Rape: A Political Weapon in Modi's India

An 8-year-old Muslim girl Asifa Bano was locked in a Hindu temple, drugged, gang-raped for several days and then bludgeoned to death in Indian occupied Kashmir, according to a report in a leading American newspaper.

Gang Rape Victim: 8-Year-Old Asifa Bano

Support of Rapists: 

The horror of a Muslim child's rape and murder was made even worse when the ruling BJP-affiliated right-wing Hindu lawyers marched in defense of her attackers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reluctantly condemned the crime after waiting for several days. His belated acknowledgment came in response to international outrage.

Is this just another rape in India? Did the child's Muslim faith make her a target? Has Islamophobia gone mainstream in India?  To answer these questions, let us put some context to what is happening in Modi's India.

India saw about 39,000 rape cases reported in 2016, a 12% jump over the prior year, according to Indian crime statistics.  Children were reported as victims in 42% of the cases.

It is hard to say how many of the rape victims were Muslim.  What is known, however, is the exhortation by iconic Hindutva leaders to rape of Muslim women.  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the founders of right-wing RSS who Prime Minister Modi describes as "worthy of worship", is among them. After getting elected to the highest office in India, Modi paid tribute to Savarkar by laying flowers at his portrait that hangs in India's Parliament.

Hindu Nationalist Leader VD Savarkar

VD Savarkar, in one of his books titled Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, elaborates on why raping of Muslim women is not only justified but encouraged.

Savarkar has used revisionist Hindutva history to exhort his followers to rape Muslim women as payback for historic wrongs he believes were committed by Muslim conquerers of India. “Once they are haunted with this dreadful apprehension that the Muslim women too, stand in the same predicament in case the Hindus win, the future Muslim conquerors will never dare to think of such molestation of Hindu women,” he writes.

Hindutva Revisionist History: 

American history professor Audrey Truschke, in her recently published book "Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King" has argued that colonial-era British historians deliberately distorted the history of Indian Muslim rule to vilify Muslim rulers as part of the British policy to divide and conquer India.  These misrepresentations of Muslim rule made during the British Raj appear to have been accepted as fact not just by Islamophobic Hindu Nationalists but also by at least some of the secular Hindus in India and Muslim intellectuals in present day Pakistan, says the author.  Aurangzeb was neither a saint nor a villain; he was a man of his time who should be judged by the norms of his times and compared with his contemporaries, the author adds.

Truschke says the original history of the Mughal rule was written in Persian. However, it is the English translation of the original work that are often used to distort it. Here's what she says about it in her book:

"The bulk of Mughal histories are written in Persian, the official administrative language of the Mughal empire but a foreign tongue in India today. Out of necessity and ease, many historians disregard the original Persian text and rely instead on English translations. This approach narrows the the library of materials drastically, and many translations of the Mughal texts are of questionable quality, brimming with mistranslations and abridgments. Some of these changes conveniently served the agendas of the translators, especially colonial-era translations that tend to show Indo--Muslim kings at their worst so that the British would seem virtuous by comparison (foremost here is Elliot and Dowson's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians). Such materials are great for learning about British colonialism, but they present an inaccurate picture of Mughal India."
Modi's Record: 

In 2002 when Narendra Modi was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, hundreds of young Muslim girls were sexually assaulted, tortured and killed.  These rapes were condoned by the ruling BJP, whose refusal to intervene lead to the rape and killing of thousands and displacement of 200,000 Muslims.

Since his election to India's top elected office, Modi has elevated fellow right-wing Hindu extremists to positions of power in India. Yogi Adiyanath, known for his highly inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric, was hand-picked in 2016 by Modi to head India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.

Adiyanath's supporters brag about digging up Muslim women from their graves and raping them. In a video uploaded in 2014,  he said, “If [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, we’ll kill 100 Muslims.”

Yogi wants to "install statues of Goddess Gauri, Ganesh and Nandi in every mosque”.  Before his election, he said, “If one Hindu is killed, we won’t go to the police, we’ll kill 10 Muslims”.  He endorsed the beef lynching of Indian Muslim Mohammad Akhlaque and demanded that the victim's family be charged with cow slaughter.

Madhav S. Golwalkar, considered among the founders of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India, saw Islam and Muslims as enemies. He said: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers".

