Hindutva activists have been particularly angered by a campaign last April, when images of Bollywood celebrities holding placards asking for justice for a child flooded social media. The campaign sought to draw attention to the obstruction of justice in the case of the rape and murder of a eight-year-old girl in Jammu’s Kathua area.

The child belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakkarwal community, while the eight accused were Hindu; four of them were policemen. As a consequence, the crime, which allegedly took place inside a temple in January 2018, was initially covered up.

The police chargesheet later noted that the crime was part of a plot to dislodge the Bakarwal community from the area, where it had been locked in tensions with local Hindus over the use of land, among other things.

The area’s communal faultline was so deep that many Hindu residents, instead of asking for a speedy trial, held protests demanding that the accused be released. The leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which was then part of the state’s ruling alliance, extended their support to the protestors.

It was only after lawyers linked to Hindutva groups tried to physically obstruct the filing of the chargesheet that the case found national attention, sparking off the social media campaign.

The campaigners, including Bollywood celebrities, tweeted messages with a hashtag that included the child’s name. They rued the fact that the crime had taken place in a devisthan, a sacred place. Though Hindutva activists took offence to the reference to the temple, the campaign was not about politics: it was entirely focused on the safety of women and children.

False equivalence

The Kathua campaign has so incensed Hindutva activists that since then, whenever a crime against a child has been reported in which Muslim men are the alleged perpetrators, they have gone on a frenzy, unleashing copy-cat campaigns, complete with placards and hashtags.

Each time, they have made sure to foreground the religious identity of the accused.

Influential voices, including some from Bollywood, have amplified these messages. But they have chosen to overlook the fact that unlike the Kathua case, there has been no communal friction in the backdrop to these crimes. In none of the cases have the families of the children alleged so. The religious identity of the alleged perpetrators has had no relevance at all.

The Hindutva campaigners also chose to ignore another key difference: while the Kathua case had initially seen a cover-up, the cases they are campaigning for had seen prompt action by the police. No one had tried to shield the accused – neither political leaders, nor Muslim protestors.

On the contrary, when a seven-year-old child was abducted and raped by a Muslim man in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh in June last year, Muslims in the town participated in protests asking for death penalty for the accused. They even declared that his body would not be given space in the community burial grounds.