INDIA'S DAUGHTER
In India, defacing, disfiguring and insulting our national flag is a criminal offence; the punishment includes a jail sentence or a fine or both. Of late, we police our patriotism and codify our nationalism and use loose labels like ‘anti-national’ even in the course of routine disagreements. This reductionism has unfortunately become the new normal.
So in this age of outrage and competitive nationalism, where is our anger over how the tricolour was desecrated and debased by being used at a rally for a man accused of rape and murder in Jammu’s Kathua district? An eight-year-old, Asifa, from the shepherd Bakerwal community, who was abducted, sexually abused and killed — her father says the body came back with burn marks, visible signs of torture and genital mutilation — deserves just as much of our empathy and rage as the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim did.
The State Police arrested a Special Police Officer (SPO) by the name of Deepak Khajuria as the main accused in the case. But a self-styled Right-wing group called Hindu Ekta Manch has stood up in favour of Khajuria; their street agitation to free him saw the flag being held by protesters, as well as loud chants of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”.
If this isn’t a subversion of nationalism, what is? Yet, where are all the patriots? Where are those crusaders who file criminal cases when someone even inadvertently holds the flag upside down? Or wear the flag on their shirt or dress? Remember police action against fashion designer Malini Ramani when she wore a flag dress? What is worse: wearing the flag colours with affection on your clothes or using the tricolour and patriotic slogans as a cloak for hatred and bigotry?
What else can you call people who communalise the rape of a child? What else can you call those who turn the grave of a girl into a metaphorical gladiatorial battle between Hindus and Muslims? What else should you say of those who want to widen the gap between the regions of Jammu and Kashmir — a division that can only hurt India’s national and strategic interests? Which other word can you use for those who call for the social boycott of the Gujjar-Bakerwal nomad community (a Muslim minority in that area) merely for demanding justice for one of their own children?
I’m glad that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, will introduce the death penalty for rapists of girls under 12 years old, following an outcry over the latest sexual assaults to shock the country.
Modi convened an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday to approve an executive order, or ordinance, that will amend India’s criminal law. The order will also force police to complete rape investigations within two months and extend maximum sentences for the rape of girls under 16 and women.
I would argue that after this ugliness, all politicians — mainstream parties as well as Right-wing groups in Jammu and separatists groups in the Valley — should keep their distance from this sensitive case. This is no time for point-scoring or political sloganeering. In the past divisions like these have only magnified the differences within the state and pitted two religions and communities against each other.
And we cannot forget that in the end this is about a young girl who took her ponies to graze near a village pond when she was kidnapped, drugged, brutalised and dumped in the thick of the forest. She was a child.
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Illustration by Kaushikee Gupta