Muslims fleeing village at centre of rape crisis in India

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RASANA, India, April 18, (Agencies): There are no Muslims left in the village of Rasana, which has become a symbol of India’s rape crisis after the brutal murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl blamed on Hindu men.

Police say the girl was raped and killed as part of an attempt by some of the village’s majority Hindus to evict Bakarwal Muslim nomads, who graze their cattle in the hills in the summer months. It seems to have worked: the girl’s family have headed for the Kashmir hills under police protection. Other Muslim families in the community of around 100 people all left after the rape in January.

At the empty home of the dead girl’s family, five armed police kept guard half asleep in chairs outside. Police say the child was drugged, held captive in a Hindu temple for five days, and repeatedly raped before being beaten to death. Her anonymous grave in orange earth partially covered by weeds is in a nearby village in Kathua district, about 60 kms (40 miles) from the region’s main city Jammu. Media reports said Hindus in Rasana refused to allow the girl to be buried there.

Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state, but the Jammu region in the south is dominated by Hindus. Hindus and Muslims had lived together relatively peacefully in Rasana until the killing, though each side had made sporadic police complaints about the other, according to official documents.

Meanwhile, the rise in the number of reported cases of rape and sexual abuse against children in India is a “national emergency”, Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi said on Tuesday, with up to 100,000 such cases pending in the courts

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