The attempts to intimidate and drive out a nomadic community from their village has exposed the horrors faced by Muslims in India, where supporters of Hindu groups continue to be emboldened by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Moazum Mohammad reports from the Pir Panchal mountains in the Indian-administered Kashmir.
s the sun emerged from a thick cloud over the lush green peaks in Pir Panchal on a recent morning, Naseema removed the blue tarpaulin sheet from the tent they’d been sleeping in. The mountains have been home to her and Mohammad Yusuf Pujawala, her husband, for the last few weeks. The couple, along with dozens of other families from the Bakarwal community, takes a grueling two-day trek to come to these mountains every year from Kathua, a village on the banks of the Khad, about 55 miles from the state’s winter capital of Jammu. This year, they were forced to arrive here earlier.
“This time we came early because of threats from Hindus in our village,” says Pujawala. Nearly 87 percent of Kathua’s population is Hindu, who dominate the businesses and own almost all of the land in the district. Bakarwals, the Muslim nomads who for centuries have traveled with their livestock between the mountain pastures in the summer and lowland grazing grounds in the winter, are the third largest ethnic tribe in the region—about 60,724 people, according to 2011 survey by the Indian government.
On January 10, Naseema and Pujawala’s eight-year-old daughter went missing from a neighboring village. Seven days later, authorities found her body in Rasana, a village in Kathua—she had been raped and murdered. Since then, eight men, including the custodian of a local Hindu temple, have been arrested in the case. (Indian law prohibits identifying a rape victim by name even after they have died.)
The incident has sparked outrage in the region and across the country, especially following protests in support of the detained men, led by outfits like the Hindu Ekta Manch, whose members have ties to both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well as the Indian National Congress.
Police in the state of Jammu & Kashmir said the motivation behind the gruesome rape and murder was to terrorize and dislodge the Bakarwals from Kathua, and the man at the center of the conspiracy was Sanji Ram, the custodian of the local temple. Police officials have also said that Ram had been discouraging Hindus in Kathua from providing land to the Bakarwals for grazing their cattle.
“We didn’t know he was living next to us,” Naseema says about the Hindu priest. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have allowed my daughter to go to Rasana.”
Jammu & Kashmir police say the girl had walked to the nearby village that day to inquire about her horses. According to the charge sheet filed by authorities, that’s when the priest’s nephew signaled her to the forests, claiming he had seen her horses. Local investigators said she was then kidnapped, drugged, and held inside the Devisthan temple, where the men took turns and raped her.
“My daughter loved horses, and she would play with them,” Naseema says, pointing to a big stone a few yards away which she said her daughter used to jump on the horseback.
In a 15-page document, investigators describe in sordid detail what happened to the girl in January. The eight-year-old was held without food, given sedatives, and subsequently raped. Minutes before she was murdered, one of the accused men told the priest’s teenage nephew—he is a minor and is being tried under a separate law for minors—to wait so that he could rape her one last time. Then, according to police, the two of them raped the little girl again before strangling her with her scarf and hitting on her head with a stone.
“I can’t believe how brutal they were,” Naseema says. “Hindus would harass and abuse us when our herd would graze on their farmlands, but we never expected they would drug our daughter and rape her.”
When the parents went out looking for the girl on January 10, Naseema said they ran into Ram, the priest, who told them to go back home.“Your daughter is having roti somewhere, and you will find her,” Naseema says he told them that evening.
Mother of the rape victim migrated to the Pir Panchal mountains few weeks ago.
Life has always been filled with hardships for Kashmir’s Bakarwals, but Naseema said this year has been “the toughest and the saddest” because of the tragedy that befell them. “There is no end to the loss,” she says. Three of their children and Pujawala’s mother were killed in a road accident in the mountains eight years ago. After the accident, the family adopted the girl from Pujawala’s sister when she was only two months old.
Pujawala said they had plans to admit their daughter to school this year and were looking forward to seeing her in a uniform. Her family and relatives in the Bakarwal community remember her as talkative—“chirpy like a bird”—and a clever girl who was always happy whenever she went go to the meadows with the animals.
“She loved trekking along these mountains,” Naseema says. “She would sit on a horse and keep watch on the herd.”
The family was supposed to attend the court hearings on their daughter’s rape case in the following days, but Naseema didn’t know if they could make it.
“How can we attend the hearings?” Naseema shouts. “Who is going to look after the herd?”
