Brutal rape and murder of 8-year-old girl shocks, outrages, and divides India

(RNN) – In January, an eight-year-old girl, Asifa Bano, disappeared in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Three days later, she was dead, left in a forest next to a meadow where she had been grazing horses.

The story of just what happened proved horrifying. She’d been lured into the forest, drugged, and imprisoned in a nearby temple. A group of men repeatedly raped her.

Then they killed her, strangling her and bashing her head with a stone. But not before, according to local police, she was raped one last time, at the special request of one of the captors.

Rape and violence against children is astonishingly rampant in India, so much so that a Nobel laureate from the country, Kailash Satyarthi, said this week it was a “national emergency.” According to Reuters, there are as many as 100,000 child sexual abuse cases pending in courts.

But the unflinchingly brutal and calculated nature of Asifa’s killing grabbed attention. It has inspired outrage, calls for justice and protests.

In a country increasingly divided along religious lines, however, the outcry itself inspired a backlash.

The accused ringleader in the case is an influential Hindu, Sanji Ram, a former revenue official and custodian of the local temple. Asifa Bano was a Muslim, part of a nomadic sect called the Bakarwals.  

“His poison has been spreading,” a local Bakarwal leader told The New York Times earlier this month. “When I was young, I remember the fear Sanji Ram’s name invoked in Muslim women.”

Hindu nationalism has been on the rise for some number of years in India.

They make up close to 80 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people. The current prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party are generally seen as aligned with the movement.

Hindu nationalists believe that India should exist as a homeland for, and by, Hindus. And Muslims, as the most significant religious minority in the country at just shy of 15 percent of the population, have primarily born the brunt of discriminatory sentiments.

The leader of a Muslim political party in the state of Maharashtra told Reuters last month: “The government wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

These are the sectarian fault lines that were opened up by the case of Asifa Bano.

Hindus in the area contended the men were framed, victims of a conspiracy perpetrated by Muslims in the local police force. It reached the point that a mob of Hindu lawyers organized to block the police from going to the local court to file arrest papers. Ram's daughter also fanned the conspiratorial flames.

Asifa’s family and lawyer faced death threats, to the point that her father asked that the trial be moved, and they have left their village.

Even beloved Bollywood stars who joined a #justiceforourchild campaign for Asifa were met with fierce opposition from some commentators on Twitter.

Writing for popular Indian news and commentary site The Scroll, Samar Halarnkar said: "There is only one reason men accused of such a heinous crime have widespread public support: like the majority of people in Kathua, the suspects are Hindu; the girl was a Muslim."

Modi, after an initial period of silence, eventually spoke about the case (and another, involving the rape of a 17-year-old by a politician in Uttar Pradesh, which has also provoked outrage).

"No culprit will be spared, justice will be delivered," he said. "Those daughters will get due justice. All of us have to fix the problem together."

The trial began this week. Police have charged eight people in the case, including four police officers. They have all claimed their innocence.

Even if they are found guilty, it is not likely to end the ordeal for Asifa's family.

As her biological father, Mohammad Akhtar, told Al Jazeera this week: "After she was killed it created more fear than before ... They said if our men are given the death sentence, we will kill you one by one."

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