Violence Against Women In India

"“Some viewers have commented on social media about a recent episode of “Crime Patrol” on SET resembling a recent incident reported in the media. We wish to clarify that while the episode is a work of fiction, it is based on certain events that occurred in 2011 and not connected to any recent case.” They further wrote, “We take every care to ensure our content meets broadcasting standards laid down by the regulatory bodies. However, in this case, respecting the sentiments expressed by our viewers, we have discontinued the airing of the episode. If the telecast has hurt the sentiments of any of our viewers, we wish to express our sincere regrets.”"

"The Delhi police in its 6,629-page chargesheet, revealed how Aaftab gruesomely killed his live-in partner Shraddha. Poonawala told the police that he and Shraddha Walkar had been quarrelling for a while and he was determined to get her out of the way. "I started quarrelling with her and I was determined to get her out of my way for once to get rid of her habit of abusing forever, I caught and threw her on the floor. I then sat on her chest to kill her and strangled her tightly with both her hands till she died."He added, "I hid her dead body in the bathroom and then I planned to dispose of the dead body by cutting it into small pieces and putting it in a big briefcase and then throwing it somewhere.""

"Campaigning for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in poll-bound Gujarat, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma referred to Shraddha murder case in south Delhi’s Mehrauli and said, “Somebody from the police asked Aaftab Poonawala, ‘why do you date only Hindu women?’ To this, he said Hindus are emotional.” Addressing an election rally in Gujarat’s Dhansura, Sarma said that the country needs a strict law against Love Jihad. “A boy named Aaftab Poonawala from Mumbai convinced Shraddha Walkar to come to Delhi, assuring her to get married. However, he didn’t get married and instead killed her and chopped her body into 35 pieces. He kept her mutilated body inside a fridge and in the meantime, he invited other women to his flat for dates,” the Assam chief minister said. “When the police asked him, ‘why do you bring only Hindu women?’ Aaftab said Hindus are emotional. This is not just the story of Aaftab, there are several similar Aaftab-Shraddha incidents in the country. There is a strong need for a stringent law against Love Jihad,” Sarma said. Aaftab murdered his live-in partner Shraddha on 18 May, 2022. During his confession, the 28-year-old trained chef said, "More than a week before the murder, I had made up my mind to kill Shraddha. Even on that day, Shraddha and I had a fight. I was determined to kill her when she suddenly became emotional and started crying. So I held back for later.""

"Extra judicial killings cannot be accepted in a country of law."

"So the predators have become the prey! Now this is called true poetic justice!"

"The action taken by Hyderabad Police is praiseworthy. In Uttar Pradesh rape is happening every day, be it young girls or aged women, nobody is being spared."

"No one could predict how long this sold-off woman would remain there. These poor women were housed by the government in the Kunja camp as there was fighting going on in Kashmir. The army handed them over to us when they were useless...All 600 had been used by the Pakistani army...Pakistan's attitude was that it should be thankful that it had managed to recover so many women. Naturally, they would not admit that they had any hand in the situation the women found themselves in."

"One Muslim member of the Legislative Assembly was said to have five hundred girls in his possession in West Punjab, while an abducted Muslim girl from a well-known family was reported to be with the Maharaja of Patiala. In West Punjab police officials, members of the Muslim League and landed magnates were involved."

"The following strategy, the Report continues, was used wherever the mobs attacked: First of all minorities were disarmed with the help of local police and by giving assurances by oaths on holy Quran of peaceful intentions. After this had been done, the helpless and unarmed minorities were attacked. On their resistance having collapsed, lock breakers and looters came into action with their transport corps of mules, donkeys and camels. Then came the ‘Mujahadins’ with tins of petrol and kerosene oil and set fire to the looted shops and houses. Then there were maulvies with barbers to convert people who somehow or other escaped slaughter and rape. The barbers shaved the hair and beards and circumcised the victims. Maulvis recited kalamas and performed forcible marriage ceremonies. After this came the looters, including women and children."