For generations, Bakarwals have trekked hundreds of miles every year herding and grazing their goats, sheep, cows, and horses. Many of them say their lives would cease to exist without the animals because they are the only source of their livelihood. “For us, these goats and sheep are as dear as our children,” says Pujawala.” “I climb mountains so that our herd doesn’t die from hunger. We may not eat, but will do everything we can to protect them.”
1. Nomad families of the Bakarwal community cross a snow-fed stream in Kashmir. 2. A nomad sits outside his mud house in outskirts of Srinagar.
Pujawala says his community had been tolerating the harassment and intimidation from Hindu villagers in Kathua for years. But in the aftermath of their daughter’s rape, members of the Hindu Ekta Manch have turned hostile towards Muslim families in the village. “We are four to five nomadic families in the village,” Pujawala says, “but the Hindus accused us of occupying their lands and conspired to throw us out.” Pujawala says Hindus in the village also regularly accuse them of “smuggling” cattle—illegally transporting cows for slaughter.
Last year in April, a Bakarwal family that was traveling with their cows was attacked by a mob of Hindu men in Jammu. About 150 men beat the Bakarwals with iron rods and sticks and burned down the local police post. When the police arrested 11 Hindu men involved in the attack, local groups called for a strike to force their release.
The attack was one of the many taking place across the country, as hardline Hindus formed vigilantism groups calling themselves Gau Rakshak—“Cow Protector”—and targeted Muslims and Dalits for possessing beef or transporting cattle for slaughter from one state to another. Reports of attacks on Muslims by cow vigilantism groups have grown since the election of BJP leader Narendra Modi—97 percent of the cow-related attacks from 2010 to 2017 took place after Modi’s election in 2014, according to a content analysis of the English media in India by Indiaspend.
“When Bakarwals go to mountains, they accuse us of smuggling cows.”
Talib Hussain, a Bakarwal lawyer and activist who has been rallying for justice in the Kathua rape and murder case, said members of right-wing Hindu outfits have been attacking Bakarwals during migration between Jammu and Pir Panchal mountains.
“When Bakarwals go to mountains, they accuse us of smuggling cows,” says Hussain, adding that Hindu right-wing groups like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, are systematically harassing and threatening Muslim nomad communities in Kashmir.
Chaudhary Abdul Hamid, a representative of the Bakarwal community, said the Bakarwals and the Gujjars—another ethnic Muslim community—have been living in fear following the rise in violent attacks by Hindu groups. “The Bakarwals receive permission for transporting cows during migration from one place to another, but they are still being targeted by Hindus,” says Chaudhary.
Two years ago, a BJP minister threatened a delegation of Gujjar farmers by reminding them of the 1947 massacre of Muslims in Jammu & Kashmir region. He was also among the two BJP ministers who addressed the Hindu Ekta Manch rally in support of those accused of raping the Kathua girl. Since BJP came to power in the region three years ago, the ministers who oversaw the provincial forest ministry directed to remove encroachments from the forests—a move many nomadic Muslims say was aimed at removing them from the forest land.
For the Bakarwals, who earn their livelihood by selling sheep and goats, shrinking grazing lands and increasing restrictions from Hindu villagers and vigilante groups is adding growing apprehension.
“The forests are being closed for Bakarwals,” said Hussain, the Bakarwal lawyer, who last year led a caravan of livestock to the region’s highest office to demand right to the forest for the nomad community. The BJP has opposed implementing the law to guarantee the rights to members of the region’s tribal community, arguing that the laws enforced by the parliament cannot be extended to the disputed territory.
“Our issue is with grazing rights and right to life, but the RSS and BJP don’t want the law to be applied here because it involves Muslim nomads,” says Hussain, who has pledged not to wear shoes till the law is not implemented in the region.
The Hindu men accused of raping their daughter are still in prison, and their trial is yet to begin. The Hindu Ekta Manch has started a donation campaign to hire the “best” legal team and file a plea in India’s top court for handing the case to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), an agency under the jurisdiction of the BJP government. So far, the court has turned down the plea in previous hearings.
“The crime branch fairly investigated the incident, but the Hindus want to shield the accused men by seeking a CBI investigation,” Pujawala says. “We don’t want that to happen.”
Following the nationwide outrage after a series of rape incidents, including the gang rape of the eight-year-old girl, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi signed an executive order last month introducing the death penalty for anyone found guilty of raping girls below the age of 12. “We want those men who snuffed the life out of a pure soul to be hanged,” Naseema says.
