No, We Can’t Stop Communalizing Asifa Bano’s Rape. Here’s Why.

There's this rampant line of thought where we take out the ‘religion’ factor from everything and see the atrocity inflicted on Asifa Bano as just a crime committed against a little girl.

By Shahla Khan Apr 13, 2018 5 min read

Asifa Bano, an 8-year-old Muslim girl was gang-raped for days inside a Hindu temple in Kathua, Jammu & Kashmir. The nation is again seeing outrage poured into social media and protests being held, sadly not in support of the dead girl, but in support of the men who did this to her.

Twitter is an interesting playground when incidents like this happen because in 120 words you can see a common rhetoric at play. First, you see highly offended Hindus upset that the rapists used the temple for their crime and using Ram’s name to get public sympathy.

Then we have people pointing out that this was just a crime committed on one human against another and there was no need to bring religion into it.

We see people literally calling this incident an attack on Hindus rather than a case of child sexual abuse, including various examples that didn’t even make sense to me.

Then, along comes the ‘what-aboutery’ brigade! The ones that will try to dilute the topic by mentioning several past incidents and asking ‘what about’ the outrage regarding that one? This is how they will try to diffuse the intensity of the outrage.

To all the ‘what-aboutery’ people, I want to point out that yes, within the Muslim community, there exist plenty of crimes against women and Muslim women like myself are actively campaigning and working against them. However, Muslims are held in a different light.

Even during India-Pakistan cricket matches, Muslims like me are held inside these invisible socially created docks (katgarha) where we are bluntly asked whether we support the Pakistani team. While as an Indian I find their questions absurd, I also understand that they are simply testing my loyalty towards my nation. They want to be constantly assured that while being a Muslim by faith, I stand with my nation.

In fact, when terrorism-related crimes happen globally, due to a handful of fanatics, the entire Muslim community are branded terrorists and Muslims consistently face discrimination and hate crimes due to this rhetoric. Muslims are expected to publicly condemn the event and show solidarity with the nation and the victims of that crime.

There are also many accusing the media of deliberately making this about religion when they should be only focusing on the crime itself.

Apart from the several pray-for, justice-for Tweets for the victim, there are plenty of people saying that the victim was just a girl and the rapists were just barbarians, along with the hashtag #RiseAboveReligion.

Sounds great in theory. Superficially, I applaud this line of thought where we take out the ‘religion’ factor from everything and see it as just a crime committed against a little girl. This is a crime against humanity after all. However, to see it as just that would be to deliberately ignore the big picture.

Yes, rape is a common crime in India. But we need to acknowledge the fact that rape is also being used as a tool. The sexism we face is racialized and communalized too. In the case of Asifa Bano, the reason behind her rape and murder was to threaten the minority Bakerwal tribe to move out of that particular area.

Also Read: The Angry Hindu Nationalist And The Melancholia Of Lost Masculinity

This tweet of Shehla Rashid’s says it all-