The Big Story: A death in Kathua

This week, Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh remarked he did not “think there is any problem” if the investigation of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu’s Kathua district were to be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation. He also appeared to chastise Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, who said she was “horrified” by a rally launched by a Hindu rightwing group, waving the tricolour and protesting against the arrest of the accused. While the Bharatiya Janata Party, to which Singh belongs, has tried to distance itself from the Hindu Ekta Manch, the group formed in defence of the accused, the Union minister has seen fit to wade in. It gives an official imprimatur to the intimidating tactics of the manch and the polarising discourse that has wracked Jammu over the last month.

The case that has shaken the state of Jammu and Kashmir is troubling for various reasons. First, in the way it implicates the local police. The battered body of a child who belonged to the Muslim Gujjar-Bakarwal community in Jammu was found on January 17. She had been missing for a week, during which she was raped and murdered. Her family alleged that the local police had done little to find her. After the Gujjar community erupted in protest, the case was handed over to the crime branch, which arrested two special police officers. One of them, accused of direct involvement in the murder, had been part of the search parties sent out after the girl and later beat up Gujjar protestors demanding justice.

Second, in the majoritarian backlash that it triggered. All three accused arrested in the case are Hindu, prompting the local Hindu community to rise up in arms. Under the banner of the Hindu Ekta Manch, formed on January 23, wild theories of Hindu persecution were formulated, along with speculation about a biased probe headed by Muslim police officers. At a meeting held under the aegis of the manch, a social boycott of the Gujjar community was proposed. Muslim Gujjars are a minority in these parts of Jammu. In the recent past, the insecurities of this marginalised community have been deepened by forced evictions and attacks by cow vigilantes. Gujjars living under the constant threat of displacement now fear that the murder probe could be wielded as a new weapon to drive them out of their homes and lands.

Finally, no matter how the BJP tries to cut it, the saffron party is deeply complicit in the Hindutva mobilisations in Jammu. The president of the manch is a BJP member who was Kathua district president from 2013 to 2015. Its events were attended and addressed by other senior BJP leaders in the state. The BJP, which is part of the coalition government headed by the People’s Democratic Party, won all its seats from Jammu in the 2014 assembly elections. The party will find it hard to shake off the charge that these mobilisations are calculated to strengthen its support base in an already polarised and volatile area, where border tensions with Pakistan are meshed with resentments against the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley. Singh’s apparent rebuke to Mufti strengthens this impression.

The Hindu Ekta Manch now masks its majoritarian furies by the fig leaf of a demand for an impartial probe. Only the Central Bureau of Investigation could provide this, the group claims, a demand now echoed by Singh. Sadly enough, it is an idea that has become laughable. The central investigating agency, famously called a “caged parrot” by the Supreme Court, is known to be shackled by its political masters in Delhi. For years, it has been a convenient burial ground for politically inconvenient cases. Surely Singh is aware of this as Union minister?

The Big Scroll

Rayan Naqash reports on the Hindu rightwing group formed in Jammu to protest against the arrest of the accused and the public uproar sparked off by the rape and murder of the eight-year-old.

Punditry

  1. In the Indian Express, Omkar Goswami tries to decode the Nirva Modi ponzi scheme.
  2. In the Hindu, Shiv Viswanathan on how the democratic imagination is limited when it comes to the Maldives.
  3. In the Telegraph, Anup Sinha on the age of surveillance.

Giggles

Don’t miss...

Raksha Kumar reports on how a land programme in Bihar helped Dalits until Chief Minster Nitish Kumar allied with the BJP:

  Under Manjhi’s predecessor, Nitish Kumar, the Bihar government had launched a programme in April 2013 to distribute three decimals of land – a decimal is one-hundredth of an acre – to the state’s Mahadalit families to build houses. It was later revised to five decimals. Dakhal Dehani, in contrast, did not provide new land. It only sought to help Dalits get hold of the land – provided by the state to build houses, called homestead land, as well as farmland – they had ownership papers for but that had been occupied by others.