Rape: A Political Weapon in Modi's India

[Riaz Haq]

An 8-year-old Muslim girl Asifa Bano was locked in a Hindu temple, drugged, gang-raped for several days and then bludgeoned to death in Indian occupied Kashmir, according to a report in a leading American newspaper.

Gang Rape Victim: 8-Year-Old Asifa Bano

Support of Rapists: 

The horror of a Muslim child's rape and murder was made even worse when the ruling BJP-affiliated right-wing Hindu lawyers marched in defense of her attackers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reluctantly condemned the crime after waiting for several days. His belated acknowledgment came in response to international outrage.

Is this just another rape in India? Did the child's Muslim faith make her a target? Has Islamophobia gone mainstream in India?  To answer these questions, let us put some context to what is happening in Modi's India.

India saw about 39,000 rape cases reported in 2016, a 12% jump over the prior year, according to Indian crime statistics.  Children were reported as victims in 42% of the cases.

It is hard to say how many of the rape victims were Muslim.  What is known, however, is the exhortation by iconic Hindutva leaders to rape of Muslim women.  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the founders of right-wing RSS who Prime Minister Modi describes as "worthy of worship", is among them. After getting elected to the highest office in India, Modi paid tribute to Savarkar by laying flowers at his portrait that hangs in India's Parliament.

Hindu Nationalist Leader VD Savarkar

VD Savarkar, in one of his books titled Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, elaborates on why raping of Muslim women is not only justified but encouraged.

Savarkar has used revisionist Hindutva history to exhort his followers to rape Muslim women as payback for historic wrongs he believes were committed by Muslim conquerers of India. “Once they are haunted with this dreadful apprehension that the Muslim women too, stand in the same predicament in case the Hindus win, the future Muslim conquerors will never dare to think of such molestation of Hindu women,” he writes.

Hindutva Revisionist History: 

American history professor Audrey Truschke, in her recently published book "Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King" has argued that colonial-era British historians deliberately distorted the history of Indian Muslim rule to vilify Muslim rulers as part of the British policy to divide and conquer India.  These misrepresentations of Muslim rule made during the British Raj appear to have been accepted as fact not just by Islamophobic Hindu Nationalists but also by at least some of the secular Hindus in India and Muslim intellectuals in present day Pakistan, says the author.  Aurangzeb was neither a saint nor a villain; he was a man of his time who should be judged by the norms of his times and compared with his contemporaries, the author adds.

Truschke says the original history of the Mughal rule was written in Persian. However, it is the English translation of the original work that are often used to distort it. Here's what she says about it in her book:

"The bulk of Mughal histories are written in Persian, the official administrative language of the Mughal empire but a foreign tongue in India today. Out of necessity and ease, many historians disregard the original Persian text and rely instead on English translations. This approach narrows the the library of materials drastically, and many translations of the Mughal texts are of questionable quality, brimming with mistranslations and abridgments. Some of these changes conveniently served the agendas of the translators, especially colonial-era translations that tend to show Indo--Muslim kings at their worst so that the British would seem virtuous by comparison (foremost here is Elliot and Dowson's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians). Such materials are great for learning about British colonialism, but they present an inaccurate picture of Mughal India."
Modi's Record: 

In 2002 when Narendra Modi was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, hundreds of young Muslim girls were sexually assaulted, tortured and killed.  These rapes were condoned by the ruling BJP, whose refusal to intervene lead to the rape and killing of thousands and displacement of 200,000 Muslims.

Since his election to India's top elected office, Modi has elevated fellow right-wing Hindu extremists to positions of power in India. Yogi Adiyanath, known for his highly inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric, was hand-picked in 2016 by Modi to head India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.

Adiyanath's supporters brag about digging up Muslim women from their graves and raping them. In a video uploaded in 2014,  he said, “If [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, we’ll kill 100 Muslims.”

Yogi wants to "install statues of Goddess Gauri, Ganesh and Nandi in every mosque”.  Before his election, he said, “If one Hindu is killed, we won’t go to the police, we’ll kill 10 Muslims”.  He endorsed the beef lynching of Indian Muslim Mohammad Akhlaque and demanded that the victim's family be charged with cow slaughter.

Madhav S. Golwalkar, considered among the founders of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India, saw Islam and Muslims as enemies. He said: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers".

In his book We, MS Golwalkar wrote the following in praise of what Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did to Jews as a model for what Hindus should do to Muslims in India: "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Social Hostility Against Minorities in South Asia. Source: Bloomberg

Rise of Hindu Nationalists: 

The situation for India's minorities, particularly Muslims, has become a lot worse in the last two years with Hindu mobs raping and lynching Muslims with impunity. The 2016 election of anti-Muslim radical Hindu priest Yogi Adiyanath as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, is seen as a clear signal from Mr. Modi that his anti-Muslim policies will continue.

