LONDON: Indian activist and writer has unveiled sensational informationabout the rape of Muslim women in India under PM Modi.
She wrote in an article in The Guardian calling India “republic of fear”has been shared thousands of times has said that rape culture underNarendra Modi’s government is celebrated by ministers and activistsbelonging to extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Amrit Wilson, a writer on race and South Asia who is one of the leaders ofSouth Asia Solidarity Group (UK), wrote for The Guardian as Modi arrived inBritain to take part in the Commonwealth summit.
The article referred to crimes against women in India, including twoviolent rapes in Kathua in the Indian Held Jammu and Kashmir (IHK) andUnnao in Uttar Pradesh. The twin rape cases have particularly rocked Indiaand Modi was greeted by thousands of protestors in London who condemned hisgovernment for doing nothing about the culture of rape.
The article by Amrit Wilson said it would be wrong to see the twin rapeincidents as simply a part of violence against the women that have been”endemic in India” but that it was planned and executed to terrorise theMuslim Bakarwal community to which she belonged to drive it out of theregion.
The Guardian article said: “The attempt to lodge the charge sheet againstthe accused at a local court was followed by violent protests in theirdefence by a pro-Modi Hindu right-wing outfit, the Hindu Ekta Manch.
Two BJP ministers attended the protests and urged the crowd to obstruct theprosecution of the accused.” The Guardian piece said about the Unnao casethat a BJP member of UP legislative assembly was arrested on charges ofraping a 16-year-old girl but when the family of the rape victim protested,her father was brutally beaten up by the accused MLA’s supporters and hedied in custody after getting arrested.
In an interview with this correspondent here, Amrit Wilson said thatattacks on women have always taken place in India and elsewhere but “a newphenomenon has emerged under Modi where not only rape culture is rife, it’scelebrated and promoted by the perpetrators. This is new. Rapes happenedbefore but there was no celebration of it.”
Amrit Wilson told that she wrote in The Guardian to tell the world that theBJP is a fascist party. She said that founders and ideologues of the BJPsuch as Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the reveredicon of the Hindu right, praised Hitler and his policies.
She said that Savarkar said that Muslim women should be raped and “it willbe suicidal if they are not raped”. Amrit Wilson said: “If such writingsand thoughts are part of the BJP and RSS politics then you can imaginewhat’s happening.
Modi is an RSS member since young age. He is a lifelong member of RSS.Savarkar was its ideologue and Golwalkar was its founder. A meeting tookplace around two years ago in which a BJP leader said that Muslim womenshould be raped.