The horrendous rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu, in January last year has led to the conviction and punishment of six of the seven accused. The case had attracted national headlines and acquired a communal tinge, given that the victim belonged to a nomadic tribe of Muslims known as Bakherwals. It was suggested that the perpetrators set upon the poor girl in order to force the community away from settling in Kathua and thus alter its demographic profile further in favour of the minority community.
Local Hindus were doubly upset at the mysterious influx of Rohingyas in their neighbourhood, suspecting them to be a part of a conspiracy to unsettle the wider region in concert with the anti-India forces active in the Valley. This backdrop was supposed to mitigate the barbaric deed committed against an innocent girl, and that too in a temple, and her subsequent murder, but fortunately it did not. Only the court could separate the political from the criminal so meticulously. The trial was shifted to Pathankot in Punjab by the apex court following an agitation by lawyers in Jammu in defence of the accused.
Two sitting ministers in the then PDP-BJP Government had joined the protesters, embarrassing Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. The trial concluded in record seventeen months. Three men, accused of rape and murder, were given life imprisonment. Three policemen were sentenced to five years of RI for destruction of evidence. The seventh accused, the son of the main conspirator, was acquitted. The Kathua verdict lends a sharper edge to the public outrage against the continuing abuse of young children by sex fiends elsewhere in the country, whether motivated by political agendas, as in Kathua, or otherwise.
The kidnapping of a two- and-a-half-year-old girl in Aligarh and her rape, mutilation of her body and murder by a member of the minority community has caused anger and disgust among the people. But the people who had lost no time in ranting against the ‘fascist’ Modi government and the RSS-BJP last year following the barbaric crime in Kathua, not-so-surprisingly haven’t been heard at all following the Aligarh outrage.
Being selective in condemnation is the privilege of the secular-liberal cabal. And how the ordinary people feel about this self-seeking group of award-wapasi and fake outrage was yet again clear in the recent parliamentary poll. Unless they are even-handed in praise and condemnation, unless they begin to see a crime as a crime without reading political gain or loss in it, they will remain peripheral to the concerns of the people.
For, whether the victim was a Muslim, as in the case of the girl in Kathua, or a Hindu, as in the case of the two-and-and-a-half-year-old girl in Aligarh, the secular-liberal loudmouths, including their first cousins in the media, will have little or no credibility. Like the session judge in Pathankot who delivered justice unconcerned by the politics behind the criminal act, the self-appointed guardians of the public morals claiming superior wisdom should stop seeing every wrong through the prism of partisan politics. A wrong is a wrong regardless of who commits it.
Meanwhile, the Kathua case also serves as a reminder against the politicisation of the police force. The involvement of the local police in suppressing the case, their refusal to lodge an FIR and the subsequent destruction of evidence is a blot on the entire system. A policeman too is a product of his environment and cannot be divorced fully from the popular passions, yet a sense of duty and honour of uniform ought to prevail over all else. In this case, the police force came to be divided on communal lines, with those belonging to the majority community reluctant to pursue the case while those belonging to the minority community equally determined to go after the perpetrators. Communalisation of the police force in troubled Kashmir was an undeniable fact, but its fall-out in Jammu was unfortunate.
