On 27th of February this year, an unidentified mob in Godhra, Gujarat set on fire a railway coach occupied mainly with Kar Sevaks (Hindu volunteers) returning from Ayodhya, the site of the movement to build a temple in the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. This heinous act left 57 dead - many of them women and children - and several others grievously injured. While this ghastly crime is still being investigated, to determine whether it was a pre-meditated assault by a group of Muslims or, as is a being alleged by some, a spontaneous reaction to the molestation of a Muslim girl by Kar Sevaks, the anti-Muslim carnage that followed has numbed the nation. Laxmi Murthy reports.
"............and they were all honourable men." To avenge the insult to the
dignity of 'their' women, from February 27th onwards, some 'bravehearts'
belonging to the Bajranj Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other militant
Hindu outfits went on a rampage, raping and mutilating women from the
Muslim community.
No matter that the rumours of Hindu women being kidnapped from the
Sabarmati Express, raped and their breasts cut off, were completely
fabricated by Sandesh, an incendiary local newspaper. No matter that the
incident was corroborated by neither the administration nor the police. No
matter that the same newspaper later issued a retraction of that particular
news item. And no matter that the Godhra incident was condemned in no
uncertain terms by all right-thinking persons. Yet women's bodies became
the site for a violent expression of a distorted 'patriotism' -- a ghastly
arena for playing out a 'love for the motherland' where Muslims represent
the detested 'other'.
The extent of sexual violence and brutality witnessed during the carnage in
Gujarat since the 28th of February is likened by many to the horrors of the
post-Partition riots in 1947. With an estimated 2,000 dead, more than
100,000 rendered homeless and property worth millions of rupees destroyed,
the toll is still mounting. Not since the 1984 Sikh massacres has the
country witnessed the systematic elimination of members of a particular
community. Yet, what distinguishes the current pogrom is the extent of
pre-meditation and infiltration of the civil administration and police by
fascist organizations like the RSS, Bajrang Dal and VHP as well as the
targeting of women and children for particularly savage acts.
The extent of sexual violence and brutality witnessed during the carnage in
Gujarat...is likened by many to the horrors of the
post-Partition riots in 1947.
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"Do not spare the women!" was the order given to the cadres by leaders of
the right wing Hindutva organizations. And the women were not spared. Nor
were the children. Teenagers Ruksana, Kheroon, Noorjahan and Farzana of
Naroda Patiya in Ahmedabad were gang raped and then burnt to death. Shabana
of Eral village in Kalol taluka -- described by her mother Medina as a
'flower yet to bloom' -- was raped and had her breasts hacked. Bilkees --
five months pregnant -- was gang raped and left for dead among the bodies
of her baby girl and other family members. The list is endless, the orgy of
violence numbing. And hope for justice in the present system is dim -- with
women being too terrorised to even file FIRs at police stations staffed by
openly anti-Muslim police, or get medical examinations while on the run.
A doctor in rural Vadodara said that the wounded who started pouring in
from the 28th of February had injuries of a kind he had never witnessed
before even in earlier situations of communal violence. In a grave
challenge to the Hippocratic oath, doctors have been threatened for
treating Muslim patients, and pressurised to use the blood donated by RSS
volunteers only to treat Hindu patients. Sword injuries, mutilated breasts
and burns of varying intensity characterised the early days of the
massacre. Doctors conducted post-mortems on a number of women who had been
gang raped, many of whom had been burnt subsequently. A woman from Kheda
district who was gangraped had her head shaved and 'Om' cut into her head
with a knife by the rapists. She died after a few days in the hospital.
There were other instances of 'Om' engraved with a knife on women's backs
and buttocks.
The mobs were composed of so-called 'ordinary' people from
various walks of life. People like you. People like me.
