Murder of eight-year-old in India tied to nomadic land rights, activists say | PLACE
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The brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in India, that has triggered massive protests, highlights nomadic tribes’ vulnerability and lack of land rights, activists said.
According to the police, the girl was kidnapped, gang raped and killed in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir as part of a plot by Hindu residents to evict her nomadic Bakkarwal community from a village where they had temporarily settled.
Nearly 2 million people in the state belong to the Muslim Bakkarwal and Gujjar ethnic groups who traditionally spend the summer months in mountain pastures, and winters on the plains with their cows, sheep and horses.
They have sparred with Hindu villagers in recent years over their shrinking access to grazing and forests, said Javaid Rahi, a tribal activist in Jammu.
“Their biggest problem is the lack of land rights,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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