ISLAMABAD, Aug 26 (APP):The release of 11 men convicted of the rape and murder of a Muslim family testifies to a climate of impunity towards those who persecute this religious minority.
This is a matter that India had forgotten. A crime that resurfaced on August 15 when the authorities of Gujarat, a state in the west of the country, released eleven men sentenced to life in prison for gang rape and the massacre of a family of 14 people including a 3 years old young girl. Only one woman survived, Bilkis Bano, 21, pregnant at the time, who was raped and left for dead, according to an article published in a Belgium newspaper La Libre.
On February 28, 2002, Bilkis Bano and her family fled their village of Randhikpur as an anti-Muslim pogrom perpetrated by Hindu terrorists bloodied Gujarat. The head of this state, and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was slow to deploy the security forces.
The extremists had a free hand. Bilkis and her relatives wander from village to village in search of shelter. On March 3, they were arrested by a band of twenty-five men armed with sabers and sticks.
The men were exterminated, the women raped and then massacred. But Bilkis comes back to life and drags herself to a villager who comes to his aid. Then begins a long legal journey.
She filed a complaint and her story resonates all the way to the Supreme Court. The highest court, faced with the refusal of the local police to investigate, transferred the file to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the CBI. The defendants finally appeared before a court which convicts them in 2008.
After 14 years in prison, the detainees asked for early release. The Supreme Court gives the green light and the case is examined by a commission made up of officials from Gujarat and executives of the BJP, the Hindu fundamentalist party of Prime Minister Modi. The committee accepts the request. When they leave, the eleven men were congratulated by the VHP, an extremist Hindu organization linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which crowns them with flowers.
This is not the first time that sex crimes have made headlines in India. In 2012, the gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus aroused immense anger and the culprits were hanged.
This time, the members of the commission justified their decision by arguing that the detainees were entitled to a reduced sentence. One of them claimed that they were high-caste Hindus and therefore deserved to be freed: “They are Brahmins, well-bred and virtuous men”, pleaded C.K Raulji, a BJP MP at the assembly of Gujarat.
The release of the Bilkis Bano rapists demonstrates that anti-Muslim crimes can be forgiven and even rewarded by Hindu fundamentalists with the complicity of the authorities.
The indulgence towards the eleven condemned is part of a discourse carried by the BJP and which the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta summarizes in the columns of the daily The Indian Express: “Crimes committed against a religious minority are not crimes”, laments the university. As a result, Indians of the Muslim faith risk no longer being protected by law, unlike ordinary citizens.
The turning point in the Bilkis Bano affair is the latest episode in an anti-Muslim hatred that has been building since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. “The BJP’s policy towards Muslims is a new form of pogrom”, laments in the Indian press Ashutosh Varshney, professor of social sciences at Brown University. In addition to introducing or tightening laws against intermarriage in several states, houses belonging to Muslims have been illegally bulldozed in New Delhi, Prayagraj and Madhya Pradesh in the past four months.
This erosion of the rule of law comes seven weeks after the arrest of Teesta Setalvad and R.B Sreekumar, two human rights activists working to bring those responsible for the 2002 pogrom to justice. Their detention, combined with the reduced sentences granted to the eleven rapists, casts doubt on the impartiality of the judicial machine, especially since the Prime Minister has little interest in seeing justice done. Narendra Modi was never tried for his failure to stem the pogrom.
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