Hatebuster! Aaftab Poonawalla- Shraddha murder case had nothing to do with religion!

Claim: The speaker in the video, Gautam Khattar, claims that 99.9% of the Muslim men have been involved in wooing innocent Hindu women and getting them to fall in love with them. The speaker then says that out of all these women, 80% of them have been murdered or raped, and the remaining are living in hell.

Busted! There are no such official statistics that are released by any authority or body or even any organization to support the baseless claims being made by Khattar. The National Crime Records Bureau, every year, releases a Crimes in India report that documents crimes committed against women, but they are not classified on communal basis.

These number have just been stated to push the communal agenda, instill fear in the minds of the public and create disharmony in our country.

The case referred to here by the speaker is a gruesome case of murder which has been given a communal color by the hindutva groups. From a case of violence and murder of a woman, this has now been presented as a lesson for all those Hindu women who choose to cross the societal bars of segregating people based on their castes, beliefs and faiths.

The video

In the video, the speaker, Gautam Khattar, is seen referring to recent case of murder of Shraddha Walkar by her boyfriend, Aaftab Poonawala. In this particular case, the boyfriend and girlfriend were living together as a couple, and got into a fight. As a result of it, the boyfriend strangled the girl and later chopped up her body into 35 pieces. Since the couple belonged to different faiths, the speaker in the video can be heard comparing this aforementioned case to a case of love jihad. To make his case, he quotes certain percentages. As stated by him, 99.9% of the Muslim men have been involved in wooing innocent Hindu women and getting them to fall in love with them. He goes on to say that such Hindu women are suffering today, and are victims. The speaker then says that out of all these women, 80% of them have been murdered or raped, and the remaining are living in hell. In furtherance to this, he says that for all this, neither the Muslim man nor the Hindu girl’s parents are to be blamed, as they try to stop her. But, as the girl believes in her advanced thinking, she breaks her relation with her own family and goes on to enter into a live-in relationship with the Muslim man. Connecting again with the case, the speaker says that the girl then goes to Delhi, earn and eat on their own and indulge in the drama of love. After a few days, the same girl is then stuffed in the fridge after getting murdered.

The video can be viewed here: (20) Dr. Prachi Sadhvi on Twitter: “ध्यान से सुनना https://t.co/yPlkLp3lPU” / Twitter

While it can be deduced from the facts of this cases that this is just a case of crime committed against women, a communal color is being given to the same.

India sees multiple cases of crimes against women on a daily basis. From molestation and abuse to rape, domestic violence, and dowry death, crimes against women have been on the rise. While some of these cases are covered by mainstream India, based on the caste, creed and religion of the woman, the case of Aaftab Poonawalla and Shraddha has been dissected by the media to propagate Muslims under the bad light.

To bust this myth that only Muslim men indulge in killing a woman in such a horrifying manner, we have made a list of crimes committed against women in the recent past, wherein the perpetrator was not a Muslim man.

• Just a few days post the aforementioned murder case,  Abhijit Patidar, alleged to have killed Shilpa Jharia by slitting her throat, shot a video with the victim’s body and posted it on social media. In the shocking video he posted on social media, Abhijit says, “Bewafai Nahi Karne Ka” (do not be unfaithful). He then lifts a blanket to reveal a woman lying in bed, with her throat slit.

• In the same week as the Aaftab case, Priyangi Singh was admitted to a hospital in Mumbai after having suffered multiple fractures to her spine, a head injury and paralysis below the waist in the assault by her boyfriend, 25-year-old Amey Darekar, on the 13th-floor terrace water tank of a common friend’s building in Dahisar.

• In September 2022, Nineteen-year-old Ankita Bhandari, a receptionist at Vanantara resort owned by now-expelled BJP leader Vinod Arya’s son Pulkit Arya, was found dead in a lake. She was murdered for having refused to succumb to pressure by the accused for indulging in prostitution.

• In September 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped in Hathras district, Uttar Pradesh, by four upper caste Hindu men. She died two weeks later in a Delhi hospital. Initially, it was reported that one accused had tried to kill her, though later in her statement to the magistrate, the victim named four accused as having raped her. The victim’s brother claimed that no arrests were made in the first 10 days after the incident took place. After her death, the victim was forcibly cremated by the police without the consent of her family, a claim denied by the police.

• In January 2018, an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Asifa Bano was abducted, gang raped, and murdered by six men and a juvenile, in the Rasana village near Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Known as the Kathua rape case, all the perpetrators were Hindu and the victim had been targeted because of her religion.

• In 2017, Rajesh Gulati was found guilty of murder and causing disappearance of evidence by the Dehradun court. He had murdered his wife and chopped her body into 70 pieces.

To bring forth the prevalence of domestic violence in India, here are some eye-opening statistics on the same. The fifth NFHS round (2019-21) shows that 31.5% of Indian women in the 18-49 age group have experienced physical and sexual violence at least once.[1] The NFHS data further shows that multiple factors affect the likelihood of such violence against women- such as age, education, income, etc. While 18.3% of women aged between 18 and 19 have suffered sexual or physical violence either in the last year or in their lifetime, this number increases with the age of the women (to 35.3%) till the 30-39 year age group. It does come down slightly in the 40-49 age group (35.2%). Compared to urban women, rural women are much more likely to have experienced physical or sexual abuse. Higher levels of education and income do contribute to a reduction in the likelihood of physical violence against women, but they do not completely eradicate it, as the Shraddha case demonstrates.[2]

The World Health Organisation’s Global Database on the Prevalence of Violence Against Women provides a consolidated global database on the prevalence of intimate partner violence in 158 countries of the world.[3] These numbers are based on the latest national level surveys conducted during the period 2000 to 2018. WHO data shows that 18% of Indian women aged between the ages of 15 to 49 suffered at least one form of intimate partner violence in the preceding 12 months. This figure puts India in the 33rd highest spot within 156 countries for which a comparable estimate was available.

To put things in perspective, Indian women are less susceptible to intimate partner violence than women in Bangladesh (23%) and Afghanistan (35%), but more susceptible than Pakistan (16%), Nepal (11%) and Sri Lanka (4%), and major industrialised nations in the world. If one looks at the percentage of women who have suffered intimate partner violence in their entire lifetime, these numbers are higher. About 35% of Indian women aged between 15 and 49 have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence in their entire lifetime, placing India in the 33rd position among 151 countries (for which a comparable estimate was available).