Frontline: “Leaving Afghanistan,” “India’s Rape Scandal” (WGBH, PBS, aired July 20, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a fascinating, if also incredibly depressing, documentary on the PBS series Frontline about two grim stories in the Asian region of Afghanistan and India. The two stories they combined into the program were “Leaving Afghanistan,” about the chaos the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is leaving behind and the likelihood that Afghanistan will either fall under the total control of the Talban (incidentally the word “Taliban” just means “religious students” – it’s as if the U.S. were taken over in a violent revolution led by a guerrilla army called “The Seminarians”) or the sort of civil war that afflicted the place in the 1990’s among various factions that led to many Afghans regarding the Taliban’s takeover with a sense of relief. Anyone even remotely aware of the news from the late 1990’s knows what Taliban rule will be like for the Afghan people – women draped in blankets and denied education, health care, employment or even the right to go outside; destruction of priceless historical landmarks because they pre-dated the existence of Islam; a ban on all public entertainments except for mass executions in Kabul’s former soccer stadium which Afghans will be forced to watch; and the littering of Afghanistan’s streets, mountain paths and landscapes with people killed arbitrarily on the Taliban’s orders because they weren’t considered sufficiently “Islamic” – including the Hazara, a minority tribe of Shi’a Muslims whom the Taliban have marked for genocidal extermination because they don’t consider Shi’a Muslims to be real Muslims.

“Leaving Afghanistan” had very little to do with the politics surrounding the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from what’s become America’s longest war – when he announced the pull-out President Biden said he was the fourth President to preside over the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and he was going to make sure there wouldn’t be a fifth – or the big issue the U.S. media have been covering, which is the likely fate of the Afghan interpreters and others who served the U.S. presence and have immediately become marked for death by the Taliban now that American forces are no longer around to protect them. Instead the reporter, Najibullah Quarishi, focused on the likely outcome of the U.S. pullout for Afghans themselves, including the increasing involvement of Iran in Afghan politics. According to Quarishi, the Iranian government is pulling their militia force, the Fatemiyoun, out of Syria (where they were organized to fight in support of the Bashir al-Assad regime against the attempted revolution the U.S. was kinda-sorta backing), and infiltrating them into Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect the Hazara from extermination at the hands of the Taliban. Quarishi managed to get an interview with the Taliban warlord Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi, with whom he got “cred” in a fascinating way. After passing through 12 checkpoints to get to Niazi’s camp 500 miles west of Kabul, Afghanistan’s (nominal) capital, going through a 90-minute mountain hike and getting placed in a holding cell under a flag reading, “Welcome to the Taliban Court,” he heard the muezzin call the Taliban faithful to prayer – and joined in, thereby establishing that he was a faithful Muslim and therefore someone Mullah Niazi could trust.

Quarishi said that in person Mullah Niazi was quite personable and charming (so were Hitler and Stalin, according to people who met them and lived to tell the tale), and after making the obligatory statement that America “should go back where it came from: (an ironic parallel to the cry of anti-immigration Americans that one part or another of our polyglot population should “go back where they came from”), he told Quarishi of the Iranian Fatemiyoun, whom he said the Taliban were killing almost as fast as Iran could send them but still constituted a threat. Niazi claimed – and showed footage on his cell phone to prove it – that his Taliban forces had ambushed a Fatemiyoun detachment and killed 150 of the estimated 700 fighters Iran was trying to infiltrate. Quarishi also got an interview with a Fatemiyoun member who said, “Right now, I know that 5,000 men have already been placed inside Afghanistan, in every military division. Even inside the government there are Fatemiyoun. Five thousand are inside. Three thousand are in the police. Another thousand like me are in regular jobs.” Much of the reporting about the U.S. exit from Afghanistan has focused on how quickly the Taliban are sweeping through Afghanistan – they claim to be in charge of 80 percent of the country already, though other estimates say they have 55 percent, and much of the U.S. media have portrayed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as similar to the speed with which the North Viet Namese army and Viet Cong guerrillas overran the supposedly sovereign government of South Viet Nam once the U.S. was no longer around to protect it, and the resulting scenes of people hanging on to helicopters in a last-ditch attempt to flee what they imagined would be Communist retribution. Actually, the Viet Namese went through a relatively peaceful reunification and the United States lost the Viet Nam War but won the peace (just as the Confederacy lost the U.S. Civil War but won the peace – within 12 years after the end of the war they were able to get the federal troops out of the South, restore white supremacist governments to power, take away African-Americans’ voting rights and civil rights, and reduce America’s Black population to the penury and permanent servitude Southern whites – and a lot of Northern whites as well – thought was their proper “place”), Afghanistan has little or nothing to offer the Western world other than its strategic importance as the so-called “Gateway to Asia.”