Mohammad Akhlaq is believed to be the first victim of Hindu lynch mobs claiming to be protecting the cow. He was accused of consuming beef. For more than a week Prime Minister Narendra Modi remained silent over the incident and even after he spoke about it, he did not condemn it outright. The ruling BJP officials even tried to explain it as the result of the genuine anger of the Hindus over the slaughtering of a cow.

Pew Research Report:

A Pew Research report from data collected in 2015, about a year after Modi rose to power, found that the level of hostility against religious minorities is "very high". In fact, it said India scores 9 for social hostilities against religious minorities on a scale of 0-10.   Other countries in "very high" category for social hostilities include Nigeria, Iraq and Syria. Pakistan's score on this scale is 7 while Bangladesh is 5.5.

Pew Research Report on Religious Freedom

History of Anti-Muslim Riots in India:

Paul Richard Brass, professor emeritus of political science and international relations at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, has spent many years researching communal riots in India. He has debunked all the action-reaction theories promoted by Hindu Nationalists like Modi. He believes these are not spontaneous but planned and staged as "a grisly form of dramatic production" by well-known perpetrators from the Sangh Parivar of which Prime Minister Modi has been a member since his youth.

Here's an excerpt of Professor Brass's work:

"Events labelled “Hindu-Muslim riots” have been recurring features in India for three-quarters of a century or more. In northern and western India, especially, there are numerous cities and town in which riots have become endemic. In such places, riots have, in effect, become a grisly form of dramatic production in which there are three phases: preparation/rehearsal, activation/enactment, and explanation/interpretation. In these sites of endemic riot production, preparation and rehearsal are continuous activities. Activation or enactment of a large-scale riot takes place under particular circumstances, most notably in a context of intense political mobilization or electoral competition in which riots are precipitated as a device to consolidate the support of ethnic, religious, or other culturally marked groups by emphasizing the need for solidarity in face of the rival communal group. The third phase follows after the violence in a broader struggle to control the explanation or interpretation of the causes of the violence. In this phase, many other elements in society become involved, including journalists, politicians, social scientists, and public opinion generally. At first, multiple narratives vie for primacy in controlling the explanation of violence. On the one hand, the predominant social forces attempt to insert an explanatory narrative into the prevailing discourse of order, while others seek to establish a new consensual hegemony that upsets existing power relations, that is, those which accept the violence as spontaneous, religious, mass-based, unpredictable, and impossible to prevent or control fully. This third phase is also marked by a process of blame displacement in which social scientists themselves become implicated, a process that fails to isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, and instead diffuses blame widely, blurring responsibility, and thereby contributing to the perpetuation of violent productions in future, as well as the order that sustains them."

"In India, all this takes place within a discourse of Hindu-Muslim hostility that denies the deliberate and purposive character of the violence by attributing it to the spontaneous reactions of ordinary Hindus and Muslims, locked in a web of mutual antagonisms said to have a long history. In the meantime, in post-Independence India, what are labelled Hindu-Muslim riots have more often than not been turned into pogroms and massacres of Muslims, in which few Hindus are killed. In fact, in sites of endemic rioting, there exist what I have called “institutionalized riot systems,” in which the organizations of militant Hindu nationalism are deeply implicated. Further, in these sites, persons can be identified, who play specific roles in the preparation, enactment, and explanation of riots after the fact. Especially important are what I call the “fire tenders,” who keep Hindu-Muslim tensions alive through various inflammatory and inciting acts; “conversion specialists,” who lead and address mobs of potential rioters and give a signal to indicate if and when violence should commence; criminals and the poorest elements in society, recruited and rewarded for enacting the violence; and politicians and the vernacular media who, during the violence, and in its aftermath, draw attention away from the perpetrators of the violence by attributing it to the actions."

Summary:

India is seeing a spate of gang rapes and lynchings of Muslims by Hindu mobs who have been emboldened by the rise of anti-Muslim Hindu Nationalist leader Narendra Modi since his 2014 election to the highest office in India.  In their writings, iconic Hindutva leaders like Savarkar have encouraged rape of Muslim women. The elevation of radical Hindu Yogi Adiyanath to the top job in Uttar Pradesh by Mr. Modi has further alarmed India's Muslim minority. University of Washington's Professor Emeritus Paul Brass, who has documented the history of anti-Muslim violence in India,  describes it as "a grisly form of dramatic production" by well-known perpetrators from the Sangh Parivar of which Prime Minister Modi has been a member since his youth. Pew Research report on religious violence confirms India's status as a country with "very high" levels of social hostilities against religious minorities.  There appears to be no relief in sight for them at least in the foreseeable future.

