The Rape That Shook India

After the Delhi gang rape case of 2012, India is once again up in arms against sexual crime. People want justice in the Kathua case, involving  an 8-year-old girl belonging to the Bakarwals, a nomadic community of Jammu and Kashmir. She was brutally raped and then murdered in Rasana village of Kathua district of Jammu region, in January of this year.

The Kathua rape case didn’t get much attention from across the country until mid-April, when media organizations reported the chilling details of the rape and murder after a charge sheet was filed by the local investigation agency. The charge sheet mentioned the graphic details of the planning and execution of the crime.

The girl was kidnapped on January 10. As per the police report, she was kept captive in a Hindu temple in Rasana village, where she was dosed with sedatives and raped repeatedly for four days, before those accused strangled her to death. The charge sheet filed before the court held Sanji Ram as the main accused in conspiring to commit the heinous crime.

Local police initially investigated the case, but have been accused of destroying crucial evidence. Two officials have also been named in the charge sheet for destruction of evidence. Bloodstained clothes, for instance, were washed before they were sent to a forensic lab for investigation.

The investigation revealed that the crime was planned to scare the Bakarwals away from the village, as they had started settling down in the area for the past few years. The Bakarwals, a nomadic Muslim community, migrate to the hilly pasture areas of Kashmir along with their livestock to graze them for the entire summer season and settle down in the plains of Jammu in the winter season. The charge sheet and media reports suggest that this was not an isolated sexual crime but part of a conspiracy against the nomadic community.

The crime comes against the backdrop of increasing hate crimes against minorities across India since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came in power in 2014. In April 2017, a Pew Research Center study had ranked India the fourth-worst country for religious intolerance out of 198 nations.

After the Kathua rape and murder case made headlines across the Indian and international media, many protests took place across the state of Jammu and Kashmir and India as a whole to demand stern punishment for the culprits and justice for the innocent girl. Students across Kashmir held peaceful protests regarding the Kathua rape case; however in several places in South Kashmir students pelted stones at the security forces. The security forces retaliated with tear gas and aerial firing to disperse the mob. Many were injured during these protests.