World Sikh News presents a two-part series of essays to understand the complexities that plague a society where an eight-year-old is brutally assaulted and murdered, the guilty are defended through delay and awe and how verbosity and inaction from the Prime Minister of India dowards fails to identify, admonish and restrain cannibals in our midst like the ones in Kathua and Unnao. WSN appeals to readers to understand the perspective presented in both the articles and see them in totality.

Believe me, the last two weeks have not been easy, squirming through sleepless nights, reading and viewing TV, online videos to make sense of the barbarism and cannibalism in Kathua and Unnao. As I cogitated, more were added to the list of shame towns. Irrespective of their name, caste, religion, profession and political leaning, the perpetrators personified cannibalism clearly showing a collapse of civility and order in a broken society.

I could not look into the photograph of the baby girl. I listened to the parents of the girl without eye contact. It was as if, I was also guilty.  The poignancy of the illiterate vagabond father of Asifa was striking when he said, “What would the girl know between a Hindu and a Muslim.”

She loved animals, especially horses. When they went astray, the little one searching them fell prey to beasts lurking in human form.  Recall what Guru Nanak said witnessing murder and mayhem perpetrated by Babar. “Eti maar payi kurlane tain ki dard na aaaya? – so much misery and bloodshed, O God, did you not feel compassion?” God must have felt the pain of the eight-year-old in Kathua.

“Ravish Kumar of NDTV India has reminded us again that there is a mob hiding in your neighbourhood waiting to pounce on you! Beware! ”

Humanity failed. People failed. The state failed. The protectors failed. The leaders failed. Indian PM Modi failed us with his death-defying silence broken after five days with a mere indirect reference, followed by politicking about the crime in a London talk show and a boast in Madhya Pradesh after  passage of a death penalty ordinance for child rapists, saying “Delhi listens to you.” Believe me, it does not. Delhi was woken from slumber by pan-India protests and the fast of Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal.

Delhi -the City of Djinns is purblind! Delhi is insensitive! Delhi is not ashamed even when the UN Secretary general Antonio Guterres asks India to punish the guilty in Kathua. The IMF chief Christine Lagarde has called Kathua assault “revolting” and directly asked PM Modi to do so something about women in India. For the first time in many decades, India has not termed such statements as “interference in internal affairs of the country.”

Can someone in the corridors of power in Delhi explain why it has not yet responded to various calls for judicial and administrative reforms for safety of women, loudly advocated by the likes of Vrinda Grover and Nirbhaya’s mother!

The Delhi bosses have so far not reprimanded in public or in private the BJP rank and file and leadership or done anything to reign-in marauding mobs and their cheerleaders. The rape accused lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh -Kuldeep Sengar has not been suspended from the party. And then we are told “Delhi listens to you!”

India’s Delhi does not use international parlance to avoid international opprobrium for non-compliance of international treaties and conventions. Adivasis are “our own people” but they cannot be “aboriginals”. Despite evidence, irrespective of the political dispensation, India flagrantly declares, “India does not torture.” India has not ratified the UN Convention against Torture. Even the Supreme Court while adjudicating the matter accepted “the government’s compulsions….as this is a political decision…..” Need I say more!

Nandita Rao writing in the Indian Express says, “The Kathua rape and murder is the first, post-partition, publicised hate crime, where a conscious decision was made to target a child. It is the manifestation of a growing political discourse which views the minority community, even children, as deserving of violence.” Shuddering, isn’t it? She declares that call a hate crime by its name. Will India do it during the present times of rising chauvinistic nationalism?  

India continues to deny that rape is a weapon of war by India against the Kashmiri people and this has been adequately documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Whether the prosecution will be able to prove in court or not, the barbaric assault on the girl child was a weapon to dislodge the poor, vagabond Gujjar Bakarwal Muslims from the region, in order to save the “demographics of the region.”

When BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi tried to wriggle out of the situation with innuendos and illogical statements, she was simply fulfilling her political duty.  The illustrious lawyer-patriarch of the family of the Lekhis -Pran Nath Lekhi must be turning in his grave. On the streets of London, a group of women -Indian Ladies in UK, were chanting, “We love Modi.”  Remember, “my country, right or wrong”! Hitler said it and what did it lead to?

Bollywood veteran Amitabh Bachchan said that even talking about Kathua is bizarre. It is satisfying that Bollywood makes some political noise from time to time. It needs to do more often. Bollywood perpetuates objectification of women and must stop it. The overloaded double entendre against women in the name of humour in the Kapil Sharma show watched by millions on prime-time television is repulsive!