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For the survivors too the damage goes deep -- having watched their children
and close family members brutalised, hacked to death and set on fire in
front of their eyes. For children witnessing their mothers and sisters
being raped, their fathers and brothers being butchered, the emotional and
mental trauma cannot be put into words -- and it is anyone's guess when the
wounds will heal, if ever. 'Post-traumatic stress disorder' can only be
assessed once the trauma is past. The chilling reality is that the horror
continues. The schisms are so deep that even the most optimistic wonder if
the country can ever be the same. Relief camps in the state, mostly run by
religious bodies, are overflowing with people who have nowhere to go -- with
their homes and means of livelihood destroyed. Many are too insecure to go
back to the hostile neighbourhoods from where they were singled out and
driven away. For women, there is an overwhelming sense of loss of
community, of betrayal by their neighbours and friends. Those very
'friends' who came to enjoy 'sheer korma' at Id attacked them with inhuman
savagery.
For most of us in progressive movements, what is the most difficult to
reconcile is that the brutal assaults were not perpetrated only by
power-hungry politicians or a police force gone berserk, or even a handful
of hoodlums. The mobs were composed of so-called 'ordinary' people from
various walks of life. People like you. People like me.
Feminists are grappling with the disquieting reality that women too were
responsible for the violence -- part of mobs that killed, raped, looted and
burnt down Muslim houses, vehicles and shops. Even tribals and other
oppressed classes joined in the killing spree. The poison has spread deep
within the fabric of society, seeped into the mind of an uncomfortably
large chunk of Hindu men, women and children. The progressive sections have
had to face the fact that the silence of the majority may actually endorse
the violence. The polarisation is widespread and visible -- a photograph of
Hanuman on your door and a red dot on your forehead may be the difference
between life and death.
Logic and facts certainly have their place, but demonising the 'other' need
have no basis in rationality as we found. We met Hindu women who had a very
real fear of being overrun by Muslims, and fantastic stories of large
stores of weapons stacked in Muslim homes abounded. With utter disregard
for the principle that a democracy is measured by the manner in which
minorities are treated, these women had accepted in toto the notion that
minorities were hogging more than their share of the pie. Myths about
polygamy (though statistics show that more Hindu men are bigamous), family
size (again, facts show that Muslim families are no larger than Hindu ones)
are used to create a paranoia about being 'taken' over. These images, are
aided in no small measure by Muslim fundamentalist leaders have contributed
to building an image of the 'marauding, aggressive Muslim'. In the mind of
the Hindu woman, images of sexual violence predominate, transmitted to
their daughters magnified hundredfold. Women's very real experiences of
violence are patterned along communal lines, where religious identity
overshadows their experience of being women in a male-dominated world.
The line being crossed, i.e from hating Muslims to condoning their killing,
encouraging it, and even taking active part in it, has been taking place
with increasing ease and social sanction. Far from a moral condemnation of
the violence that has been unleashed, women are reportedly sending bangles
-- a sign of diminished manhood -- to RSS shakhas in places where the
devastation has not been so ferocious. Eliminating Muslims and brutalising
women is equated with machoism and patriotic duty.
Women of all religions are the most vulnerable to religious fundamentalism
-- whether in the shape of widow-immolation in the name of 'sati', or being
denied rights to inheritance, child custody and divorce through
discriminatory religious laws, or the Talibanesque diktats to Muslim women
to wear burqas. Yet, women are deeply religious keepers of the faith -- a
conundrum that has puzzled feminists of all shades agitating for women's
rights. A mild exasperation at the insistence on following vrats (religious fasts) has perforce given way to an acknowledgement of religious
fundamentalism among women as well. Women have formed the backbone of all
mass movements; and, however hard it is to accept, it is clear that women
have been successfully mobilised by the Shiv Sena, Durga Vahini, the RSS
and other Hindu fundamentalist organizations. Yet, it is equally clear that
the promise of power in these male-dominated outfits is chimerical, since
the leadership continues to be male, and women used only as a medium to
transmit messages of malevolence. Women's ability to network, make links
and communicate at intimate levels has been harnessed for the hate campaign
against minorities.
Can the secular women's movement re-orient the discourse where it belongs --
to a reiteration of egalitarian civil laws over discriminatory religious
precepts, access to land and other productive resources for women and other
oppressed classes? The real battle is elsewhere. Unfortunately, the arena
has been hijacked to fight an illusory war.
For only if women forge bonds beyond religious and ethnic affiliations, to
reiterate a sisterhood borne of a collective experience of oppression, can
the Ruksanas, Kheroons, Noorjahans and Farzanas hope to get justice.