Related Links:

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Islamophobia Goes Mainstream

700,000 Indian Troops vs 10 Million Kashmiris

Muslim Lynchings in Modi's India

Yogi Adiyanath as UP CM

Hindu Nationalists Admire Hitler

Hinduization of India Under Modi

Muslim Victims of Gujarat 2002

India's Superpower Delusions: Modi's Flawed Policies

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[Riaz Haq]

Rana Ayyub
@RanaAyyub
The whataboutery over the blood curdling sexual crimes in Manipur, releasing the rapists of Bilkis Bano on the 75th year of Indian independence, the solidarity of BJP leaders with the rapists of the eight year old girl in Kathua. A pattern.

https://twitter.com/RanaAyyub/status/1686553337578356736?s=20


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A grisly rape case has shaken India. Modi needs to act.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/01/modi-india-manip...

by Rana Ayyub

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is once again under pressure for letting communal and ethnic violence spiral under his watch. This time, the victims are from a Christian ethnic group in the northeastern state of Manipur. At the core of the scandal is the government’s handling of a grisly rape case that has profoundly shaken Indian society.

A devastating video was published on July 19 showing two women from a Christian ethnic group in Manipur being stripped naked and paraded around by a mob. It quickly went viral. An indigenous rights group claimed the women were later gang-raped in an adjacent field. The incident occurred around May 4 but went unreported for nearly three months.

Manipur, which borders Myanmar, has been the site of ethnic strife for years, but violence has spiked recently. The predominantly Christian Kuki tribe and the majority-Hindu Meitei have engaged in violent clashes that have led to several churches being burned down, almost 60,000 people being displaced and more than 150 dead.

Details have been underreported because, once violence erupted, the Indian government suspended local access to the internet. And when the video emerged, the government’s immediate instinct was to consider suing Twitter, which has been rebranded as X, for allowing it to circulate, on the grounds that it threatened to sow chaos.

One of the two rape victims accused the police of handing them over to the mob. The woman also said that the father and the brother of the younger victim were killed trying to save them. Since the video went viral, reports of more cases of rape and murder have begun to emerge — and the details are horrifying.

Modi himself had been studiously quiet on the violence in Manipur before the video emerged. The incident “shamed India,” he said outside Parliament in New Delhi on July 20. “I assure the nation, the law will take its course with all its might,” he said. “What happened with the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven.”

Nevertheless, Modi attempted to divert attention from the atrocity by pointing to examples of violence in provinces run by the opposition. His evasion of responsibility and brazen whataboutism have outraged India. There is a well-established record of majoritarian groups using sexual violence as a weapon in ethnic and communal conflict, and the state has almost always looked the other way.

The police have arrested seven people in connection with the incident in Manipur thus far, but only after the video became public. Chief Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud ordered the government to keep the courts apprised of the steps being taken against the accused, vowing that “we will take action if you don’t.”

On Monday, India’s Supreme Court began hearings on the alleged gang rape. Kapil Sibal, a lawyer representing the women, alleged that “police collaborated with the perpetrators of violence.” Chandrachud asked why the police had waited so long to bring charges, and demanded the government provide details on the more than 6,000 cases registered with the police since violence erupted in Manipur.

[Riaz Haq]

A grisly rape case has shaken India. Modi needs to act.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/01/modi-india-manip...

by Rana Ayyub


Modi’s government has paid lip service to condemning violence against women, but its actions say something different. Last year, the 75th year of Indian independence, while Modi spoke in front of New Delhi’s Red Fort about women’s safety, his government approved the release of the 11 rapists of Bilkis Bano, one of the rape victims in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat (which took place while Modi was governor there).

Other politicians in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been less subtle. In 2018, two prominent officials rallied in support of six Hindu men convicted for the brutal rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl in Kashmir on the premises of a temple.

Opposition parties have filed a no-confidence vote in Modi’s government. But since the BJP is comfortably in the majority, the government is unlikely to fall. The opposition hopes to at least force the prime minister to publicly defend his handling of the violence in Manipur.

Modi is right that the incident has shamed India. But I have lost count of the times during the past few decades that the phrase has been used. The shock and anger feel empty and performative. Those in power who enabled such crimes have repeatedly been absolved. The state continues to look the other way.

During the anti-Muslim pogroms that shook Mumbai in the early 1990s, I was staying with my family among the handful of Muslims in a Hindu-majority area. My sister and I had to get away in the middle of the night as a mob made its way to our neighborhood. Our Sikh neighbor helped us escape through a bathroom window. I remember him telling my family: “They are coming for the girls.”

That horrible night will remain with me forever. We successfully escaped, however, and survived as refugees. The women in Manipur, who were brutalized in full public view, were far less fortunate.