After communal divide, political unity on Kathua

NEWDELHI: From Union minister VK Singh to Congress president Rahul Gandhi, politicians across political lines expressed outrage on Thursday over the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu’s Kathua after allegations that there was a prolonged silence from top political leaders over the incident.

Jammu and Kashmir CM Mehbooba Mufti of the PDP said that her government would bring a law that would make the death penalty mandatory in cases where minors were raped. “We will never ever let another child suffer in this way,” she said. Amid protests by the Jammu Bar Association against the handling of the case by the state police’s crime branch, Mehbooba also promised there would be no obstruction of justice.

Terming the rape and murder as an “unimaginable brutality that cannot go unpunished”, Gandhi criticised those indulging in politics over the crime. “How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?” he asked in a tweet. While the central BJP leadership did not comment on the incident till Wednesday, Singh and the party’s general secretary, Ram Madhav, condemned the crime on Twitter a day later.

JAMMU: On March 1, 2015, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) formed a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir with the promise of “good governance.”

Ideologically, the two parties had always been poles part, but the intention was to weld the mandate the PDP won in Kashmir with the backing the BJP received from voters in Jammu to forge a stronger bond between the two regions .

Three years later, the fault lines seem to have only widened -- between the PDP and the BJP, between Jammu and Kashmir, Muslims and Hindus, between locals and nomads. That has been exposed by the brutal rapemurder of an eight-year-old girl from the nomadic Muslim Bakrawal community in Jammu’s Kathua that has triggered tensions in the region.

Migration has had something to do with the tensions. Political, social, trade and tourist organizations in Jammu have been protesting against the settlement of Rohingya Muslims, whom they perceive as a security threat, in the region and demanding their deportation.

Then there’s friction between locals and nomadic tribes who settle there. In the Kathua rape and murder, the crime branch charge sheet attributed the crime to a conspiracy to create fear among the nomadic Bakarwal community and get them to leave Rassna village.

“Our debates on demographic changes in Jammu had picked up momentum and when a mass movement was just about to begin, this government with a communal agenda sabotaged the movement and changed the narrative. The rape and murder case was totally given a communal colour by the chief minister Mehbooba Mufti..,” lawyer Ankur Sharma said.