Aditya Sinha: The Rohingyas bogey in Kathua

Girls at a candle light vigil in Bengaluru against the Kathua rape and murder PICPTIAs the outrage erupted last week over the rape and murder of an eightyearold girl of Jammu and Kashmirs nomadic Bakerwal tribe which happened in January BJP supporters floated a justification for the barbaric act A stunning aspect of the case ndash alongside the detail in the police chargesheet that an accused raped the little girl one last time before they killed her ndash was a protest march in support of the rapistsmurderers This despite the accused having confessed their crimeEven the tricolour was waved during this protest merely to communalise the crime between patriots and antinationals After all this the justification began emerging on social media comprising a single word Rohingya The rest was left to lurid nativist paranoia A narrative emerged according to which a communal chasm opened up in Jammu due to the influx of Rohingya Muslim refugees who escaped the genocide in their homeland by the Myanmar army Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi kept quiet on it for political expedience leading to scattered calls for withdrawing her Nobel Peace Prize Some extrapolated this narrative to talk of jehadi Rohingyas and one genius even claimed the PDP had surreptitiously settled these jehadi Rohingyas in Jammu for demographic change in what is still a Hindumajority cityFact 1 The rapemurder had nothing to do with Rohingya Muslims Fact 2 The criminals were caught and have confessed Fact 3 The home ministry says there are 7000 Rohingya Muslims in Jammu Fact 4 Jammu towns population is nearly 5 lakh while the entire Jammu division population comes to around 60 lakh Fact 5 Kathua the scene of the ghastly crime is 100 km from JammuFake news as we know exploits peoples ignorance about a distant place or time crunching 100km distances to a single point and it constructs a narrative dominated by lies and halftruths which convince on the scaffolding of the few facts that are actually used the easilypersuaded For many Indians Kathua and Jammu might be sidebyside in the way that many imagine Muzaffarabad and Peshawar or Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura to be sidebyside Many Vaishno Devi pilgrims have never seen Kathua Thus any manufactured fact about Jammu is readily tacked onto KathuaSeven thousand refugees can never demographically change bustling Jammu It is a bogey Rohingya Muslims are scattered around India in an even more impoverished state than Bangladeshi migrants Bangladeshis in Gurgaon live in pitiable slums in subhuman conditions The Rohingyas are worse off They struggle to eat and have no time for jehadi nonsense It is but a Hindutva wet dream The rapemurder itself shines light on larger as well as local factors The Bakerwal nomads have caught up with the 21st century and a social change they face is of their children getting educated they dont want the nomadic life The youngsters are getting atomised and settling down around the state like lawyer Talib Hussain 29 a Bakerwal settled in Kathua who was recently jostled by BJP supporters on TVOne of the BJP state ministers who attended the prorapist rally and was dropped by the PDPBJP coalition government is Lal Singh He used to be a Congress MP during the UPA1 and UPA2 decade The Congress didnt contest him in 2014 so he joined the BJP unsurprisingly over 80 of the BJPs MPs are professional turncoats Why did he go out of his way to support the rapistmurderers It is alleged that he wants to grab the land that Bakerwals traditionally grazed on and so supports their ejection once and for all The rapistmurderers have confessed that their beastly crime was meant to scare the Bakerwals away from their areaAnother fact BJP supporters have thrown about as part of their whataboutery defence of the accused is of several unconnected rapes that over the recent year took place in Assam The perpetrators are Muslims and the victims young Hindu girls These are definitely terrible crimes But no one took out a rally to support these rapists indeed mobs of their own community attacked the accuseds houses the attackers might have been motivated by selfpreservation but so what There was no candlelight march for these victims because one the law did its job and two no one needlessly communalised the matterWe perhaps should thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi for finally speaking out about the injustice to the little victim He has however tried to have it both ways his initial silence signalling his endorsement of the Rohingya conspiracytheorists etc He probably realised that with the Karnataka assembly election in less than a month he cannot afford to have both Dalit opinion and womens anger against him His words are merely an electoral calculation not expressed in the kind of anguish his predecessor Manmohan Singh expressed after the 2012 Nirbhaya rapemurder No one is fooledAditya Sinhas new book will be out in May He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom