(This is brutality in its most clean, most pristine form. This is a threat to us and our nation. Now for those people who wish to extend a hand of friendship to these people, let these people first come into your own homes before you let them come into my country.)
New Delhi (IANS) – A citizen’s tribunal that spoke to victims of the sectarian bloodshed in Gujarat has chronicled most brutal and inhuman torture of women, leaving survivors and their families emotionally scarred for life.
Before they were killed, the usual routine that they were made to go through by the killer mobs was rape, gang rape, mass rape, stripping, parading, insertion of objects in their body, molestation and torching.
“Rape was used as an instrument for subjugation and humiliation of a community,” noted the tribunal headed by former Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer and comprising former judges and activists.
The tribunal collected evidence from 16 Gujarat districts and spoke to hundreds of female victims.
The report said a chilling cover-up technique was destruction of the evidence by burning the victims.
“Barring a few, in most instances of sexual violence, female victims were stripped and paraded naked, gang-raped and quartered and burnt beyond recognition.”
Many of the 33,000-odd children forced to live in refugee camps throughout Gujarat were mute witnesses to sexual crimes against their womenfolk - mothers, sisters, aunts and even grandmothers.
In Naroda Patiya, one of the worst affected villages in the violence, the tribunal records that mobs even raped girls as young as 3 or 11 years. Babies were cut up and flung into pyres.
Young girls were made to remove their clothes in front of 1,000-2,000 strong mobs that humiliated them. Eight to 10 men raped them. After this, attackers inserted sharp swords, knives or other objects into their bodies and tortured them before burning them alive.
When women begged and pleaded with police personnel to save them, they were told that the police had orders to “do nothing for 24 hours in Naroda”.
Forty-six women were among the 96 bodies that were buried in a mass grave after the village had been ravaged by the mobs.
A rape victim from the Godhra relief camp told the tribunal that she was “stripped, gang-raped, her baby was killed in front of her, she was beaten up, burnt and left for dead.”
Women were also attacked with acid, beaten up with rods, their vagina sliced, and iron rods pushed inside. Their bellies would be cut open and objects inserted.
A 13-year-old girl had a rod pushed into her stomach. A mother recounted that her three-year-old baby was raped and killed.
One of the most gruesome accounts was that about the death of Kausar Bano, a pregnant woman of Naroda Patiya. She was raped, tortured, her womb was slit open with a sword; her foetus was torn out, hacked to pieces and burnt alive with its mother.
Women from Shah Alam and Danilimda villages went to the police to seek protection for their families. The police ignored them. But when they got persistent, the police came with reinforcements and rained batons and rifle butts on them.
In some villages, where the police allegedly colluded with the mobs and facilitated their entry into Muslim lanes and houses, women suffered quite another kind of humiliation.
When the women tried to shield their houses from the police and the mobs, the police pulled down their trousers and shouted abuse at the women, the tribunal was told by various victims.
The tribunal was told by a woman of Vadodara that she was beaten so brutally by the police that she gave premature birth and had blood oozing out of one breast while feeding her baby with the other.
In Tarsali village, a woman was made to watch as her son was dragged down from a tree that he had climbed in desperation, his fingers cut off and the rest of his body dismembered. That was the last picture in her mind before she died.
The report notes: “In Gujarat, the degree of violence and sexual crimes against women reached unprecedented levels. That sexual crimes against Muslim women took place on such a large scale in post-independent, democratic and secular India is shocking in itself.”
