For Muslim women in India, the new year began with a new edition of stale old Islamophobic abuse by Hindu supremacist forces. An app displayed photographs and names stolen from social media profiles of Muslim women, offering them up for “auction” online. Many of the Muslim women were journalists and activists. This was a new version of an app that had surfaced last year, also “auctioning” Muslim women online. The apps are named after derogatory and abusive words used by Hindu supremacists for Muslim women: we will not use those words.
The Delhi Police had claimed to have made no headway in the investigation into the first app. As a result the perpetrators enjoyed impunity. In the latest case, however, the Mumbai Police has made headway, identifying a young woman Shweta Singh and a young man Vishal Kumar Jha as perpetrators. Further investigation is a must to expose the entire Hindu supremacist network and ecosystem and the masterminds running them.
It must be recalled that the “auction” apps are only a part of a larger ecosystem subjecting Muslim women to sexual humiliation. When Jamia Millia Islamia student and anti-CAA activist Safoora Zargar was arrested, her pregnancy was subjected to sexual innuendoes by the Hindu supremacist online mobs led by BJP leader Kapil Mishra. When Article 370 was scrapped, BJP leaders had made public statements about how Hindu men could now buy Kashmiri land and “marry” Kashmiri women.
Unsurprisingly, the same Hindu supremacists who treat Muslim women as their property, also treat Hindu women as sexual and reproductive machines. Yati Narsinhanand, organiser of the hate assemblies calling for genocide of Muslims, has repeatedly referred to Muslim and Hindu women as sexual property and baby-producing machines. Yati has said that Muslim women make themselves sexually available to any man. He then said that Hindu women must compete with Muslim women by producing more children of “pure DNA”, and this can be achieved by allowing “dharmacharyas” (godmen like himself) to have multiple wives.
Yati’s words cannot be dismissed as a “fringe” opinion. Shweta Singh, maker of one of the apps auctioning Muslim women online, has also made posters treating Hindu women as baby-producing machines. These posters are copied from similar posters from Hitler’s Germany. Fascists treat women as slaves. The “auction” apps and Yati Narsinhanand’s words are a warning of what the status of women will be if India becomes an authoritarian Hindu Nation of the Sangh’s dreams.
India’s poor are no strangers to Hindu supremacist and feudal fascists massacring entire communities and referring to women from these communities as “wombs”. In the 1990s, the Sanghi-feudal terrorist outfit Ranveer Sena massacred entire villages of Dalit and Extremely Backward communities. They especially targeted women from these communities. The Ranveer Sena chief Brahmeshwar had repeatedly justified the massacre of women and children because “female snakes breed snakes, and snake-babies grow up to be snakes.” Today we are hearing the same language again – calling for massacre of Muslims, and referring to women as sexual property or breeding machines.
India’s rural landless poor must, at such a time, stand in solidarity with their Muslim brothers and sisters. As the great anti-fascist German poet Bertolt Brecht said, “The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”
