Udhampur, Indian-administered Kashmir:
Police investigation details gruesome rape and killing of eight-year-old Asifa Bano, as outrage in India soars.
Udhampur, Indian-administered Kashmir - The time was
ripe to kill the girl, Sanji Ram told his juvenile nephew on a cold
January evening, according to a police report.
The ritual had been performed and Asifa, an eight-year-old Muslim
nomad girl, was taken to a culvert in front of a temple where she had
been kept in captivity, and sedated, for four days in Rasana village of
Kathua district in Indian-administered Kashmir.
But, before she was strangulated and her head hit twice with a stone
"to make sure" she was dead, Deepak Khajuria, a special police officer,
made a demand. He wanted to rape the girl before she was killed.
"As such", the police investigation noted, "once again the little
girl was gang-raped" by the accused police officer and then by the
juvenile.
For the next three months, the rape and murder of Asifa seemed to be
just another case of sexual violence that is rampant in India but rare
in Indian-administered Kashmir, until the barbarity and the plot came to
fore in a 16-page charge sheet presented by the crime branch - a local
investigating agency.
The investigation revealed
that the rape and murder were systematic, preplanned and rooted in
religious hatred harboured by Sanji Ram, a Hindu, against the Muslim
nomadic community of Bakarwals.
The nomad girl
Asifa, the nomad girl, loved to take horses for grazing to the forest
near her home in Rasana, a quiet village in Kathua district of
Indian-administered Kashmir.
The reason Asifa was picked as a target by Sanji Ram, who knew she
"often comes to the forest", was simple; they wanted to drive the Muslim
community out, according to the investigation.
In captivity inside a temple, Asifa was drugged and raped, according
to the police investigation. The police report described Asifa as an
"innocent budding flower, a child of only eight years of age, who being a
small kid became a soft target".
The crime, however, was rooted in a sinister conspiracy and Asifa's
rape and killing were the means to an end - create fear among the Muslim
nomadic Bakarwal community and force them to leave.
Rafeeza Bano, Asifa's 55-year-old mother, recalls the horror she saw
on her dead daughter's body. "There were scars on her cheeks," she told
Al Jazeera at their camp in Udhampur.
"Her lips had turned black and her eyes had bulged out. It was a
scary scene for a mother to see," she said. "She was my youngest child.
It was horrific. She had faced a lot of barbarity."
The mother now fears for her two surviving daughters, one of them
aged 13. "They did this with an eight-year-old girl, imagine what they
can do with a 13-year-old," she said.
The Family
The tough life of a nomad had cast its shadow on Mohammad Akhtar and
he looks older than his 45 years. He now lives with a more damning
burden - the elusive justice for his daughter, Asifa.
On a hill in Udhampur district, nearly 150km north of Rasana, the
family camps under the open sky with their herd of goats and horses. The
journey is part of the annual migration of this nomadic community in
search of grazing pastures.
"Her face was full of scratches and bites," Akhtar told Al Jazeera,
describing the marks of torment on Asifa. "I never knew they would do
this to a child, her milk teeth were yet to fall out," he said.
Akhtar is Asifa's biological father as the girl was raised by her
maternal uncle, Mohammad Yusuf, who adopted her when she was a toddler
after he lost his three children in an accident.
"After she was killed it created more fear than before. We now take
our daughters along all the time, all in our community became protective
towards our daughters," he said.
Akhtar said the family also faced threats in the aftermath of the incident.
"They said if our men are given the death sentence, we will kill you
one by one. After Asifa's body was found, Hindu people came to us and
threatened us," he said.
Gazala, Asifa's aunt who lived in nearby Samba district, says she now
fears for her two daughters, age nine and four. "I fear for them. They
would run after the horses, they were free to play but now we are very
worried. We had not seen anything as gruesome," she said.
