A Child's Brutal Rape In India: Some Tough Questions For The World

Rape is everyday news in India. You read, you forget—rape fatigue, if you will. And yet, more than five years after the country erupted in protests over the rape of a young woman in a moving bus in the country’s capital, prompting a major change in laws related to sexual offences, Indians are again staring in the eye of a rape that is not only unimaginably pitiless but was also meticulously planned and executed for political reasons.

Here are the bare facts: Eight-year-old Asifa, a child belonging to a nomadic Muslim tribe in Kashmir was abducted, sedated and raped repeatedly inside the premises of a temple by a gang of men. She was then murdered by banging her head against a stone and her body was abandoned to rot.

This was allegedly committed by Hindu men to create fear in her tribal community and make them flee. And that was not all. Local policemen conspired with the suspects to destroy evidence and some of the town’s residents held marches – not to protest the rape but to prevent the arrest of the suspects! Among these protesters were lawyers and leaders of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It is not just the horror of the crime that has caused the incident to catch international attention – what is reverberating globally are the questions it raises about the impunity with which rape is used as a political weapon, the ‘vicious patriarchy’ that headlines this piece and the desperate lack of change in safety for women despite spurts of public fury.

This article looks at this local issue with a global eye and asks some questions of its own. Is there something irreducible about Indian misogyny? Does an atmosphere of macho nationalism perpetuate violence? Isn’t seeking punitive justice for women little more than melodrama?

As the author says, since men do terrible things to women all around the world, these are questions to which we need to seek answers always and not just when we avert our eyes from the bright purple dress on a tiny battered body.