So there is little reason for the advanced world to do much of anything for the country or its people except let them stew in their own juices and strike back only when they pose a threat to some person or country outside their borders, as they did when they gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to (among other things) plan and stage the September 11, 2001 attacks. The supposed “Afghan government” is a pipe dream – when Biden said he thought they had enough soldiers and equipment to hold out against a Taliban attack once we withdrew he was being uncharacteristically naïve and idiotic. I suspect most of those people in the so-called “Afghan army” are there to get their hands on American training and equipment so they can desert and fight for one warlord or faction or another – just as America’s carefully trained and painstakingly built “Iraqi army” largely deserted en masse and took their American-trained skills and American equipment to ISIS. A brutal and long-running civil war with the rest of the world deciding we’ve already invested too much money and energy in Afghanistan is one of the few things for the country that would be even worse than a total Taliban takeover; for all the horrors of their rule, at least the Taliban brought stability and order out of the chaos of civil war that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989. Ironically, just weeks after Quarishi interviewed Mullah Niazi, he was killed in an ambush and his son took over his force – and the son seemed more cosmopolitan (I briefly got the impression he was speaking English; his dad didn’t seem to know any Western language but was fluent in both Pashto and Dari, the common languages of southern and northern Afghanistan, respectively) but equally dedicated to the Taliban’s cause.

The second segment of last night’s Frontline was just as chilling, albeit in a different way: it had to do with the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whom the New Yorker ran a story about a couple of years ago and described as a Hindu fundamentalist party seemingly determined to make India Muslimrein the way Adolf Hitler and his Nazi associates were determined to make first Germany, then Europe and finally the whole world Judenrein. One of the particular evils of authoritarians in general and warriors in particular is that they regard rape as one of the privileges of conquest, and they enlist people into their causes with promises of all the money they can steal, all the enemies they can kill, and all the women (and, if they’re interested in that, boys) they can force themselves on and abuse to their heart’s content. The story told by correspondent Ramita Navai deals with two cases of rape in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which she describes as “the most populous state in India and the most electorally significant. It also holds a less impressive statistic: It has the second-highest reported number of rapes in the whole country.” One of the victims she profiled was an incredibly courageous woman Navai agreed to call by the alias “Jaya” because she’s still in danger of retribution and therefore can’t allow her real name to be used. Jaya was personally attacked at the home of a leading BJP politician in the state, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, whom Navai describes as “then a powerful politician in India’s ruling BJP party. He’s now in prison for Jaya’s rape but still has a loyal following. … Even though Sengar's in prison, he and his family still control the area,” which Navai explained made villagers in Jaya’s town unwilling to talk to her because she’s a foreign journalist and word might get back to Sengar’s friends. In June 2017 Jaya, only 16 years old, went to Sengar’s home, ostensibly for a job interview.

“The door opened,” she testified in his trial. “We reached the courtyard. Sengar caught me by my hand and dragged me to his room. He stripped me of my clothes. He closed the door and subjected me to a sexual assault. When I opposed, he said, ‘If you raise a voice, I will murder you.’” Though she initially reported the rape only to her aunt, word must have got out because within s few days of being raped by Sengar, Jaya was kidnapped, taken to another village, locked in a house and regularly gang-raped for a week. “The men took turns to rape me,” she told an Indian journalist. “I recognized two of them as Sengar’s men. They kept me on sedatives. Once I even tried to flee, but I was caught and sedated again.” When the police finally found her abandoned in the house after eight days in captivity, they took down the names of the people who had gang-raped her but refused to register her rape allegation against Sengar. What followed for Jaya was a Kafka-esque ordeal as she tried to report her rape to the state government of Uttar Pradesh – only the state’s chief minister, Yoga Adityanath, whom Navai described as “a senior member of the ruling BJP party and often touted as a future Indian prime minister.” Within a year of taking office as essentially the governor of Uttar Pradesh, he dismissed thousands of criminal cases pending against BJP politicians – many of whom had been accused of rape or other forms of violence against women. Jaya continued her allegations despite the retribution not only against her but her family; in April 2018 her father, Surendra, was attacked by a gang whose leader he recognized as Sengar’s brother. Jaya was so desperate that she publicly soaked herself in kerosene, intending to commit suicide by immolation.

