"One of the most spectacular forms of sadism in the recent events had been the way Muslim female bodies were made to function in the drama of Hindutva terror. There had been earlier anticipations of that. The investigations made by the AIDWA in 1992-93, especially in Surat and Bhopal, pointed out several similar features. Women were "tortured, molested, raped, and then burnt to death." Sometimes, their children were killed before their eyes. At the same time, more often than not, such atrocities were whispered about and not always confirmed openly. This time, rape victims as well as their male relatives have no inhibition about reporting rape and sexual torture; the police, however, do not admit FIRs on rape, a senior officer claims that mobs have no time for raping, and that Hindus, moreover, do not rape. Fernandes, on the other hand, says that rape is so universally prevalent that Gujarat rapes are not worth talking about. So, it has not happened, or it happens universally; in either case, it cannot or need not be mentioned. Women have been killed in very large numbers. At the mass grave that was dug on 6 March to provide burial to 96 bodies from Naroda Patiya, 46 women were buried. Bilkees Begum from the Godhra Relief camp told a tale that seemed to confirm a recurrent pattern in most places, according to survivors' accounts. She was stripped, gang-raped, her baby was killed before her, she was then beaten up, then burnt and left for dead. For variety's sake, other women also had acid thrown upon them, and then burnt in fires. A women's' fact-finding report sums up the usual procedure: " …rape, gang rape, mass rape, stripping, insertion of objects into their body, molestation… a majority of rape victims were burnt alive. " Before they were finally killed off, some were beaten up with rods and pipes for almost an hour. Before or after the killing, their vagina would be sliced, or would have iron rods pushed inside. Similarly, their bellies would be cut open or would have hard objects inserted into them. A thirteen year old girl, Farzana, had a rod pushed into her stomach, and was then burnt. A mother reported that her three year old baby girl was raped and killed in front of her, while elsewhere daughters reported on the rapes of their mothers, now dead. Kausar Bano, a young girl from Naroda Patiya was 9 month's pregnant. Several eyewitnesses testified that she was raped, tortured, her womb was slit open with a sword to disgorge the foetus which was then hacked to pieces and roasted alive with the mother. At Fatehpura, more than 50 young girls were paraded naked, and then asked to urinate. After they were rescued by a Muslim ambulance service, they travelled to the camp without a stitch on them. Other victims arrived naked at camps, too, after acid had been poured upon their clothes, which they tore off in agony from their burning and peeling bodies. Medina Mustafa Ismail Shaikh reported from Kalol camp: "My daughter was like a flower, still to experience life…The monsters tore my beloved daughter to pieces..the mob was saying, cut them to pieces, leave no evidence… I saw fires being lit. After some time, the mob started leaving. And it became quiet. " It became very quiet, for the voices of children could not be heard. A very large number of parents, especially mothers, had to see their children die in excruciating agony before they, too, were tortured and burnt. At the mass grave for 96 people, they buried a six-month old baby. Fatimabibi, who secretly came to Delhi to testify to the violence, kept repeating dementedly: " Innocent (masoom) tender babies were crying for water, they filled them up with petrol and then lit them up." At Randhikapur village, a young pregnant woman first saw her baby cut to piecs. Then she was raped and her foetus was ripped out and killed,. They beat her up and left her for dead. Four year old Asif died of 90% burns after several days' of agony. Before he died, The Hindu took a photograph of his bandaged face, out of which his large, beautiful, fully aware eyes were blazing out. One can go on narrating the ways in which babies and women were tortured and killed, but the point here is often the two acts were coupled together. The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One, the woman's body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with especial savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes. In readings of community violence, rape is taken to be a sign of collective dishonouring. The same patriarchal order that designates the female body as the symbol of lineage and community purity, would designate the entire collectivity as impure and polluted, once the woman is raped by an outsider. Rape, in Gujarat violence, obviously performed that function. But what, then, is the point of the elements of excess, the surplus of cruelty, and its multifarious forms? We need to remember that the Gujarati press invented the murder of 80 Hindu women on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, who had been raped and had their breasts cut off - a complete invention, since even the Gujarat police denied the story. However, it served to justify rapes and mutilations of Muslim women within the structure of " action-reaction" discourse. The fact that revenge went far beyond that is not surprising for revenge is not revenge if it does not outstrip the original offence.. In Delhi, on 28 February, we heard RSS boys shouting: Ek Ka badla Sau me lenge. (We will avenge one death with a hundred"). Beyond Godhra are the legends that all boys in the shakhas are bred on: partition time rapes of Hindu women, rapes of Hindu queens under Muslim rule, abductions of Hindu women all through history by Muslims. There is also the perpetual fear of a more virile Muslim male body that lures away Hindu girls, a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by violent deeds. Violence, for the Sangh, is maleness. In the 1990s, when communal violence had intensified, bangles were sent to localities where riots had not taken place, to taunt Hindu men with effiminacy. At Jawaharlal Nehru University, a post- Godhra procesion of the ABVP chanted: " Jis Hinduon ka khoon na khola, woh Hindu nahin, woh hijra hain". (Those Hindus whose blood does not boil, are not Hindus, they are eunuchs'). This identification between killing and masculinity, is a strong and uniquely Sangh teaching. In the Gujarat violence, mobs who raped, sometimes came dressed in khaki shorts or in saffron underwear, rape being obviously seen as a religious duty, a Sangh duty. In times of violence, Hindu male sexual organs must function as instruments of torture. There is more to it. For generations, anxieties had been whipped up about Muslim fertility rate, of their uncontrolled breeding and numerical outstripping of the Hindu majority. So coupled with anxieties of a comparatively less potent Hindu maleness, there is a fear of infertile Hindu femaleness, and a drying up of future progeny, - the longstanding image of dying Hindus. This is counterposed to that of vigorously self-multiplying Muslims. Fed on such self-invented self-doubt, Hindu mobs swooped down upon Muslim women and children with multiple but related aims. First, to possess and dishonour them and their men, second to taste what is denied to them and what, according to their understanding, explains Muslim virility. Third, to physically destroy the vagina and the womb, and, thereby, to symbolically destroy the sources of pleasure, reproduction and nurture for Muslim men, and for Muslim children. Then, by beatings, to punish the fertile female body. Then, physically destroying the children, they signified an end to Muslim growth. Then, by cutting up the foetus and burning it, a symbolic destruction of future generations, of the very future of Muslims themselves. The burning of men, women and children, as the final move, served multiple functions: it was to destroy evidence, it was to make Muslims vanish, it was also to desecrate Muslim deaths by denying them Islamic burial, and forcing a Hindu cremation upon them. There were, thus, many layers of signification, of symbolic meanings that went into the act that were repeated by different mobs at different locales, but on fairly identical lines. They can be aligned to Sangh teachings, stereotypes and fantasies. This also explains why the same female body was subjected to a series of sexual humiliation, torture, mutilation and obliteration. Conjoined with the bodies of their children, they provided a site where the entire drama of revenge was enacted in its long and complicated sequence."