In his book We, MS Golwalkar wrote the following in praise of what Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did to Jews as a model for what Hindus should do to Muslims in India: "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Social Hostility Against Minorities in South Asia. Source: Bloomberg

Rise of Hindu Nationalists: 

The situation for India's minorities, particularly Muslims, has become a lot worse in the last two years with Hindu mobs raping and lynching Muslims with impunity. The 2016 election of anti-Muslim radical Hindu priest Yogi Adiyanath as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, is seen as a clear signal from Mr. Modi that his anti-Muslim policies will continue.

Mohammad Akhlaq is believed to be the first victim of Hindu lynch mobs claiming to be protecting the cow. He was accused of consuming beef. For more than a week Prime Minister Narendra Modi remained silent over the incident and even after he spoke about it, he did not condemn it outright. The ruling BJP officials even tried to explain it as the result of the genuine anger of the Hindus over the slaughtering of a cow.

Pew Research Report:

A Pew Research report from data collected in 2015, about a year after Modi rose to power, found that the level of hostility against religious minorities is "very high". In fact, it said India scores 9 for social hostilities against religious minorities on a scale of 0-10.   Other countries in "very high" category for social hostilities include Nigeria, Iraq and Syria. Pakistan's score on this scale is 7 while Bangladesh is 5.5.
Pew Research Report on Religious Freedom

History of Anti-Muslim Riots in India:

Paul Richard Brass, professor emeritus of political science and international relations at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, has spent many years researching communal riots in India. He has debunked all the action-reaction theories promoted by Hindu Nationalists like Modi. He believes these are not spontaneous but planned and staged as "a grisly form of dramatic production" by well-known perpetrators from the Sangh Parivar of which Prime Minister Modi has been a member since his youth.

Here's an excerpt of Professor Brass's work:

"Events labelled “Hindu-Muslim riots” have been recurring features in India for three-quarters of a century or more. In northern and western India, especially, there are numerous cities and town in which riots have become endemic. In such places, riots have, in effect, become a grisly form of dramatic production in which there are three phases: preparation/rehearsal, activation/enactment, and explanation/interpretation. In these sites of endemic riot production, preparation and rehearsal are continuous activities. Activation or enactment of a large-scale riot takes place under particular circumstances, most notably in a context of intense political mobilization or electoral competition in which riots are precipitated as a device to consolidate the support of ethnic, religious, or other culturally marked groups by emphasizing the need for solidarity in face of the rival communal group. The third phase follows after the violence in a broader struggle to control the explanation or interpretation of the causes of the violence. In this phase, many other elements in society become involved, including journalists, politicians, social scientists, and public opinion generally. At first, multiple narratives vie for primacy in controlling the explanation of violence. On the one hand, the predominant social forces attempt to insert an explanatory narrative into the prevailing discourse of order, while others seek to establish a new consensual hegemony that upsets existing power relations, that is, those which accept the violence as spontaneous, religious, mass-based, unpredictable, and impossible to prevent or control fully. This third phase is also marked by a process of blame displacement in which social scientists themselves become implicated, a process that fails to isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, and instead diffuses blame widely, blurring responsibility, and thereby contributing to the perpetuation of violent productions in future, as well as the order that sustains them."

"In India, all this takes place within a discourse of Hindu-Muslim hostility that denies the deliberate and purposive character of the violence by attributing it to the spontaneous reactions of ordinary Hindus and Muslims, locked in a web of mutual antagonisms said to have a long history. In the meantime, in post-Independence India, what are labelled Hindu-Muslim riots have more often than not been turned into pogroms and massacres of Muslims, in which few Hindus are killed. In fact, in sites of endemic rioting, there exist what I have called “institutionalized riot systems,” in which the organizations of militant Hindu nationalism are deeply implicated. Further, in these sites, persons can be identified, who play specific roles in the preparation, enactment, and explanation of riots after the fact. Especially important are what I call the “fire tenders,” who keep Hindu-Muslim tensions alive through various inflammatory and inciting acts; “conversion specialists,” who lead and address mobs of potential rioters and give a signal to indicate if and when violence should commence; criminals and the poorest elements in society, recruited and rewarded for enacting the violence; and politicians and the vernacular media who, during the violence, and in its aftermath, draw attention away from the perpetrators of the violence by attributing it to the actions."

