The violence was not confined to the temple. It spilled out into the city. Hindu homes were marked. The men would break down the doors, drag the husbands and fathers outside, and execute them in the street. Then they would turn to the women inside. They didn’t just rape them; they claimed them. They branded their asses with a hot iron bearing the crescent moon, a permanent mark of ownership. They forced them to cook beef and eat it, the ultimate humiliation. They took the prettiest ones, stripped them naked, and paraded them through the streets on leashes like dogs, their bodies a public testament to the victory of their vengeance.
In Delhi and Ayodhya, in Mumbai and Kolkata, the country tore itself apart. The leaked files of two girls had ignited a firestorm of sexual civil war, and every Hindu woman and every Muslim woman was now just potential booty in the battle for avenge.
The night the mob came, the air in their small village in Odisha smelled of jasmine and impending rain. Fatima, sixteen, was helping her mother, Bushra, prepare dinner. The first sign was the distant, rhythmic chanting of a mob, a sound that grew louder and more distinct until it was a deafening roar right outside their door. It wasn’t the local police or the army. This was something else, something born from the leaked files and the nation’s madness.
The door splintered open. A flood of men poured in, their faces painted with saffron paste, their eyes wild with a righteous, predatory gleam. They weren’t there to kill. Not yet. They were there for conquest. Bushra, a woman in her late thirties whose beauty had only matured with age, threw herself in front of Fatima. “Take me! Leave my daughter!” she screamed in Odia, her hands clasped in supplication.
The leader of the mob, a man with a thick, black beard and a scar across his cheek, laughed. It was a cruel, guttural sound. “Why choose?” he rasped. “We’ll take the mother and the daughter. A family set.”
They were dragged out, their burqas torn off in the street, their bodies exposed to the leering eyes of the entire village. They were thrown into the back of a truck, along with a dozen other women from neighboring homes. The journey was a nightmare of rough hands and brutal groping, the men treating them like sacks of meat, not human beings.
They arrived at the “Hindu camp” after hours of jostling travel. It wasn’t a military camp. It was a converted ashram on the outskirts of a town, a place that had once been a school for tribal children ^1,2^. Now, its dormitories and classrooms had been transformed into a processing center for spoils of war. The air reeked of disinfectant, sweat, and fear.
Bushra and Fatima were separated immediately. Fatima was dragged with the other young girls, all between the ages of fifteen and twenty. They were herded into a large, tiled bathroom and ordered to strip. Their clothes were thrown into a large metal drum and set on fire. Then, under the cold spray of high-pressure hoses, they were washed. Their body hair was shaved off—heads, arms, legs, and pubic hair—by stoic women who were clearly captives themselves, their eyes dead and empty. They were being sanitized, stripped of their identity, and prepared for use.