As rest of the world is all set to observe Human Rights Day on December 10 (tomorrow), the ‘lesser humans’ in India including Muslims, Christians, Dalits and women (of all faiths) continue to be subjected to physical, psychological and sexual victimization by the Hindu radicals as well as state machinery. In today’s India, the security of non-Hindu communities as well as women and minors has become an extremely serious issue. However, the agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is apparently limited to the cow meat and those who eat it.
‘Gau Raksha’ squads comprising radical Hindus have proved themselves to be extremely proactive in picking the scent of cow flesh from miles before it is eaten or even slaughtered by a Muslim or Dalit household, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. On December 3, a violent mob spearheaded by gau rakshaks rampaged through Bulandshahr district in northern India after the discovery of suspected cow carcasses and set ablaze a number of vehicles besides beating two people to death.
Cow slaughter has remained a bone of contention between Hindu and Muslim communities even before the partition, however under the present regime, the cows have become increasingly sacred in India compared to the rights and even lives of the humans. Rights groups in India maintain that the issue of cow slaughter has now been deliberately stoked by the Modi-led government to win favours as well as votes of the radicalized Hindu majority during the upcoming general elections.
Grave breaches of human rights in Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) are an everyday happening and invariably the poor Kashmiri Muslims are the easiest subjects to bear inhuman sufferings at the hands of the occupation forces. Since 1947, thousands of Kashmiris have laid their lives seeking freedom from unlawful occupation by India. The amount of torture, killings and rapes perpetrated on Kashmiri people by Indian armed forces speak volumes for India’s vicious disregard to the human rights.
In today’s India, Muslims are not the only entity whose rights as humans are being violated; women as a gender are also being victimized and abused since long. Rape and harassment incidents are common, with 47,000 such occurrences reported in 2017 alone compared to 35,000 reported cases in 2016, whereby majority of the victims were either low-caste Dalits or women from the minority faiths.
The religion does not provide refuge to even Hindu women where faithful female believers are discriminated merely on the basis of their gender. Just a couple of weeks back, Hindu hardliners forcibly blocked women below 10 years and above 50 year of age from visiting one of India’s holiest sites known as ‘Lord Ayyappa Temple’ at Sabarimala in Kerala state. More awful becomes the fate of an Indian woman if she happens to be from some minority faith. Recently, a Christian woman was savagely beaten and paraded naked on the roads of Bihar over some unfounded allegations.
For the people of India, the year 2018 has also remained horrifying on account of sexual terrorism against minors – both girls and boys. A few weeks back, a 13-year-old low-caste Hindu girl was beheaded in Tamil Nadu by a man of higher caste merely for refusing sex. Who can forget the horrendous ‘Chennai Horror’ in July this year when 17 men gang-raped an 11-year-old girl over a period of seven months. More dreadful is the account of another eight-year-old girl who was kidnapped, locked in a temple, gang-raped and then beaten to death.
Recent reports by the UNHRC, OHCHR, EUHRC and OIC-IPHRC have unequivocally exposed India’s brutal account of hostilities on the innocent Kashmiris, and the situation of human rights in the occupied valley is moving from bad to worse with each passing day. It will be very unfortunate if the world human rights bodies once again fail to realize the miseries of the minority faiths, low-caste Hindus and the women in India besides freedom-seekers of the occupied valley of Kashmir.
Published in Daily Times, December 9th 2018.