Thread by @Osman__Ghazi

One thing was distinctly rotten about 2002 #GujaratGenocide: use of rape as a form of terror!
A LONG THREAD!👇🏻

Extreme cruelty and brutality has characterised all the big communal massacres of post-Independence India, but the Gujarat carnage stands out for its extensive...1/n

and specific targetting of women, young girls and children, who were subjected to the most vicious forms of violence. Women suffered the most bestial forms of brutality, sexual violence, including gang rape, insertion of objects into their bodies, stripping, and molestation...2/n

A majority of the women who suffered this violence were then burnt alive. Amongst the survivors, many have spoken about the assaults but many have been silenced for fear of further attacks and for fear of censure from their own families and community...3/n
#GujaratGenocide

There was a distinct, tragic and ghastly feature of the state sponsored carnage unleashed against the Muslim minority in Gujarat, which was the systematic sexual violence committed against young girls and women...4/n
#GujaratGenocide

Rape was used as an instrument for the subjugation and humiliation of a community. A chilling technique, absent in pogroms unleashed hitherto but very much in evidence this time in a large number of cases, was the deliberate destruction of evidence...5/n #GujaratGenocide

Barring a few, in most instances of sexual violence, the women victims were stripped and paraded naked, then gangraped, and thereafter quartered and burnt beyond recognition...6/n
#GujaratGenocide

The ‘sexual violence consisted of forced nudity, mass rapes, gang-rapes, mutilation, insertion of objects into bodies, cutting of breasts, slitting the stomach and reproductive organs, and carving of Hindu religious symbols on women’s body parts’...7/n
#GujaratGenocide

An international fact-finding committee comprising gender activists from US, UK, France, Germany and Sri Lanka reported that ‘sexual violence was being used as a strategy for terrorising women belonging to Muslim community in the state’...8/n
#GujaratGenocide

There were several wrenching testimonies of unprecedented cruelty of mass sexual violence on women. #GujaratGenocide

TRIGGER WARNING ‼️
a) "Sultani, for instance, from village Eral in Panchmahals, speaks of how, escaping from a mob, fell behind as I was carrying my son, Faizan..

The men caught me from behind and threw me on the ground. Faizan fell from my arms and started crying. My clothes were stripped off by the men and I was left stark naked. One by one the men raped me. All the while I could hear my son crying. I lost count after three.

They then cut my foot with a sharp weapon and left me there in that state."

b) "A mother, Medina, from the same village testifies that, ‘two villagers pulled away’ her own daughter. My mind was seething with fear and fury. I could do nothing to help my daughter...

from being assaulted sexually and tortured to death. My daughter was like a flower, still to experience life. Why did they have to do this to her? What kind of men are these? The monsters tore my beloved daughter to pieces. After a while, the mob was saying cut them to pieces,..

leave no evidence. I saw fires being lit. After some time the mob started leaving. And it became quiet."

c) "Many reports refer to the horror experienced by Kausar Bano. In the words of Saira Bano, ‘What they did to my sister-in-law’s sister Kausar Bano was horrific and heinous.

Kausar was nine months pregnant. They cut open her belly, took out her foetus with a sword and threw it into a blazing fire. Then they burnt her as well."

Sometimes the details would vary—the foetus was dashed to the ground; the foetus was slaughtered with a sword;

the foetus was swung on the point of the sword and then thrown into a fire etc. In all instances where extreme violence is experienced collectively, meta-narratives are constructed. Each victim is part of the narrative; their experience subsumed by the collective experience.

Kausar is that collective experience—a metanarrative of bestiality and helpless victimhood. There are a 1000 Kausars. Fact-finding team have seen photographic evidence of the burnt bodies of a mother& a foetus lying on mother’s belly, as if torn from the uterus &left on the gash.

Splintered Justice, lawyer Prita Jha recounts that the rioters of 2002 did not limit their acts of sexual violence to Muslims. They also targeted fellow Hindus who had any association with Muslims...17/n
#GujaratGenocide

Gauri was in love with a Muslim man and was living with him. When the Hindu mob attacked her village, Gauri said, she persuaded her partner to leave the house and hide in the fields, believing that since she was a Hindu, the rioters, her co-religionists, would not harm her...18/n

Gauri was gangraped by 7 Hindu terrorists, in front of 30–40 fellow villagers, none of whom even tried to help her. Her ordeal was also witnessed by her minor daughter, who later testified in court as the only eyewitness. Going through the trial process was traumatic, Gauri said.

In another testimony by Azharuddin, he saw Farzana being raped by Guddu Chara. Farzana was about thirteen years old. She was a resident of Hussain Nagar. They put a rod in Farzana’s stomach. She was later burnt. 12-year-old Noorjahan was also raped by four Hindu rioters...20/n

Eight-year-old Saddam described how men attacked and ‘then…then they stripped my mother naked…usko nanga kar diya’. A 9-year-old volunteered to explain to another women’s team what rape means. ‘Balatkaar ka matlab jab aurat ko nanga karte hain aur phir use jala deta hain'!

Source:
This excerpt from ‘Between Memory and Forgetting: Massacre and the Modi Years in Gujarat’, written by Harsh Mander, has been published with permission from Yoda Press.
#GujaratGenocide