Indian army uses rape as a tool of retaliation: HRW

By Mian Saifur Rehman (freelance writer)

Despite claiming to be one of the biggest democracies of the world and a legatee of one of the ancient most civilisations, India has never ever ceased to brutalise the vulnerable categories of its own people.

It seems that notwithstanding the so-called secular nature of Indian Constitution, the class hatred, rooted in supremacy of one caste over the other, still rules the roost.

The treatment meted out to the “lowly ones” like Shoodras and Dalits by those from the higher (and ‘ noble ‘) categories like Brahmins, is now a globally known fact.

The worst hit community that has been at the receiving end since the Kashmiri freedom fighters’ ‘Intifada’ (uprising) of 1988/89, are Muslims of Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOJ&K). Their ‘sin’, according to the superior Hindu majority of India, is that they are Muslims who are despised for their love for Pakistan. Repeated Indian governments, supported by their security establishment, have marked Pakistan as their number one adversary. The government of Bhartya Janata Party (BJP), now led by Nirandera Modi, has crossed all limits in fomenting social-and-class hatred.

It requires volumes to be written on BJP’s jingoism and violent ways. Violence, in fact, has remained a tool of oppression and suppression when the world had not yet transformed.

India is, however, an odd-country-out in the transformed, more civilised, more tolerant world, given its leaders’ penchant for brutal suppression of non-Hindus seeking equality in India at par with the powerful Hindu ruling lot that is ‘afflicted’ with superiority complex.

The freedom fighters of Kashmir Valley, belonging to Muslim majority, are the worst hit.

All the thinkable and unthinkable tools of suppression have been used to brutalise them with the backing of draconian, black laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which authorises Indian soldiers to enter any premises in IOJ&K without a search warrant and wreak havoc on the poor, harmless inmates at their mercy.

This has been happening during the incumbency of governments of different political parties. There have been other black laws in force, including Public Safety Act (PSA), that had conferred extra-judicial powers on Indian Army officials to detain innocent Kashmiris for longer periods of time without producing them in the courts of law.

Equipped with the ‘immense powers’, around 300 Indian Army personnel resorted to brazen bestiality and gang-raped 150 Muslim Kashmiri girls in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora during a search-and-cordon operation.

And the world has not yet forgotten other such acts of bestiality that are being committed with impunity in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, by the cruel Indian forces deployed to the extent of 0.7 million regular army and 0.4 million paramilitary personnel.

Rape and sexual violence have actually been some of the main tools of oppression and suppression, as employed again and again to subjugate and humiliate peace loving and unarmed Kashmiri Muslims for demanding the right to self-determination according to the UNSC resolutions.

Sometimes, it seems as if the Indian troops are following in the footsteps of Dogra troops of Kashmir that committed mass rapes against Kashmiri Muslim women, instigating Hindu mobs to emulate them when conflict broke out in Kashmir immediately after Independence.

A number of scholars and human rights organisations assert that “rape has been leveraged as a weapon of war by Indian security forces comprising Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)and Border Security personnel.”

And, according to Human Rights Watch, “Indian forces use rape as a method of retaliation and as a counter-insurgency measure against Kashmiri civilians”.

However, the global fraternity is still a silent spectator to these brutalities perhaps because of India’s ‘big market’ status. Well, it cannot go unchecked. The courage of the Kashmiri freedom fighters will not be dampened by such brutalities……never.

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