Late last year, eleven Hindu extremists walked free from a prison in India’s Gujarat state. Their crime: brutally gang-raping a pregnant Muslim woman and murdering fourteen members of her family in 2002, during one of the worst outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence in recent Indian history. They served just fourteen years in prison — but far from criticizing such leniency, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) congratulated the men on their release.

The survivor, Bilkis Bano, was rightly horrified by the courts’ utter failure to keep these men behind bars. But the BJP and large swaths of the Indian public received them as heroes: they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets, and touted as respectable icons by the ruling party. One BJP parliamentarian praised them as having “good sanskar” (values) while implying that Bano had lied about the attack to “to corner and punish them.” Two other BJP politicians hosted one of the ex-cons at an official government event like a celebrity.

After November 25’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, it’s time for the world to take a long, hard look at India. It’s no secret that the country has long struggled with troubling levels of violence against women, most notably against low-caste Dalit women. But under the influence of Modi and Hindutva, a supremacist ideology that believes that India should be a Hindu ethnostate, it has become mainstream to dehumanize, vilify, and inflict violence on minorities, with Muslims in particular labeled as enemies of Hindus and India. As an extension of this climate of violence, rape threats and sexual violence have become weapons of choice for India’s Hindu right, used for the explicit purpose of intimidating and terrorizing Muslim women.