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Leading Indian activist says BJP ideology believes in raping Muslim women

Says rapes being celebrated and promoted under Modi; BJP and RSS all out to turn India into a Hindu state, rapes planned and executed to terrorise Muslims and other minorities

By Murtaza Ali Shah
April 23, 2018

LONDON: Indian activist and writer whose article in The Guardian calling India “republic of fear” has been shared thousands of times has said that rape culture under Narendra Modi’s government is celebrated by minister and activists belonging to extremist Bharati Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Amrit Wilson, a writer on race and South Asia who is one of the leaders of South Asia Solidarity Group (UK), wrote for The Guardian as Modi arrived in Britain to take part in the Commonwealth summit.

The article referred to crimes against women in India, including two violent rapes in Kathua in Jammu & Kashmir and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh. The twin rape cases have particularly rocked India and Modi was greeted by thousands of protestors in London who condemned his government for doing nothing about the culture of rape.

The article by Amrit Wilson said it would be wrong to see the twin rape incidents as simply a part of violence against the women that have been "endemic in India" but that it was planned and executed to terrorise the Muslim Bakarwal community to which she belonged to drive it out of the region.

The Guardian article said: "The attempt to lodge the charge sheet against the accused at a local court was followed by violent protests in their defence by a pro-Modi Hindu rightwing outfit, the Hindu Ekta Manch. Two BJP ministers attended the protests and urged the crowd to obstruct the prosecution of the accused."

The Guardian piece said about the Unnao case that a BJP member of UP legislative assembly was arrested on charges of raping 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 he died in custody after getting arrested.

In an interview with this correspondent here, Amrit Wilson said that attacks on women have always taken place in India and elsewhere but “a new phenomenon has emerged under Modi where not only rape culture is rife, its celebrated and promoted by the perpetrators. This is new. Rapes happened before but there was no celebration of it”.

Amrit Wilson told that she wrote in The Guardian to tell the world that the BJP is a fascist party. She said that founders and ideologues of the BJP such as Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the revered icon of the Hindu right, praised Hitler and his policies. She said that Savarkar said that Muslim women should be raped and “it will be suicidal if they are not raped”.

Amrit Wilson said: “If such writings and thoughts are part of the BJP and RSS politics then you can imagine what’s happening. Modi is an RSS member since young age, the is a lifelong member of RSS. Savarkar was it’s ideologue and Golwalkar was its founder. A meeting took place around two years ago in which a BJP leader said that Muslim women should be raped. He said about a dead and buried Muslim women that she should be pulled out of the grave and raped. Yogi Adityanath chaired that meeting and remained silent.”

Amrit Wilson said that everyone should understand that these people are “fascists” and their policies have gained popularity since the destruction of Babri Mosque. “The BJP has risen since then. It has turned out to be a party that’s neo-liberal, good with big business, good with big corporates but entrenched in Hindutva. Its popularity has gone up. If you look at the BJP from outside, you see it as a modern party its modernism is linked linked with fascism. It’s a dichotomy. Its new politics.”

She said that the Hindutva hate brigade is the BJP’s core constituency and the BJP leadership relies on this constituency for its politics of communalism and hate.

Amrit Wilsom said that Modi’s popularity has gone down and there are agitations almost daily in India. She added: “People in India want change. They are unhappy with the Modi government. If free and fair elections are held today, Modi will lose.”