"The trouble for the non-Muslims in general, and for the women in particular, started in March, 1947. Whatever may be the causes of the Rawalpindi and Multan riots, it is admitted that these were of terrific nature Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, aftcr visiting district Rawalpindi reported to the British Government in England, "The whole of the Hindu-Sikh part is an absolute wreck, as though it has been subjected to an air raid."2 Several Hindu and Sikh villages were wiped out. Justice Teja Singh, a member of the Punjab Boundary Commission, stated before the Commission that during the Rawalpindi riots, "A large number of people were forcibly converted, children were kidnapped, and young women abducted and openly raped."3 Though a separate number of female casualities is not available, the official figure of deaths in the district of Rawalpindi was 2,263 which was considered far below the actual numbcr.4 Thc womcn were subjected to maximum humiliation and torture. Their agony can be judged by the fact that a number of women jumped into wells to save their honour. It is as unbelievable today as it was at that time. But fortunately Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru visited the village on 14th March, 1947, and he was told about thc incidents of ladies jumping into wells. His staff photographer took photographs of the bottom of the well with the help of a flashlight. These photographs showed the decomposed limbs of the bodies. One copy of a photograph was given to me by late Sant Gulab Singh in whose land the well existed. He told me that his wife was the first to jump into the well. The photograph has been published in my book Shahidian."

"The assailants did not spare even little children. It was naked beastliness performing a devil’s dance. Children would be snatched from the hands of their parents, tossed on spears and swords, and sometimes thrown alive into the fire. Other cruelties equally horrible were perpetrated. Women’s breasts, noses and arms would he lopped off. Sticks and pieces of iron would be thrust into their private parts. Sometimes the bellies of pregnant women were ripped open and the unformed life in the womb thrown out. In some places processions of naked Hindu and Sikh women are also reported to have been taken out by the Muslims mobs. (81)... At Nara, in the tehsil of Kahuta, Sikh women and children were burnt alive, and the women were tortured in ways most devilishly ingenious and sadistic, which it is not possible for any decent human being to describe.... All this was done in village after village after the Muslims had given assurances of safety on the Koran to Hindus. Hindu women were molested and abducted. Altogether 50 villages in this tehsil were looted with arson, murder and abduction of women. Ears, noses and breasts of women were cut off, and they were raped in the presence of their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons."

"There is a marked difference in the behaviour of Muslims and Sikhs towards women and children captured during this fight. While Muslims everywhere dishonoured, abducted or murdered Hindu and Sikh women and children, Sikhs never resorted to anything of which they might have reason to be ashamed. On the first day of attack, several Muslims got killed by an infuriated Sikh crowd in a locality which was at the junction of a Muslim and non-Muslim zone, not very far from the centre of the Sikh influence. More than one hundred Muslim women and children, whose menfolk had either been killed or had run away for safety, fell into the hands of the Sikhs. Sikhs kept them safe and fed them for the two or three days that the fighting lasted and all communications in the town were cut off, and later sent them under escort to the City Police Station, These women acknowledged the chivalry and courtesy of the treatment of the Sikhs towards them. (156)"

"When everybody had got into the train and as the engine was whistling to indicate that the train was going to start, a huge crowd of Muslims came from the side of the Mandi and factories. They were armed with rifles, chhuras, axes, barchas and other lethal weapons... The women-folk were not butchered, but taken out and sorted. The elderly women were later butchered while the younger ones were distributed... The children were also similarly murdered. All the valuables on the persons of the women were removed and taken away by the mob... During these visits I also saw a large number of Hindu women in the houses of the Muslim inhabitants of Kamoke. All of them complained that they were being very badly used by their abductors."

"“On 4-10-47, a small caravan of about fifteen non-Muslims tried to cross the bridge Ravi from Pakistan to this side. They were entrapped by the Muslim Military picket on the other side of the bridge. That caravan included four women. The male members of the caravan were murdered during the night. Our Military picket on this side of the bridge heard shrieks and cries of the victims. The Gurkha Jamadar in charge of the picket saw the women with Military (Muslim). They kept those women in their tents during the night and the military picket on our side heard their shrieks too during the night as if they were being raped. Later on those women never crossed the bridge on this side."