Feminists must understand that human weaknesses abound and respect for womanhood requires a gargantuan solution which should involve women from all strata of society.

The disgustingly shocking behaviour of the rape perpetrator BJP member of the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Unnao is a classic example of the kind of lawmakers we have. Apart from murder of the victim’s father, the naked dance of support drummed up by the BJP from the CM Yogi Adityanath downwards was demonstrated flagrantly as they swung into some action only after being stung by the High court in Lucknow.

Resisting the threats issued to her, it must be said that it was the bravery of lawyer Deepika Singh Rajawat that the Kathua case has not been dumped the way the girl was by the criminals. The members of the Kathua Bar especially its chief B. S. Slathia, who blocked the police filing of the charegesheet, were made to eat humble pie by the Supreme Court but they should not be allowed to go scot free. Mere denouncement by the Supreme Court is not enough. The reported verbosity of the chief of the Bar Council of India Manan Kumar Mishra left me dumbfounded.

“Isn’t it amusing that the erstwhile home minister of India P. C. Chidambaram calls India, The Republic of Impunity in his weekly Sunday column of the Indian Express. Need I remind him  that during his tenure, he was the godfather of Punjab’s police chief KPS Gill and others whom he gave full impunity to rape, plunder, pillage and kill. ”

I wonder whether the lawyers in Kathua and the constituents in Unnao-who among other citizens of the country “must learn to respect girls and women” according to PM Narendra Modi, can ever look into the eyes of their daughters, sisters and mothers!

Statistics from India’s National Crime Records Bureau confirm that the Delhi is actually the rape capital of the country.  Leader-lawyer Kapil Sibal did not hesitate to emphasize that “India is the rape capital of the world.” Right under the nose of the Prime Minister, the Parliament and the Supreme Court of India, Delhi is not safe, if Delhi is not safe then what can be said of the other thousands of miles of this vast unmanageable sub-continent?

Notwithstanding the internal democratic churning among the judges of the Supreme Court, justice eludes the citizenry of India. When will India have more judges, more courts, more police people, more accountability and equality before law?

Isn’t it amusing that the erstwhile home minister of India P. C. Chidambaram calls India -The Republic of Impunity, in his weekly Sunday column of the Indian Express. As India’s home minister, he was the godfather of Punjab’s police chief KPS Gill and others who had full impunity to rape, plunder, pillage and kill.

Today AFSPA -Armed Forces Special Powers Act, may have been repealed in some parts of the Northeast, but 11 years of fasting by activist Irom Chanu Sharmila did not bestir the powers that be. The rapes of protesting women by the Indian armed forces were condoned as reporting such incidents and punishing the perpetrators would be “harmful to the morale of the forces.”  Who is accountable for this?

The recruitment of Special Police officers -two of whom are the accused also needs understanding. Who is a Special Police officer?  A trained personnel? No. The SPO is an unemployed individual, generally belonging to a caste or class different from those whom he has to protect and is recruited into the police force to augment the numbers either at police stations or to act as cannon fodder for the para military and military forces. Strictly speaking, he is an illegitimate recruitment, underpaid but faces the same risks as others. Knowing all this he becomes carefree and a law unto himself. The havoc wreaked by such Special Police Officers (SPOs) in the countryside in Punjab is not yet forgotten.

Ravish Kumar of NDTV India has reminded us again that there is a mob hiding in your neighbourhood waiting to pounce on you! Beware! We have seen this mob -the mob of Kathua lawyers, the mob of constituents of Unnao supporting their undertrial MLA Kuldeep Syengar and the mob that has attacked the house of self-trained artist Durga Malathi in Kerala, to tell her “how not to protest through cartoons!”

Over the last four years, an organized mob, masked and faceless, has been telling people what to eat, what not to eat, what to sell, even where to live, where not to pray, whom to marry, which road to walk on and how to justify all this. Beware!!

Sometime back Justice Markandey Katju said, “Nothing short an upheaval like the French revolution can save this great country of diverse people.”  If you have any other solution for this “biggest democracy on the planet” do let me know. Temporary reprieves, a little justice here and there, some outpouring of grief, even crocodile tears, may be some compensation are only face-saving gestures.

 If you like our stories, do follow WSN on Facebook.

Half-truths and alternative facts are on a 100 % discount sale in India and there are many buyers. If you buy, you are a cannibal, and there is no hope; should you resist, fight tooth and nail and prepare for a revolution, there is hope. Choice is yours.