Summary:

India is seeing a spate of gang rapes and lynchings of Muslims by Hindu mobs who have been emboldened by the rise of anti-Muslim Hindu Nationalist leader Narendra Modi since his 2014 election to the highest office in India.  In their writings, iconic Hindutva leaders like Savarkar have encouraged rape of Muslim women. The elevation of radical Hindu Yogi Adiyanath to the top job in Uttar Pradesh by Mr. Modi has further alarmed India's Muslim minority. University of Washington's Professor Emeritus Paul Brass, who has documented the history of anti-Muslim violence in India,  describes it as "a grisly form of dramatic production" by well-known perpetrators from the Sangh Parivar of which Prime Minister Modi has been a member since his youth. Pew Research report on religious violence confirms India's status as a country with "very high" levels of social hostilities against religious minorities.  There appears to be no relief in sight for them at least in the foreseeable future.

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Comment by Riaz Haq on April 27, 2018 at 7:53am

India’s abuse of women is the biggest human rights violation on Earth
Deepa Narayan
Tragic rape cases have shocked the country. But the everyday suffering of 650 million Indian women and girls goes unnoticed

India can arguably be accused of the largest-scale human rights violation on Earth: the persistent degradation of the vast majority of its 650 million girls and women. And this includes the middle classes, as I found when interviewing 600 women and men in India’s cities.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/27/india-abuse-w...

India is at war with its girls and women. The planned rape of eight-year-old Asifa in a temple by several men, including a policeman who later washed the clothes she was wearing to destroy evidence, was particularly horrific. Asifa’s rape has outraged and shaken the entire country. Yet sexual abuse in India remains widespread despite tightening of rape laws in 2013. According to the National Crimes Records Bureau, in 2016 the rape of minor girls increased by 82% compared with the previous year. Chillingly, across all rape cases, 95% of rapists were not strangers but family, friends and neighbours.

The culturally sanctioned degradation of women is so complete that the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, launched a national programme called Beti Bachao (Save Our Girls). India can arguably be accused of the largest-scale human rights violation on Earth: the persistent degradation of the vast majority of its 650 million girls and women. And this includes the middle classes, as I found when interviewing 600 women and men in India’s cities.

India’s women are traumatised in less obvious ways than by tanks in the streets, bombs and warlords. Our oppression starts innocuously: it occurs in private life, within families, with girls being locked up in their own homes. This everyday violence is the product of a culture that bestows all power on men, and that does not even want women to exist. This is evident in the unbalanced sex ratios at birth, even in wealthy families. But India also kills its women slowly. This violence is buried in the training of women in some deadly habits that invite human rights violations, but that are considered the essence of good womanhood.

The first teaches girls to be afraid of their own bodies. When a girl is not supposed to exist, 1.3 billion people collectively pretend that girls don’t have bodies and especially no sexual parts. If girls do not have bodies, sexual molestation is not possible, and if it does happen, it has to be denied, and if it cannot be denied, the girl must be blamed.

Denial of sexuality in homes is another habit that is deadly to girls. Almost every woman I interviewed had experienced some form of sexual molestation. Only two had told their mothers, only to be dismissed, “Yes, this happens in families,” or “No, this did not happen.” Indian government surveys show that 42% of girls in the country have been sexually abused.

Speech is another basic human right. To have a voice, to speak up, is to be recognised, to belong. But girls are trained in silence. They are told to be quiet, to speak softly, dheere bolo, to have no opinions, no arguments, no conflicts. Silent women disappear. They are easy to ignore, overrule, and violate without repercussions. Impunity flourishes.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 27, 2018 at 3:14pm

“SAY NO TO RSS SAKHA IN AMU”, Writes AMUSU President (Maskoor Ahmad Usmani)

http://ironyofindia.com/say-no-to-rss-sakha-in-amu-writes-amusu-pre...

1925 marks the birth year of the hateful and terror breading organization Rastriya Swayam Sewak Sangh, founded by Dr. K. B. Hegedwar and the coward V. D. Savarkar. The much exaggerated ‘veer’ Savarker was the same person who pleaded and begged to the British numerous times from jail for mercy and his release. Later, these fanatics shared by common ideology came under the banner of RSS. The tail of espionage and working hand in glove with the British is much known in the history of pre-independent India. From exchanging outfits and staging violence to spiting venom in public meetings there have been no stone unturned by the RSS to break down the social fabric of India.