Asifa's rape and killing have forced an early migration of Bakarwals,
a nomadic tribe with a rudimentary lifestyle that earns a living out of
herding goats, sheep and horses to mountainous pastures. The incident
instilled fear in their community, which is unprotected during its
lengthy migratory journeys.
Manega, Asifa's elder sister, was still in shock when she talked to Al Jazeera in Udhampur about her sister's death.
"I saw her dead body," she said. "I now fear a lot. We don't play, we
don't go out alone. Asifa's killing has shattered us," Manega, 13,
said.
The accused
A retired government official, his son who came from another city to
"satisfy his lust", the juvenile nephew and his close friend, and the
special police officer were all part of the conspiracy and crime to
kidnap, rape and killing of the eight-year-old girl, according to the
police report. Three police officers were involved in destroying the
evidence.
The incident, which initially appeared to draw a reluctant outrage,
however, snowballed into a major crisis for India's ruling Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the horrifying details and
motives of the rape and killing came into public domain.
Human rights groups have repeatedly claimed that religious minority
groups, particularly Muslims, face increasing "demonisation by hardline
Hindu groups, pro-government media and some state officials" in India,
and the frequency of such incidents appears to be increasing.
READ MORE
Accused plead 'not guilty' in Asifa gang-rape case
In a recent Amnesty International report, the London-based human rights group noted that dozens of "hate crimes against Muslims took place across the country".
"At least 10 Muslim men were lynched and many injured by vigilante
cow protection groups, many of which seemed to operate with the support
of members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party," it said.
While the outrage over Asifa's rape and murder was muted - even
missing - during the initial weeks, the eight accused men found a
crusading force of lawyers and ministers from BJP in their support, some
of whom insisted the police investigators were Muslims and had a bias
towards the accused - all of whom Hindus.
In the second week of April, nearly three months since Asifa's body
was found in the forested foothill, a group of Hindu lawyers attempted
to block police investigators from entering a court premise where they
had gone to file the charges against the accused.
"It is shocking that the lawyers in Kathua so blatantly tried to
obstruct justice in this case," Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director
of Human Rights Watch, said in her report last week.
"For the local lawyers and other BJP supporters, the Hindu suspects
and the Muslim victim were grounds for blocking prosecution of the
case," Ganguly said.
As the pressure mounted on BJP, which administers Indian administered
Kashmir in an alliance based government, its two ministers - who had
attended a rally in favour of the accused - resigned.
"The investigation was completed within 90 days which makes it clear
that there was no intervention or attempt to block the investigation,"
BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav told reporters in the city of Jammu,
60km from here.
The Fear
The fact that it took three months and the exposure of horrific
details for the outrage to build against the rape and killing of the
girl, who was just eight-years-old, has already instilled fear among the
Muslim nomads.
Bakarwals, a poor tribe of nomads, tread across mountains during
their biannual migrations from the meadows of Kashmir valley to the
hilly forests of Jammu, where some pockets are dominated by
ultra-nationalist Hindu groups
Muhammad Yusuf, 45, Asifa's uncle who had adopted her when she was a
toddler, abandoned Rasana village with his herd of sheep, goats and
horses soon after the girl's body was found. The routine migration was
still weeks away, but the new-found fear forced it earlier.
"We left home earlier than usual due to fear. There is a fear among
all the Muslim families in Rasana and most of them have left now," Yusuf
said. "We are afraid to go back," he said.
In the village, where Asifa was raped and killed and, later, not
allowed to be buried, Yusuf said Hindus were always hostile towards
Muslims. "Sometimes, they would object to our grazing of horses,
sometimes they would block the water supply," he said.
Zafar Chowdhary, author and political analyst based in Jammu, told Al
Jazeera that there is a feeling among the Hindus in the state's Jammu
region that Muslims are involved in making demographic changes.
"There is unrest and distrust among the communities in the region
particularly on the question of identity in the state," he said.
The family members of accused in the village have launched a hunger
strike demanding that the investigations be done by the federal
investigative agency.
