Public Comment

The brutal rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl from a semi-nomadic Muslim community has sent shock waves in India. What caused such outrage was not only the heinous crime but the attitude of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party who defended the men accused of the crime. 

The young girl was abducted and imprisoned in a Hindu temple where she was drugged, starved and gang raped repeatedly before being murdered. 

One of the accused, a police officer asked his co-conspirators to delay the killing so he could rape her one more time. The police charge sheet suggested that this was not a random killing but followed a pattern of politics of criminal behavior where Muslims are being targeted in increasing numbers since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. According to the police the brutal murder was premeditated to terrorize the Bakarwals, a hill tribe, and drive them out of the area. The bereaved parents fled the area unable to bury their child. 

A newly formed extremist group called Hindu Ekta Manch, or Hindu Unity Forum organized a protest march defending the accused. The co-founder of the group is Vijay Sharma a senior official of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P) in the region. Two B.J.P. ministers in the state government attending the march were dismissive of the crime commenting, “So what if a girl died? “Many girls die every day.” The BJP organizers want the case to be transferred to the federal Central Bureau of Investigation, a delegitimized institution which serves at the behest of the ruling BJP where the case will surely die. 

The girl’s lawyer was physically threated from filing charges against the accused. As the details of the crime trickled down to social media people responded with mounting outrage demanding the two ministers who backed the perpetrators of the crime, resign. Modi finally responded from his deep slumber and meekly denounced the perpetrators’ and fired the ministers who organized the march. 

A spokeswoman for Mr. Modi’s party, Meenakshi Lekhi, attacked opposition protests, suggesting that they were selective and opportunistic.  

“You see their plan,” she said. “First shout ‘minority minority’, then ‘Dalit Dalit’ and now ‘women women’ and then try to somehow fix blame of state issues on the center.” 

An open letter by an ex-civil servant accused Modi of investigating such violence and held him directly responsible for “this terrifying state of affairs.” Another B.J.P. official accused Muslim Rohingya of instigating the violence in Burma. 

A youth activist posted a Facebook comment that the “rape must have been fun”. Many who voted for Mr. Modi are disappointed for his failure to condemn sectarian and sexual violence and hate speech by his party colleagues and ministers. It is entirely possible that the BJP will further stoke these ethnic and religious tensions in the run-up to the next election.