Divisions grow over girl’s rape and murder
INDIA: She was an 8-year-old girl who, while grazing her horses in a meadow in northern India in January, followed a man into the forest. Days later, Asifa Bano’s small, lifeless body was recovered there.
Police say that Asifa was given sedatives and, for three days, raped several times by different men. She was eventually strangled on January 17, something police say would have happened sooner had one man not insisted on waiting, so that he could rape her a final time.
To ensure she was dead, Asifa’s killers hit her twice on the head with a stone, according to charging documents filed by police in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and published by Indian news website Firstpost.
In the months since, Asifa’s death has brought anguish to Kathua, the small town where she was killed. But it has also brought division. The case is the latest example of India’s religious friction: as some denounce sexual violence and demand justice for Asifa’s family, others demand justice for the accused men.
The eight men accused of raping and killing Asifa are Hindu. Asifa was a Muslim nomad, part of the Bakarwal tribe. Her father, Mohammad Yusuf Pujwala, has told the New York Times that he believes his daughter was killed by the Hindu men for the sole purpose of driving her people away. To add to the volatility of Asifa’s case, police say she was killed in a Hindu temple, and that the temple’s custodian plotted her death as a way to torment the Bakarwals.
Asifa was the pawn – ‘‘a child of only 8 years of age who . . . became a soft target’’, police said.
On Tuesday, a chaotic scene unfolded outside a courthouse in Jammu and Kashmir as a mob of Hindu lawyers tried to physically stop police from filing charges against the accused men. In a statement, the lawyers argued for a federal investigation, stating that the government had failed to ‘‘understand the sentiments of the people’’. Police still managed to complete the paperwork and charged the men, who include four policemen and a retired government official.
Protests have now spread across much of Kathua. Hindu activists argue that some of the police officers who worked on the case are, like Asifa, Muslims – and therefore cannot be trusted, according to the Times.
Dozens of Hindu women have helped to block a highway and organise a hunger strike. ‘‘They are against our religion,’’ Bimla Devi, a protester, told the New York Times. She said that if the accused men weren’t freed, ‘‘we will burn ourselves’’.
The lawyers, along with a group affiliated with India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), fight on the basis of religious prejudice, even though BJP supporters are vocal opponents of sexual violence.
After the brutal gang rape and murder of a medical student in New Delhi in 2012, the government promised to introduce legal reforms and support services to help victims of sexual violence. To an extent, it did – for example, it amended the law to prosecute children older than 16 as adults in rape and murder cases. (Not much more has changed for rape victims, however, according to a November report by Human Rights Watch.)
Notable BJP members have asked that the case be moved out of the state police’s jurisdiction and into that of the Central Bureau of Investigation, claiming the agency would act neutrally. The bureau, however, reports to the BJP-led government in New Delhi.
Asifa’s case has shaken the state’s Legislative Assembly. Weeks after her body was found, lawmakers still questioned the police’s behaviour in the days after she disappeared. They waited two days to file a report after Asifa disappeared, for example, and did not alert newspapers until several days after she was killed, according to the Asia Times.
‘‘The screams and cries of the girl were heard by neighbours. Why was there such a delay by police?’’ lawmaker Shamima Firdous said a few weeks after Asifa’s body was found.
Talib Hussain, a Bakarwal social activist fighting on behalf of Asifa’s family, said that Bakarwal nomads for generations had leased land from Hindu farmers so that their animals could graze during winter. In recent years, however, Hindus in the Kathua area have campaigned against the nomads. Believed to be at the campaign’s helm is the accused temple custodian, Sanji Ram.
‘‘His poison has been spreading,’’ Hussain told the Times. ‘‘When I was young, I remember the fear Sanji Ram’s name invoked in Muslim women. If they wanted to scare each other, they would take Sanji Ram’s name, since he was known to misbehave with Bakarwal women.’’
Feelings of suspicion and animosity between the two communities run so deep that when Asifa did not return from the meadow, her parents instantly feared she had encountered danger. And when the Bakarwal nomads retrieved Asifa’s body for burial, ‘‘some baton-wielding goons appeared at the graveyard asking us not to bury her there’’, Hussain said. The ‘‘goons’’ feared that if Asifa was buried on their land, it would forever belong to Muslims. – Washington Post