Jacobin: In Narendra Modi’s India, Hindu Nationalists Celebrate Violence Against Minority Women

By Safa Ahmed

Late last year, eleven Hindu extremists walked free from a prison in India’s Gujarat state. Their crime: brutally gang-raping a pregnant Muslim woman and murdering fourteen members of her family in 2002, during one of the worst outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence in recent Indian history. They served just fourteen years in prison — but far from criticizing such leniency, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) congratulated the men on their release.

The survivor, Bilkis Bano, was rightly horrified by the courts’ utter failure to keep these men behind bars. But the BJP and large swaths of the Indian public received them as heroes: they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets, and touted as respectable icons by the ruling party. One BJP parliamentarian praised them as having “good sanskar” (values) while implying that Bano had lied about the attack to “to corner and punish them.” Two other BJP politicians hosted one of the ex-cons at an official government event like a celebrity.

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