Remember Kathua

Stop and ask, can depravity, brutality and injustice be justified by religion and politics?

The brutal murder and serial rape of an eight-year-old Bakherwal-Gujjar girl living in a village near Kathua, 72 km from Jammu, is horrific enough in all its detail. But, what has emerged since the police investigation led to the arrest of the alleged perpetrators of the crime is even worse, for it has exposed the fault lines in our society. How have we reached a point where the rape and murder of a child is used to fuel communal hatred and promote politically sanctioned impunity for criminals?

The gruesome details about what happened to this child between 10 January, when she disappeared, and 17 January when her brutalised young body was found, are terrifying because of what this represents in terms of human depravity. That a child could be abducted, drugged, confined in a temple, repeatedly beaten and raped, and then murdered and thrown out is horrific enough. What makes it worse is that the perpetrators included members of the local police. One of them even joined the search party with her parents after they complained that she was missing, all the time aware of where she was and what was being done to her.

Joint announcement of CPG(m-l) TKP/ML

The crisis of the global capitalist-imperialist system fuels and is fueled by the contradictions of the imperialist powers at all levels. All around the world workers and peoples are facing the most ferocious attack of the system’s forces which seek a solution in an ever greater and more profound barbarism. In our countries the working class and the peoples live in the conditions of fierce exploitation, unemployment, and impoverishment. The working force is getting discredited, the social and democratic rights of the masses are being trampled upon. In the meantime, the imperialist grip is tightening in a region, which constitutes an ardent and crucial arena of the global imperialist competition. A region in which American, Russian, Chinese, and European imperialists come across and clash according to the ambitions and magnitudes of each, in a tangle of contradictions, that daily magnifies the dangers for the peoples.

In this context the peril of war, that threatens the peoples on the both sides of the Aegean Sea, grows ever larger. A peril that is rooted in the particular and specific features, and in the history of the two countries” reactionary confrontation, but at the same time constitutes an integral part of the turmoil and of the developments that are occurring across the region.