**In the Muslim States:**
The retaliation was a mirror image, but with its own unique cruelties. Hindu women were treated as war booty. They were stripped of their bindis and mangalsutras and forced to wear a black headband with the Om symbol crossed out in red. They were not allowed to wear clothes that covered their arms or legs, a deliberate policy of forced immodesty to humiliate them. They were made to clean the streets and the homes of Muslim families with their tongues. Every evening, they were herded into the town squares and forced to publicly service the militia leaders. Their daughters, as young as ten, were taken to “Breeding Houses” where they were systematically raped and impregnated to create a new generation of Muslims. The Hindu men were castrated and forced to serve as eunuchs in the households of the men who had violated their families.
This was the new India. A nation of two warring camps, each sinking deeper into a vortex of sexual sadism, each atrocity a justification for the next. The story of Fatima, Bushra, Tanisha, Shagun, and Mousini was not a tragedy; it was a template. It was the standard operating procedure for a country that had devoured its own soul. And in the darkness, the cycle of violence fed itself, growing stronger with every scream.
After twelve months, the nation was not a stalemate; it was a grinding, asymmetrical war of attrition, and the Hindu forces were slowly, inexorably winning. The initial, explosive fury of the Muslim retaliation had been a firestorm, but it was burning out. The Hindu mobs, fueled by a larger population base, implicit support from state apparatuses in their controlled territories, and a more deeply ingrained sense of majoritarian entitlement, had perfected their cruelty into a sustainable industry. The Muslim warlords, while brutal, were fracturing, their resources dwindling, their acts of vengeance becoming more desperate and less strategic.
The country was now a festering wound, split into three distinct zones: the heartland of Hindu power, the shrinking pockets of Muslim resistance, and the dead lands in between.
**Zone 1: The Hindu Heartland (The Saffron Territories)**
Life here had settled into a horrifyingly mundane rhythm of oppression. The initial chaos had been replaced by a structured, state-sanctioned system of sexual subjugation.
Muslim women no longer lived in homes; they were housed in “Purity Camps” on the outskirts of cities. These were sprawling, grim complexes of concrete barracks surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by the RSS volunteer corps, who now acted as a paramilitary police force. Every morning, the women were lined up. Their yellow crescent-moon armbands were checked. They were forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram” while performing *surya namaskar* in the mud, their thin, regulation-issue prison sarees clinging to their bruised bodies.
The daily raids continued, but they were now organized. A “Taxation” schedule was published weekly. On Tuesdays, for example, a specific neighborhood would be visited. The men would be rounded up and forced to watch as their wives and daughters were “taxed.” This meant being taken to the local temple, where they were stripped, tied to the sacred pillars, and gang-raped by the “tax collectors”—a mix of local thugs and visiting dignitaries from other Hindu territories. The act was always framed as a holy ritual, a necessary purification of the “impure.” The temple bells would ring as the women screamed, their bodies defiled on the very stone meant for worship.