I’m 17 and a Muslim woman in this postcolonial contemporary Indian era. I get to sit in my “well-educated Muslim family-built house” and scroll through my newsfeed on my smartphone where I am barely able to make it through the gory details of the Kathua rape and murder case.
If I try to explain to some of my friends who are less politically inclined, that the issue is troubling me so much that I stay up at nights, they may likely retort, “This is not a communal issue”. Which it isn’t in the sense they assume I’m trying to imply. I’m not asking you to make this about punishing “Hindu rapists” or “non-Muslim rapists”.
I’m asking you to understand that this IS a minority issue. The people we are fighting to see punished, the actual rapists and their supporters, were “Hindu” when they forever took away an 8-year-old girl’s autonomy and replaced it with a bashed head.
These protectors of the accused are asking the public to paint a crime in a Hindu or Muslim colour, forgetting that if a human can stoop to such low levels, they belong to no God. The very moment a despicable thought such as committing this heinous act formed inside their mind, they had given up on God or religion or any such fantastical higher power. Rape, psychologically described, is an attempt by an insecurity suffering mind to assert physical dominance over another being in order to feel powerful. And is it not only God or Bhagwan or Allah who is to have supreme power over beings? In that moment, rapists believe themselves to be the only power there is, beyond even God.
These people don’t believe in the God you are so adamant to use while casting a circle of protection around them.
What’s scary is that they seem to be getting away with it without even so much as an official acknowledgement of the little girl’s life, lost to a few monsters and their paedophilia-induced land claims against a culturally vulnerable nomadic tribe.
But hey, this is India, it would be shocking if this was the last time something like this happened. Because the girl has completely been disowned as India’s daughter, or so it would seem. I recently received a message from a junior of mine at school. This screenshot probably broke the last barricade of humanity holding up the Indian society.
Apparently, the poor girl’s name has been trending on porn sites. Now, I don’t know how verifiable this fact is. But the simple existence of such a screenshot causes such extreme repulsion. Even if this is fabricated, to think of the lengths that people can go to just to sideline the real issue leaves me dumbstruck.
This is not a report, it is a plea.
A plea to let your rage flow and never let the dialogue die out.