It was on 30th January, 1947 (1948) when Ganghiji was gunned down by the Hindu fanatic and member of the RSS Nathu Ram Godse at Birla House, Delhi. Soon after the death of Gandhiji, in a letter to Golwaker dated 11th September, 1948 Sardar Patel the then home minister of India pointed out “Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.” What does this vindicates? And why was RSS so much happy that it had to distribute sweets after the killing of Gandhi?

In a letter dated 14th March, 1948, Dr. Rajendra Prasad wrote to Sardar Patel:

“I am told that RSS people have a plan of creating trouble. They have got a number of men dressed as Muslims and looking like Muslims who are to create trouble with the Hindus by attacking them and thus inciting the Hindus. Similarly there will be some Hindus among them who will attack Muslims and thus incite Muslims. The result of this kind of trouble amongst the Hindus and Muslims will be to create conflagration.”

Among RSS’s ideological forefathers the so called ‘Guru’ Golwalkar occupies a big space, in his book ‘Bunch Of Thoughts’ M. S. Golwalkar spits out venom in the following words:

“Even to this day there are so many who say, ‘now there is no Muslim problem at all. All those riotous elements who supported Pakistan have gone away once for all. The remaining Muslims are devoted to our country. After all, they have no other place to go and they are bound to remain loyal’… It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan on the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country”

How the narrative for Indian Muslims having nexus with Pakistan has come to fore in contemporary times we need to look back of how virulent this notion was treatised by Golwalkar in his book, “…within the country there are so many Pakistans’… The conclusion is that, in practically every place, there are Muslims who are in constant touch with Pakistan over transmitter…”

There are some serious questions that need to be answered; it is a deep travesty for our country that the heads of incumbent dispensation are members of the same traitor organization.

RSS, which was responsible for pre and post-independence rioting, conspiring and spreading communal hatred, paradoxically in contemporary India claims itself to be nationalist and seek others patriotism for the nation. After seventy years of Independence it is bemoaning to see that elected BJP MPs like Sakshi Maharaj demands to declare Nathu Ram Godse as a national patriot.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 11, 2018 at 5:17pm

BBC News - #India #rape: Third teenager attacked and burned in a week. #Modi #BJP #Hindutva

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44088004#

A teenage girl in India has been raped and burned alive by her attacker - the third instance of such an attack in the same week.

The 16-year-old girl died after being soaked in fuel and set on fire at her home in the Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh.

Police said she was killed after telling her attacker she would inform her family about the rape.

Two other similar attacks, one fatal, took place in Jharkhand this week.

A 17-year-old girl remains in critical condition after being set on fire by a suspect who allegedly said he wanted to marry the victim, but had been rejected.

The earlier case involved a 16-year-old who was burned alive after her parents complained to village elders about her rape. The accused had been ordered to do sit-ups and pay a fine as punishment, prompting them to beat the girl's parents and kill her.

In the most recent attack, the victim was at home alone in Jujharpur village when she was attacked. Police said they had arrested a suspect, named as 28-year-old Ravi Chadhar.

Widespread outrage
India is facing renewed public outrage over the number of violent sexual assaults in the country.

BBC India correspondent Soutik Biswas recently wrote that "rape is increasingly used as an instrument to assert power and intimidate the powerless in India".

Recent public anger over sexual assaults was sparked by the rape and murder of an eight-year old girl in January.

The girl, a member of a Muslim nomadic tribe, was found dead in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Eight Hindu men were arrested, and there was an outcry when two ministers from the Hindu BJP party attended a rally in support of the accused. In April, Hindu right-wing groups staged protests over the arrests.

Another BJP politician has also been accused of raping a 16-year-old girl - a charge he denies.

Public outrage over sexual violence in India rose dramatically after the 2012 gang rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus.

Four of the accused were given a death sentence, recently upheld on appeal, and the case led to new anti-rape laws.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 14, 2018 at 7:52pm

https://theprint.in/governance/twitter-removes-handle-of-man-booked...

Twitter removes handle of man booked for his tweet encouraging rape & trafficking of Kashmiri women
PTI13 May, 2018

An FIR against the accused Ashish Kaul has been registered at the Kothi Bagh police station | @younustraluk | Twitter

Twitter removed the user from its social media platform after the police booked him for spreading hate against Kashmiri women.

Srinagar: The police on Saturday, 12 May, lodged an FIR against a Twitter user Ashish Kaul over abusive tweets about Kashmiri Muslims and asked the social media service for more details.