The Bakarwals still have more than five months before their winter migration, when they leave the mountains and head downhill to Kathua. But they are worried about going back to the village. Until now, Pujawala had been using pastures owned by Hindus on lease for grazing his flock. But Bakarwals fear that the Hindus would no longer lease grazing pastures to them even if they were allowed back in the village, especially if the Hindu men are found guilty and sentenced to death.
“I locked my home and abandoned my wheat fields in Kathua out of fear,” Pujawala says. “Usually I would hire a man to take care of fields, but no one was willing to stay on this year.”
After the family retrieved their daughter’s battered body from the village for the funeral, the Bakarwals wanted to bury her in the land they’d purchased a few years ago—and had used it as a graveyard to bury dead people in the past. But Pujawala said a group of Hindu men wielding batons threatened the family and told them they would excavate the girl’s body if she was buried there. So, the Bakarwals walked more than seven miles into another village to bury the girl’s body.
“When they didn’t even let to bury our dead daughter,” Pujawala says, “how can they give us their land to graze animals?”
Crime Branch alleges that an eight-year-old girl was drugged, raped, starved and murdered in an attempt to drive the nomadic community out of Rasana village.
Fighting back protests by Jammu lawyers claiming that the investigation had been unfair, the Crime Branch of the Jammu and Kashmir Police on Monday filed its chargesheet in the Kathua rape and murder case. Eight people, including one juvenile, are named as the accused.
Scroll.in was able to gain access to a copy of the chargesheet, which gives details of how an eight-year-old girl from the nomadic Gujjar-Bakarwal community in Jammu was abducted in January, held captive in a local temple, drugged, raped repeatedly and then strangled. Her body was found in the forests near Rasana on January 17, a week after she went missing. It was, the chargesheet alleges, a plot to “dislodge the Bakarwal community in Rasana”, the village in Kathua district where the girl lived.
The nomadic Gujjar-Bakarwal community, who are mostly Muslim in these parts of Jammu, are a small minority in Kathua district. In Rasana village, which lies in the Hiranagar area of the district, the two communities regularly get into spats over land, damage to crops by the livestock of the Muslim herders and allegations of cow slaughter levelled by Hindu residents. The bad blood had already resulted in several first information reports in police stations in the area.
The eight-year-old child became a “soft target” in these tensions between the two communities, the chargesheet stated.
The accused
The main accused in the case is 60-year-old Sanji Ram, a retired government employee from Rasana. Four others are police officials: two are special police officers, Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar, charged with direct involvement in the crime, while the two others include Hirangar station house officer, Anand Datta, and head constable Tilak Raj, accused of helping to cover up the crime.
At least two among the accused are believed to have held personal grudges against the Bakarwal community, the chargesheet says. One of them is Khajuria, who had got into a “few scuffles” with the Bakarwals.
The minor, who had been expelled from school for “unruly behavior” with female students, was “provoked and induced” by Ram, the chargesheet said. He could “take revenge on the Bakarwals who had earlier beaten him” while Khajuria could ensure he passed his board examinations by helping him cheat. Both Khajuria and Raj were opposed to the idea of the Bakarwals settling in the area and had already talked to Ram to “chalk out a strategy for dislodging” the community, the chargesheet says.
Also named are Ram’s son Vishal Jangotra, Ram’s juvenille nephew, and Parvesh Kumar, a friend of Ram’s nephew. All of them are residents of Rasana.
Seven days
During the week that the girl had been missing, the Bakarwal community alleges, the police had done little to find her. According to the chargesheet, she had been drugged and raped multiple times by at least three of the conspirators before being killed. It tries to reconstruct events of the week that followed her disappearance.
The police pieced together its case from DNA evidence, by analysing call detail records of the accused and from the testimonies of 130 witnesses. “The CDRs [call detail records] obtained have prima facie established the individual and common locations of all the accused in and around the scene of crime on crucial dates of occurrence,” it stated.
On January 10, the juvenile allegedly lured the girl into the jungles, where Kumar was waiting. The juvenile then forcibly administered “manar” – a local drug – to the victim. “The victim fell unconscious and was raped by JCL [the juvenile in conflict with the law],” the chargesheet said. “Thereafter, Mannu [Kumar’s nickname] also attempted to rape her but could not do it.”
It then describes how she was taken to a “devisthan” or temple in the village. On January 7, Khajuria allegedly procured the drugs that were administered to the girl by both him and the juvenile over the next few days. During this time, the chargesheet says, the girl’s hands and feet were bound with the drawstrings of her salwar and she was kept under a stringed cot, covered with mats to conceal her.