"“Girls abducted from Mirpur side are sold in Jhelum city at Rs. 10 or 20 each. The local police refuses to interfere on the ground that the girls were not removed from the Punjab and also they express their helplessness because of the attitude of the armed Pathans possessing these girls. I am bringing this to the notice of the West Punjab Government but I am afraid nothing would come out of it and in our helplessness all these girls shall have to stand hardships for all their lives and suffer misery.” According to the information received most of the girls abducted from Jammu and Kashmir States and some of the girls abducted from Gujranwala, Jhelum, Mianwali, Jhang and Dera Ghazi Khan districts are taken to the North-west Frontier Province and from there to the tribal territory. At Mansera and some other places (North-West Frontier) there are regular camps where Hindu girls are being sold."

"A British Officer of the M. E. O. of West Punjab reported (September, 1947) that at a place near Sheikhupura he was called to rescue a Hindu girl, who had been carried away by Muslim National Guards. He found the girl in a hut with 4 of her captors, who had raped and cut off her breasts and were now frying them. He shot the lot."

"The kidnapping of young women and the treatment to which they were subjected constitute a sordid chapter in the history of human relations. Poor innocent girls, young married women, sometimes with infants in their arms, were forcibly taken away to distant places. They were molested and raped, passed on from man to man. bartered and sold like cheap chattel. Some- times it was impossible to trace their whereabouts. When representatives of the Indian Dominion went to recover them they were concealed and denied access to their relations. Large numbers of them, when recovered, were brought to a refugee camp at Kunjah. Conditions in this camp beggar description. A young woman of 21, describing her experiences, said: “I stayed in the camp for two months. Camp life was very miserable. We were given chappatis full of lime and were constantly molested by the soldiers, Maulvis used to come and preach to us against the Indian Dominion...They told us that we would go to heaven sf we lived with them They said that it was foolish on our part to go to India... A party of young women who were brought to the camp said “We reached the camp on the fifteenth day It was nothing less than hell The flour was mixed with lime and drinking water smelt so foul that it made us ill to drink it... Sick children were given wrong medicines and some of them became blind and died as the result of the poisons given to them. The military guards brought their friends at night and molested the young girls in the camp. They pinched our breasts and made indecent jokes , those who were pregnant were shot down... A young girl of 14 or 15 sleeping by my side was dragged away and raped. When she resisted they kicked her Her face in the morning looked as if it had been scratched by a knife”"

"Usually, rape and sexual assault were invariably followed by abduction of the victimised women. These abducted women typically became domestic servants and sex slaves. Many abducted women were sold into prostitution and some, in very rare instances, were married to their abductors and later claimed to be leading happy and respectable lives."

"Armed Pathans, operating in bands, were perhaps the worst offenders in West Punjab, especially in the districts of the Rawalpindi division (where they were concentrated), for it was they who systematically preyed upon the refugee trains and convoys, carrying off women to be sold for as little as Rs10 or 20 to Muslim men. Non-Muslim women from Kashmir also were offered for sale in West Punjab, ending up as 'slave girls' in factories. A report from Sargodha district claimed,The Pathans brought a very large number of abducted women and children from the Kashmir front and they had been selling these like cattle and chattel. There were cases in which a woman had been sold thrice or four times. The Pathans had made this a regular trade."

"They shot everyone who couldn't recite the kalima - the Arabic-language Muslim declaration of faith. Many non-Muslim women were enslaved, while many others jumped in the river to escape capture."..."They had returned with war booty," he says. "Some had brought cattle, some horses. Most of them had brought arms, and many brought women. One Afridi tribesman walked back with two women in tow. They wept incessantly and just wouldn't stop.""

"The Punjabi Sikh and Hindu girls and Kashmiri women are proverbially beautiful, so they were in great demand in the Muslim countries of Africa and the Middle East. They were sold there by the barbarian Muslim kidnappers for very high prices. These ill fated women were confined in their purchasers' harems and bound to accept concubinage"

"In this nefarious design, the Pakistan Government made an internal secret agreement called “Zen and Zar “with the Pathan mercenaries according to which if Mirpur city was captured, the captured women would be taken by the Pathans and the immovable property would be the share of Pakistan Government."