“Police in Kashmir took cognisance of the matter after it found the posts were abusive and attract offences covered under law,” a police spokesman said.


Screenshot from Ashish Kaul’s handle | @gowhargeelani | Twitter
He said an FIR has been registered at Kothi Bagh police station.

Police have also asked Twitter India to provide details of the Twitter user so that he is made to face the law, the spokesman added.

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http://ironyofindia.com/american-company-fired-indian-hate-monger-e...


American Company fired Indian Hate-monger employee for his Anti-Kashmiri Muslim women tweets


His tweets evoked angry reactions from social media users with many tagging his employer, DDI World, and asking if it condoned such hate-mongering.

The company, an international firm specialising in providing leadership tools to corporates around the world, acted with lightening speed to inform that Kaul, the hate-monger, had been fired. The company said, “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. As a matter of policy, we cannot publically comment on employee matters; however, we are taking this situation seriously.”

DDI published statement clarifying that, the employee was suspended immediately after his tweet was reported to the company.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 20, 2018 at 9:36pm

#Muslim beaten to death in #India for allegedly killing #cow http://po.st/b5A0Mo via @ChannelNewsAsia #Modi #beef #hindutva #Modi #BJP

A Muslim man accused of killing a cow was beaten to death by a mob in central India, police said on Sunday (May 20), the latest vigilante murder over the animal considered sacred by Hindus.

Siraj Khan, a 45-year-old tailor, was attacked in the Satna district of Madhya Pradesh state on early Friday and died at the scene, local police official Arvind Tiwari told AFP.


Kahn's friend Shakeel Maqbool, who was also attacked, was admitted to hospital with critical injuries.

As details of the violent assault emerged at the weekend 400 additional police were deployed to the district on late Saturday as inquiries widened, the Press Trust of India reported.

"We have arrested four people, and they have been sent to judicial custody. We are investigating what prompted the attack," Tiwari said.

He added that meat and a bull carcass was found at the scene, but did not elaborate as investigations were ongoing.

Hindus consider cows sacred and slaughtering the animals, or possessing or consuming beef, is banned in most Indian states.

Cow slaughter in Madhya Pradesh carries a maximum seven-year jail term but many other parts of India impose life sentences for infringements.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised to completely outlaw cow slaughter in India.

The right-wing Hindu BJP has been accused of turning a blind eye to a rising number of vigilante attacks in the name of cow protection.

Rights groups say Hindu mobs have been emboldened under the party, who stormed to power in 2014. Many of the victims are Muslims.

In two prominent cases last year, a dairy farmer was killed on a roadside for transporting cows and a Muslim teenager accused of carrying beef was stabbed to death on a crowded train.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 2, 2018 at 5:01pm

More than five years after the #Delhi gang-#rape, #India is still no country for #women. #Modi #India #misogyny https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/07/02/m...

One of my earliest memories of walking in the streets of India involves being groped by a stranger as I went out to dinner with my family. I still viscerally remember that moment — and the moment right after, when I turned to the man who groped me and apologized, thinking it was my fault for, apparently, falling into his hands. At the time, I couldn’t believe anyone actually wanted to touch me there.

I was just six years old.

Incidents like this are commonplace for Indian women. In fact, every single one I know has their own story to relate — some more serious than others. So when I first heard of a newly-released Thomson Reuters Foundation report that ranked India as the most dangerous country in the world for women, I wasn’t surprised. You only have to spend a day in India to realize that, if you are a woman in a public setting, you had better be armed with either a large handbag or pepper spray.

But in India, the response to the report was more impassioned. It generated outrage among politicians, academics and civil society members — groups that generally struggle to find common ground. How, they asked, could India be ranked higher than countries such as Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo, where women are caught in the middle of violent conflict, and where sexual violence is routinely used as a tool of war? And why was it listed higher than Saudi Arabia, where leading female activists are still languishing in prison for championing women’s right to drive?

For its part, India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development rejected the report, criticizing its methodology and claiming that it was a clear effort “to malign the nation.” Politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) likewise accused Thomson Reuters of having an “agenda,” though they did not specify what that means. But this knee-jerk defensiveness completely misses the point.

Yes, the report is methodologically flawed. It was based on an opinion poll of 548 “experts” — who have not yet been identified — and relies on perception rather than fact. We do not know what data and criteria were used to compare countries, or even where the surveyed experts were from. These factors could have vast implications for how countries were ultimately ranked.