Fortunately, not only was she rescued, the publicity surrounding her attempt to kill herself led to a reopening of her case and a transfer of Sengar’s trial from Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi, India’s capital. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi – the leader of the BJP and a key player in their attacks on India’s Muslim population – proclaimed “zero tolerance” for rape and ordered Sengar to turn himself in. But Jaya’s ordeal wasn’t over; a month before she was scheduled to testify against Sengar in court, the police detail that was supposed to protect her was suddenly withdrawn. She was traveling in a car with her lawyer and two aunts to a meeting. A truck rammed the car and the other three passengers were all killed. Ultimately Sengar was convicted of rape and manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison. The men charged with kidnapping and gang-raping her are still awaiting trial. In September 2020, another rape scandal broke in the Hathras region of Uttar Pradesh. Navai spotted tweets on her Twitter feed alleging that a 19-year-old woman, Manisha Valmiki, had been gang-raped by four neighbors and injured so severely in the attack she was left paralyzed. “When we got there, there was zero press,” said Indian journalist Nidhi Suresh. “Her mother and her aunt walked us to the crime scene. … It was just a small clearing — which, by the way, the police had not sealed. It was open completely. [The victim’s mother] just kept saying, ‘Something bad happened to my daughter, something bad happened to my daughter,’ and she spoke about how she found her without any clothes.”

According to Navai, one reason the rapists thought they could get away with assaulting Manisha and leaving her for dead was the continuing power of India’s caste system, its highly regimented and brutally enforced class divisions that have brutally been enforced for thousands of years. She explained that Manisha and her family are from a lower caste. “The men she said raped her are Thakurs, an influential high caste who own the majority of land here and include many police officers and politicians like the chief minister, Yogi Adityanath,” Navai explained. The accused rapists’ families defended them by saying Manisha’s own family had beaten her for having consensual sex with one of the men. The police refused to register the rape allegations or do a rape kit on Manesha, so crucial evidence was lost. Eight days later – thanks to the involvement of the Bhim Army, an organization that advocates for equal rights for lower-caste Indians, and its leader, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan – Indian media finally took notice. “Our local team went to the village and realized that the police were not taking action because of pressure by local politicians and the government,” Ravan explained. When Ravan went to see Manisha in the hospital, he recalled, “The police had blocked the whole area. I reached the hospital by motorcycle. I had to fight my way through and I demanded to see the girl.” When he finally got to see her, she could barely speak, her oxygen and blood pressure levels were fluctuating, and it was clear to Ravan that she didn’t have long left to live. Her family had her make a videotaped statement so there would be a record of her allegation after she died. When she finally passed away on April 29, 2021, Manisha’s mother, Rama Valdiki, was appalled that the authorities insisted on cremating her almost immediately instead of turning her body over to her family for the prescribed burial rites under the Hindu religion. “I want to take my daughter home,” Rama said. “I want to respect our Hindu traditions by performing her last rites. I want to apply turmeric on her before the cremation. I want to do this one last thing. She will never come back.”

Later senior officials in the BJP state government, including at least one senior police leader, denied that Manisha had ever been raped, and a district magistrate visited Manisha’s family and tried to pressure them to withdraw the rape allegation. According to Navai, Manisha’s deathbed video “went viral and fueled more unrest around the case. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath blamed the outrage on opposition parties and an international conspiracy to undermine him. The trial of the four men Manisha accused has been delayed by COVID. Their lawyer claims Manisha’s video statements about the rape were fabricated. There have been allegations that the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's office has been trying to cover up this gang rape and has been trying to protect the accused. … Cases like Manisha’s and Jaya's continue to polarize India, pitting politics against families’ search for justice. One of India’s most respected and senior legal figures told me these cases should be a wake-up call for more accountability when it comes to violence against women.” The official she was referring to was former Indian Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur, who told Navai, “It's completely inexplicable. Why should anybody—not only the prime minister, or not only the chief minister — why should anybody remain silent when something like this happens? They should speak out. It doesn't matter who the perpetrator is. The government, the state, the police machinery, everybody should come out in the open and say that this is wrong.” But the way India’s authorities treat allegations of rape and other forms of sexual assault – and the good old boys’ network that forms around highly placed perpetrators and protects them – should be a warning to us Americans not to be too complacent. The more power people, including religious fundamentalists, and others who deny the basic humanity and equality of women – whether it’s by condoning and protecting rapists (as the U.S. military has been accused of doing routinely when servicewomen are raped by higher-raking servicemen) or enacting laws threatening women with prison if they make the “wrong” choices concerning their bodies and how to deal with sex and pregnancy – achieve, the harder they will work to enslave women to men’s lusts and their own wombs.