On January 11, the girl’s parents went to the temple and asked Ram about their missing daughter. According to the chargesheet, Ram told them “she will be back as she might have gone to some relative’s house”. In the afternoon, Khajuria allegedly forced two tablets of Epitril 0.05mg – a drug containing Clonazepam, used for treating seizures – down the girl’s throat.
Even as the police searched for the missing child in the area, apparently aided by Khajuria, Ram’s son Jangotra on January 13 allegedly raped the girl inside the temple, in the presence of Kumar. After this, the juvenile also raped her, the chargesheet states. The juvenile then directed the two to leave the temple and administered three tablets of Epitril, it adds.
That evening, when the juvenile informed his uncle the girl had been raped, Ram allegedly told his accomplices that the time “was ripe to kill her”, the chargesheet states, so on January 14 she was taken from the temple to a nearby canal by the juvenile and Jangotra.
There, Khajuria and the juvenile raped her before attempting to kill her, says the chargesheet. It says Khajuria attempted to kill the girl by strangulating her but was unable to do so, following which the juvenile killed her “by pressing his knees against her back and strangulated the girl by applying force on both the ends of her chunni”. It added that the victim was hit twice on the head with a stone in order to make sure she was dead. The stone, it says, weighed one kilogramme.
Medical reports suggested that the girl had been kept without food. The cause of death is said to be asphyxia leading to cardiopulmonary arrest.
On January 15, the chargesheet continues, Ram told his son and the juvenile that a man named Kishore had refused to bring a vehicle that would help them dump the victim’s body in a canal in Hiranagar. Ram then directed them to dump the body in the jungle as devotees were expected the next day for “faanda”, a ritual of exorcism, which Ram was to perform himself.
On January 16, the juvenile, accompanied by Jangotra, lifted the girl’s body on his shoulders and left it in the jungle, says the chargesheet. Later that day, Jangotra left for Meerut, where he is a student, and the juvenile confessed his role in the crime to another friend. On January 17, the girl’s body was found.
The cover up
On January 19, the police arrested the juvenile, who led them to six other accused. Ram finally surrendered on March 20. Initially, the chargesheet says, Ram wanted the juvenille to confess to having committed the crime all by himself, promising that “he would get him cleared from the charges at the earliest”.
Meanwhile, local police were allegedly aware of the event, the chargesheet says. The chargesheet states that Datta and Raj had struck a deal with Ram before the crime took place. The two were promised Rs 5 lakh promised in exchange for help in covering up the crime, of which they had already been give Rs 4 lakh. The police is still investigating all the financial transactions surrounding the crime.
The investigation found that Datta instructed the juvenile to implicate a Hindu herder from the Gadee community. Instead, he confessed his crime before Kathua district’s senior superintendent of police.
Allegedly, Datta had warned the juvenile against blaming the others in the case. On January 19, Datta and his security guards took the juvenile to the cowshed where the child was initially believed to have been held captive, and to the spot where she was found dead. At these places, Datta allegedly “staged” photographs to implicate the juvenile holding the stone and prepared a “Disclosure Memo” stating that the stone was recovered on the juvenile’s disclosure. “This all was being done by the accused SI Dutta in order to attach an element of truthfulness to his concocted story and in the process to create false evidence so that other accused could be screened from the grave criminal charges,” the chargesheet stated.
It also alleged that Tilak and Raj had washed the girl’s clothes to destroy any DNA evidence before forwarding them to the forensic science laboratory for examination. The chargesheet accuses him of destroying “vital evidence”. It also noted that Dutta, as an investigation officer in the case, remained “very casual” and left “serious criminal lapses deliberately in order to give undue benefit or to expunge the accused involved in the case.”
Despite Dutta and Raj’s efforts, it said, “FSL [forensic science laboratory] Delhi, with updated technology, was able to confirm the presence of blood stains on the Frock-Shalwar of the victim which matched with the DNA profile of the victim. DNA profiling also established presence of victim’s blood on the vaginal smears”.
All the accused have been charged under various sections of the Ranbir Penal Code, the criminal code that is operative in Jammu and Kashmir. All eight have been booked under Section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence), Section 343 (wrongful confinement), Section 376 (gang rape), Section 302 (murder), and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and Section 363 (kidnapping).(Scroll.in)