And yes, in terms of actual numbers, India still has a lower reported rate of rape per 100,000 people than most other countries, including the United States. This is thought to be likely because of extreme levels of under-reporting, though there is some evidence that reporting rates are on the rise. Statistics are an imperfect way to compare countries but, at first glance, singling out India for censure seems misleading.

Still, even with its flaws, the report highlights something important: Despite lawmakers’ attempts to convince us that India is safer for women now than it was before an infamous 2012 gang rape and murder in Delhi, conditions remain largely the same. Women still face harassment and abuse on a daily basis — just ask the scores of women who were molested en masse on the streets of Bangalore last year. For all of Modi’s rhetoric about “treating women like goddesses,” women are still treated as anything but.

The Thomson Reuters report casts a spotlight on a question that is not asked often enough: How much has the Modi government — or any Indian government, for that matter — actually done to tackle violence against women? The BJP can point to its large-scale awareness program for girls’ empowerment, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save the Girl, Educate the Girl).

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 7, 2019 at 8:23am

People in #India Searching For 8-year old #Muslim Girl Victim of Kathua #Rape Videos On Porn Sites Exposes Sadist Mentality Of #Indian Society. Search term ‘Asifa’ was trending in India on XVideos, the world’s largest #pornography websites. #Modi #BJP https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/people-searching-for-asifa-ra...


Remember that eight-year-old victim in the Kathua gangrape and murder case? She was kidnapped, kept in a temple, drugged, raped by several men for several days, mutilated and finally, brutally killed in January. How could you forget?

The filthy mentality of a section of this country is exposed once again after the screenshot below started making rounds on the internet.

The image shows that the search term ‘Asifa’ was trending in India on XVideos, one of the world’s largest pornography websites.

It may seem extremely crude to be true but unfortunately, it is. The search shows the extremely sadist, sick and voyeuristic mentality of the consumer base for miseries of other people.

A recent study claimed that Indians are among the most "prolific consumers" of internet pornography, accounting for 40% of the website’s 14.2 billion visits.

The search hints at rampant sociopathy and excessive suppressed sexuality.

How can one relish the video of a dead child to satiate perversion? Porn enthusiasts, looking for fodder to gratify their deviance have searched multiple websites to find some sort of a clip. Search terms have surged overnight with people prefixing her name followed by a “porn”, “clip” and “videos”.

“Forced sex India” and “rape sex videos Indian” are among the top searches on porn websites.

Recently, a report said that in Uttar Pradesh, people are buying footage of a woman being raped for the price of a roadside meal. Al Jazeera found several videos that appeared to depict rape for sale across the state. They cost from Rs 20 to Rs 200 and are transmitted to a customer's mobile phone in a matter of seconds.

The faces of women are visible, their screams are clear and the attacks on them are brutal. Such videos are made to blackmail victims so that they don’t report the rape but easily find their way into the dark trade of selling and buying rape videos. In plain terms, these videos are mostly referred to as “local films”.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 5, 2020 at 10:33am

#India’s #rape culture grows without shame or consequences. If #Delhi #school boys on Instagram privately plan to rape underage girls, then men from IT cells of #BJP & its allies publicly threaten women on Twitter and Facebook. #Hindutva https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/locker-room-boys-it-cell-men-india-... via @ThePrintIndia

India has a rape culture. When not making “victims” out of women — young and old, newborn and dead — it breathes life into Indian boys’ and men’s everyday public conversations and private group chats. One such private group on Instagram, Bois Locker Room, was outed on Twitter Sunday. Screenshots of Delhi school boys sharing images of underage girls, with conversations ranging from ‘jokes’ about their private parts to planning a gang rape, went viral. They finally drew the attention of the Delhi Commission for Women, which sent a notice to both the police and Instagram demanding a probe.

But while this Instagram group had about 30-35 members, thousands of locker room boys grew up into same sexist and misogynist adults a long time ago, and no one took note. As members of Indian political parties’ IT cells, they are doing publicly what Bois Locker Room boys did privately. They log into their social media accounts every day and go after women who wear ‘short clothes’, speak their mind, talk back to them, don’t worship their political leaders, or don’t ascribe to their political ideologies — everything that hits at their masculinity. IT cells of all political parties — BJP, AAP and Congress — are part of this big boys’ club. But the BJP IT cell is most notorious.

