15-year-old Prachi Rana was brutally murdered in her home on Tuesday by Asif Mohammed, a newspaper vendor who used to deliver the newspaper at the victim’s home in Una district, Himachal Pradesh.

Prachi was a Class 10 student and was alone at home in Pratap Nagar, Amb tehsil as both her parents had gone out for their jobs. When her mother, a government employee, returned from work in the evening, she found her daughter lying in a pool of blood and immediately called police. Prachi’s throat had been slit.

Police started the investigation and a forensic team also reached the spot to collect the evidence. Late on Thursday night, police arrested Asif Mohammed aka Honey, son of Taj Mohammed from Ward 3 of Amb. The murder weapon was also recovered.

Superintendent of Police (SP) Una Arjit Sen while addressing a press conference said that on April 5, when Prachi was alone in her house, the accused entered the house around 1 PM on the pretext of giving a newspaper bill. After entering the house, he ‘proposed’ to her and tried to molest her. When she resisted, the accused slit her throat. After this, he fled the spot.

The incident has enraged locals who gathered outside the police station and are demanding the police to hand over the accused to them. They are also demanding that the accused be hanged. The Bar Association in Amb has refused to fight the case on behalf of the accused.

“No communal angle”

Amazingly, in the press conference, one journalist asked the SP on how some people are giving a ‘communal color’ to this crime, and as per his secular conditioning the SP promptly responded that there is no ‘religious angle’ to this crime which has a ‘plain, simple motive’.

But when a cow smuggler or thief belonging to the Muslim community is killed by villagers, the same media rushes to label it a ‘communal crime’ and police often doesn’t bother to correct! This is the staggering hypocrisy that is widespread across Indian media, and this is how crimes against Hindus are whitewashed and filed away in the ‘routine law & order issue’ category.

Also, how did SP Arjit Sen conclude there is no religious angle? Has police probed the mosque that Asif Mohammed was attending, the Islamic organizations that he was part of? Has police checked that he was not indoctrinated by sermons and teachings that dehumanize ‘idol worshipping’ Hindus as lesser beings who will benefit spiritually if they convert to Islam, or which label non-hijab wearing girls as ‘loose characters’ who deserve to be raped, or that radicalize one to consider non-Muslim girls as maal-e-ghanimat, i.e. legitimate targets for sexual exploitation, or that seed misogyny in general.

After all, a female Islamic professor from the world-renowned Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt has declared that “Allah (God) makes permissible for Muslim men to rape non-Muslim women in order to ‘humiliate’ them.”

Has police verified that Mohammed was not influenced by such religious doctrines, before issuing the ‘no religious angle’ clean chit for this crime?

The SP did add that Mohammed used to stalk Prachi whenever she would step out of her house. He also used to work as a plumber around an year before, and had also done some work in the newly constructed upper floor of the Rana house. So, the pedophile was probably eyeing Prachi since she was even younger. The SP also added that Prachi had a younger sister – it is not known if that child was in the house at the time of the murder. If she was, we can only imagine the mental trauma she would have undergone.

The reality is that there is a clear communal pattern to these crimes. Prachi Rana, Swati Rajput, Impressi Das, Yoga Lakshmi and so many unnamed victims – these are just some cases that have come to light in the last month or so, from all over the country. No pattern? What is the police and media of our secular state smoking?

Why do we never hear of cases of Hindu youth assuming a fake Muslim identity to stalk/groom a Muslim girl and then murder her if she resists, or force her to convert after marriage? We hardly even hear of Muslim girls being targeted by Muslim youth in this brutal manner. One serial predator Muhammad Shafi, who posed as an NRI Hindu doctor to sexually assault over 30 Hindu girls he contacted through matrimonial ads, even admitted to investigators that he targeted only Hindu girls because ‘as a devout Muslim, he thinks it is a sin to molest a Muslim girl’.

So why are Hindu girls alone being targeted in this vile manner by Muslim men? Have we lost our collective minds and common sense that we can’t see something so obvious?

And it’s not just Islamist preaching which is inciting Muslim youth to commit such crimes – our Bollywood music industry and popular culture in general is busy sexualizing minor girls too.

Update

12.45 PM, 9 April: More details added