"Once a certain calumny is spread, it remains effective till your dying day and beyond... Thus, the rape of four nuns in Jhabua kept figuring in 1999 Christian lists of "Hindu atrocities on Christians" even when a largely Christian gang of local tribals pleaded guilty... Yet the calumny continued to spread, even in supposedly neutral sources."

""Nuns have been raped", according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which blamed "Hindu nationalism" in a report presented nearly a year after the Jhabua incident, when the truth was already well-known."

"These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh."

"In 1999, they tried to make the most of a spate of incidents between Christians and non-Christian tribals in which a few Christians got killed (mercifully far fewer than the periodic harvest of martyrs in Pakistan). They falsely blamed Hindu activists for some inter-Christian rape cases and for a series of bomb attacks against churches, which turned out to be the handiwork of a Pakistan-based Muslim group, Deendar Anjuman. Before ill-informed but consequential international audiences such as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, they managed to uphold their original story, but in India the campaign to blame Hindu activists for everything had badly lost its credibility."

"In particular, all manner of small incidents within the Christian community were at once blamed on the evil hand of Hindu nationalism. In Kandhamal, Orissa, a Christian man murdered a girl and her little brother. At once, a cry went up in the secularist and Christian media that Hindu nationalists had perpetrated the crime. When the official investigation revealed the true story, it was reported only marginally in Indian papers and not at all in the international media, which had eagerly carried the initial allegations. Likewise, in the Central-Indian town of Jhabua, a quarrel among mostly christianized tribals led to the rape of four nuns. With no Hindu nationalists in sight, the media decided nonetheless that this was an act of Hindu nationalist cruelty against the poor hapless Christian minority. Though the official investigation confirmed the total innocence of the Hindu nationalists in this affair..., their guilt has been consecrated by endless repetition in the media. While the media in India couldn't prevent the truth from quietly making itself known, the international media have never published a correction, and the story of "four nuns in Jhabua raped by Hindu nationalists now keeps on reappearing as an evergreen of anti-Hindu hate propaganda."

"It was predicted that communal violence would increase a hundredfold if the BJP were allowed to come to power. In reality, the BJP term in power has been the most peaceful year since decades. Even in Jammu and Kashmir, Islamic killings of Hindus have markedly decreased. That terrorists killed twenty Hindus in Jammu (an incident that went strictly unreported in the Western media) on the eve of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s peace mission to Pakistan is first of all the responsibility of the killers themselves, even if not preventing this massacre was secondarily also a failure of the security forces. Note that most of the victims of the remaining communal violence were Hindus -- hardly the doing of the Hindu nationalist government. The Christian missionary lobby had aptly sensed the frustration of the India-watchers at seeing the “unexpected” success of the BJP in maintaining communal peace, hence its initiative to launch an international slander campaign alleging BJP atrocities against the Christians. More than ever, they could count on the foreign experts to amplify their propaganda. The world media consumer was told about the rape of four nuns and about the killing of a Christian girl and her little brother “by Hindu fundamentalists”; but not about the subsequent finding that the culprits had in fact been Christians. [..] In their desperation, the secularists tried to make the most of a few incidents in tribal areas with a history of Hindu-Christian friction. An eager international press guzzled down the stories, which passed into the received wisdom and the US Congressional Record. They have firmly remained there, even after allegations of a Hindutva hand in the matter (as in the Jhabua rape case, an inter-Christian crime) had been proven false in the court of law."

"In the worldwide perception of Hindu nationalism, the association with raping nuns and bombing churches has stuck."

"Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (...) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(...) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots."

"A climate has been created in which every allegation against Hindu activists enjoys a priori credibility while every complaint of Hindu victims is shrugged off or even maligned as hate propaganda... A similar case is the rape of four nuns in Jhabua, also in 1998: in spite of Christian allegations, it turned out that Hindu militancy had nothing to do with the crime and that half of the gang of perpetrators were tribal Christians themselves, yet this "rape of nuns by Hindu fanatics" keeps reappearing in press stories about "Hindu atrocities on Christians"."