidence that the Rohingya
refugees were being presented as a threat to the region and the nation. They were portrayed as terrorists.
The before and after came together in the agitation (led by the lawyers)
after the report by the police was filed. The demands for eviction of
Rohingays, the change in the rules for land use by tribals and the
transfer of this particular case from the J&K police to the CBI were
clubbed together. This is how the brutalisation of the little girl acquired religious angularity.
Taslima is right that rape is a secular act. But she must ask why did it have to be a Hindu Ekta Manch to lead the protest against the police investigation and why the Manch thought it fit to mix this demand with the other “anti-Muslim” demands!
Taslima is only partially right that there is no war going on between the Hindus and Muslims of India. Since she has received kind words from the BJP and the RSS, she cannot see that Muslims are under siege in India.
How easily can they (Muslims) be
isolated from the secular processes can be seen through the fact that
the only Muslim dominated State in India has been forced by agitation to
ensure that no Muslim is a part of the prosecution team for this case.
It has been announced to the shame of India that the prosecution team
has persons with religious neutrality. Two Sikhs have been chosen to
represent the State before the court. It is important for the State in
India to keep away from Muslimness to be seen as impartial and not
anti-Hindu. We rue our fall as a people. It is sadly strange that even
after being a fiction writer, Taslima Nasreen cannot share this grief.
(Apoorvanand is a professor at the Hindi Department of University of Delhi.)
