Sexual violence against Muslim children by Uttar Pradesh Police exemplifies the rotting of the system

The news of sexual violence against Muslim children by the Uttar Pradesh Police in Muzaffarnagar sparked outrage among anti-fascist forces, while the rest of the country preferred to remain nonchalant to the plight of the victims, despite them becoming vocal at times against sexual violence and child abuse. Local Muslims alleged that the police sexually tortured minors, who were picked up from Sadaat hostel, an orphanage-cum-hostel of a Muzaffarnagar-based Madrassa run by a prominent Shiʻite cleric named Maulana Asad Raza Hussaini, a septuagenarian who himself was arrested, stripped and tortured in custody by the police after protest rallies against the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, or the CAA, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) turned violent on Friday, 20 December 2019. 

A report by The Telegraph narrated the tale of gruesome atrocities that more than 100 students, detained by the Uttar Pradesh Police after it attacked their seminary-cum-orphanage, had to suffer during their captivity. Only those below the age of 10 were allowed to go, while the rest were beaten after being stripped and were forced to chant Hindutva slogans like “Jai Shri Ram”. Sexual violence against Muslim children by the Uttar Pradesh Police was alleged after some students complained of rectal bleeding after their release.

The Maulana was returned to his relatives along with the minor students a day later after the influential Shi’ite leaders struck a deal with Hindutva fascist rabble-rouser Chief Minister Ajay Singh Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The deal allegedly promised that the community will refrain from complaining against the police atrocities, and stay aloof from the protests against the CAA and NRC in Muzaffarnagar. Many students, including minors, are still detained and charged under different sections of the Indian Penal Code. There are allegations that the policemen of the BJP-ruled state were bribed between Rs 100,000 and Rs 500,000 per student for their release. 

These macabre atrocities were committed by the Uttar Pradesh Police with utmost impunity as Chief Minister Bisht promised a total “revenge” against the Muslims to appease his hardcore Hindutva fascist voters. The chief minister’s support and incitement inspired the policemen to torture and sexually abuse minors, following the model that the Indian state has practised hitherto in Kashmir. The more the children screamed in pain, the more it satiated the blood lust of the policemen loyal to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of global Hindutva fascism.

The police abetted sexual violence against Muslim children because of the sheer bigotry that they subscribe to due to their association with the RSS. This open hobnobbing between the RSS and the Uttar Pradesh Police, which began during the Samajwadi Party’s reign, when the infamous 2013 Muzaffarnagar pogrom took place, actually diminished any borderline that demarcated the Hindutva fascist enterprise and the state apparatus. The credit will go to Bisht. He made Hindutva fascism and the state identical to each other.

The absolute hatred with which the police flailed the minors, and many more Muslims in custody, dehumanised them and derived sadist satisfaction from the pain and agony of the victims, proved that these policemen care a lemon about the law and order, and alike their boss Bisht, who had withdrawn all criminal cases against himself upon coming to power, including cases of rioting, rioting with dangerous weapons, etc. These policemen aren’t operating for maintaining law and order, but to farther the cause of Hindutva fascism and even if the government is changed, the ruling party is changed, these parasitic and bigoted men will continue to carry forward the Hindutva agenda through their atrocities, which was visible during Akhilesh Yadav’s rule as well. 

It isn’t ironical to see that none of the rumbustious social media warriors, politicians or high-pitched television anchors demanding death penalty for the accused policemen;  no one even demanded their castration or “encounter killing” like they enthusiastically jeered the extra-judicial murder of four poor men accused of gangraping and murdering a veterinary surgeon in Hyderabad. This conspicuous silence, this indifference is reigning because the victims aren’t from some upper-caste Hindu elite or middle-class family, but are poor, orphan Muslims whom the Indian state anyways wants to send to concentration camps. The caste-class and religious identity of the victims sealed the judgement of opinionated India in favour of the policemen, because anyways, in the “New India” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Muslims are the de-facto enemies of the state.

It won’t take too long for this silence to return and haunt the conscience of India. The pain inflicted by Hindutva fascism on the Muslims, Dalits, women, workers, peasants and other marginalised and oppressed sections of the people won’t go unresponded. The rectal bleeding doesn’t merely imply sexual violence against Muslim children, it also implies the rotting of the very system the ruling classes are trying to preserve, which necessitates a drastic and radical change. The Islamophobic state will continue to torment the Muslims for their identity, oppress them, sexually exploit them, yet, with each such atrocity, persecution and humiliation the demand for a free, secular, people’s democratic state will rise and the formidable force of the exploited and oppressed people, united against Hindutva fascism, will pull down the tyrannical empire that Modi, Bisht and their nincompoops are trying to erect with the support of a bestial state machinery.