The tools deployed by these men to target women are the same — threats of gang rape, mutilation, reminders of past heinous crimes, body shaming, slut shaming, character assassination, and spreading rumours. These men reduce the existence of women to sexual intercourse and their body parts, and want to teach them a lesson by circulating their nude pictures. They don’t spare their target’s mother, sister or any female relative

Almost all these men swear by their religion, are “nationalists and patriots”, and are followed by leading politicians of India, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Some are politicians themselves, like former MLA and BJP leader Kapil Mishra, who has targeted public figures such as Swara Bhasker, Kavita Krishnan, Shehla Rashid, Barkha Dutt, Alka Lamba in the past and most recently, directed his vulgarity at Jamia student Safoora Zargar over her pregnancy.

As the screenshots of ugly conversations of Bois Locker Room began to emerge on Twitter, many expressed shock over the language, the sexualisation of underage girls as well as the fact that they were casually planning to rape a girl.

But if the locker room boys talk mostly about girls’ breasts, the big boys of IT cells are obsessed with women’s vagina. Every other day, there’s a Twitter hashtag targeting the genitals of the mother of the person in whose name the attack is trending. But these rarely draw anyone’s attention — be it of Twitter authorities, the Indian police or the government. It’s part of men’s everyday conversation to refer to a mother or sister’s vagina; men’s abuses directed at other men are centred on telling them they rape their mothers and sisters.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 28, 2021 at 9:12am

#Femicide, #rapes, culture of #violence make #India the worst country for #women. #India is the worst followed by war-torn #Afghanistan (2nd), #Syria (3rd). #Modi #Hindutva #Misogyny https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/femicide-...

India is perceived as having the worst record for sexual violence, harassment from cultural and traditional practices and human trafficking, meaning it is now considered the least safe country in the world for women.

These are the findings of a global perception poll carried out by Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charity, which surveyed 558 experts on women’s issues in order to assess nations on overall safety for women.

A failure to improve conditions has led to India becoming the most dangerous country for women; it was fourth in 2011, the last time the poll was conducted.

India is ahead of war-torn Afghanistan (2nd), Syria (3rd) as well as Somalia, a country that ranks significantly lower on human development indices, on overall perception of threats to women’s safety.

India is the only country to feature in the top five rankings for each of the six categories looked at by the poll, never registering lower than the fourth place.

“When only 10% of women in India own land compared to 20% globally, femicide rates are the highest in the world, there are 37 million more men than women in the Indian population, and 27% girls are married before the age of 18 – also the highest rate in the world- you begin to understand the reality in India,” Monique Villa, chief executive officer, Thomson Reuters Foundation, told IndiaSpend.

“India is still fighting the deep-rooted patriarchal mindset, which sees women as inferior in the world’s biggest democracy,” Villa added.

Cases of sexual violence against women and minors in India made international headlines in 2018 with the high-profile case of eight-year-old Asifa in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district, and the gang rape of anti-trafficking activists in Jharkhand.

The government has responded with harsher penalties for rapists and death penalty for child rapists but this may, in fact, deter reporting of rapes, IndiaSpend reported on May 2018.

A deteriorating situation

“India tops the list with levels of violence against women still running high, more than five years after the rape and murder of a student on a bus in Delhi sparked national outrage and government pledges to tackle the issue,” The Thomson Reuters Foundation report, released on June 26, 2018, said.

When the poll was conducted in 2011, India was ranked fourth overall, better only than Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan.

Its ranking was primarily attributed to high instances of female foeticide and infanticide, and human trafficking.

Seven years later, the 2018 poll shows India has been ranked as the most dangerous country for women on three significant issues:

Sexual violence: including domestic rape, lack of access to justice in rape cases, sexual harassment and coercion into sex as a form of corruption;
Cultural & religious practices: including female genital mutilation, child and forced marriage, physical abuse and female infanticide/foeticide; and
Human trafficking: including domestic servitude, forced labour and forced marriage

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 21, 2021 at 7:10am

#India's #Rape Scandal: PBS FRONTLINE correspondent Ramita Navai investigates a wave of shocking rape cases in India — some of them drawing in politicians from the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party #BJP #Modi #crime #Hindutva https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/indias-rape-scandal/?utm_so... via @frontlinepbs

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