[The survivors in the village, which
is 125 kilometers (80 miles) from the state capital of Patna, said the
attackers belonged to the Ranvir Sena, an illegal militia led by the members of
the upper caste, banned since 1995, but the Patna High Court didn’t find their
accounts reliable enough. On Oct. 9, the court acquitted all 26 defendants who
had been earlier sentenced to death or to life in prison by a lower court.]
By Neyaz Farooquee
The night a horde of men
crossed over the nearby river and killed Mahendra Chaudhary and 57 of his
villagers in the low-caste Dalit hamlet of Lakshmanpur Bathe in Bihar , he was probably
having dinner with his family of six like any other day. If not dinner, he
could have been cuddling his children, say his neighbors.
But on that cold night of Dec. 1, 1997 , like many other Dalit families of
Lakshmanpur Bathe, no one in his shanty could survive the brutal attack to
recount their ordeal.
Ghosts live in his mud house now.
Neighbors’ chickens and goats sometimes wander into it, as gourd vines unevenly
decorate the crumbling house.
The survivors in the village, which
is 125 kilometers (80 miles) from the state capital of Patna, said the
attackers belonged to the Ranvir Sena, an illegal militia led by the members of
the upper caste, banned since 1995, but the Patna High Court didn’t find their
accounts reliable enough. On Oct. 9, the court acquitted all 26 defendants who
had been earlier sentenced to death or to life in prison by a lower court.
The state government has said it
would appeal to the Supreme Court to reinstate the convictions, but after 16
years, the hope of justice is fading for the landless Dalits of Lakshmanpur
Bathe. It’s a price they are paying for challenging the generations-old status
quo that kept dehumanizing them, these villagers say.
Having lost seven of his family
members in the 1997 attack, Baudh Paswan looked dejected when I met him in
November, sitting in front of his concrete house in the village. In his native
Magahi dialect, he said, “Courts are theirs, government are theirs. What can we
do?”
The acquittal of upper-caste men in
the Lakshmanpur Bathe killings is the fourth time in
less than two years that
the highest court in the state has overturned the convictions of those accused
of orchestrating mass killings against low-caste farmers, mostly landless
Dalits, in central Bihar in the 1990s.
Starting 1970s, when the landless
poor started asserting themselves against the powerful upper-caste landowners,
often with help from leftist organizations that resorted to violence many
times, the landlords felt threatened as never before. The landless peasants
demanded long-promised land redistribution of unused government land and other
surplus lands with landlords, citing land reform laws enacted soon after India Bihar , like many other
states, failed to implement the law properly.
The landless Dalits had also started
demanding voting rights, izzat, or respect, and better wages. They started an
economic blockade by boycotting the fields of those farmers who didn’t pay
well. There are no industries in central Bihar but land is very
fertile, so livelihoods are entirely dependent on agriculture.
The landlords couldn’t afford to be
boycotted by their tillers. To counter the Dalit protests, the upper-caste men
formed private militias. Often, there would be violent clashes, attacks and
counterattacks between the left-wing militants and the landlords’ armies.
The most ruthless, organized and
politically connected of the private armies in central Bihar was the Ranvir
Sena, which was formed in 1994 in Bhojpur. But even before that, there were
many caste-based armies that had existed in the state since early 1970s, like
the Lorik Sena (of Yadav caste), Diamond Sena (Bhumihars), Sunlight Sena
(Rajputs), Bhumi Sena (Kurmis) and Kisan Sangh (Yadavs).
At the height of the violence in the
1990s, an inquiry commission was formed under Justice Amir Das by the state
government, then led by Rashtriya Janta Dal, to investigate Ranvir Sena’s
political links. The commission was disbanded in 2006 by the new chief minister
of the state, Nitish Kumar, even before the commission could submit its report.
Justice Das alleged that some members from the present Bihar government were
also involved, and leaders from all the major parties in Bihar have been accused
of having links with the Ranvir Sena in form or other.
There is an alliance of powerful
upper-caste members among politicians, bureaucrats and police, said B.N. Prasad
of A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Sciences in Patna, who wrote the book
“Radicalism and Violence in Agrarian Structure: The Maoist Movement in Bihar.”
“It’s not merely a caste war. It’s a
class war as well,” Professor Prasad said. “The landless poor are demanding
only what our Constitution ensures.”
In Lakshmanpur Bathe, a red brick
structure in front of Mr. Paswan’s house serves as a memorial for those killed
in this conflict. A red flag was hoisted on top, with names and ages of the 58
who died in the 1997 attack inscribed on the brick structure in Hindi.
The oldest victim was 70, the youngest just 1. A total of 16 children and 27
women died – eight of them pregnant, which the memorial doesn’t mention. (The
Ranvir Sena’s leader, the late Brahmeshwar Nath Singh, also known as Mukhiya,
once told the journalist Nalin Verma, “The viper
in the egg will one day hatch and come to bite you. There is no sin in crushing
the egg.”)
Mr. Paswan was away at his relatives’
place that fateful night. When he rushed back the next morning after getting
the news of the massacre, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His wife, two daughters
and four sons lay dead in a pool of blood, with bullet holes in their chests,
arms, legs and heads. Wails were heard all around in the hamlet.
His nephew, Vinod Paswan, was the
only survivor in the home, after he hid himself under a tub meant for feeding
cows, behind the creepers that covered the mud house.
Villagers had said that the majority
of the gunmen came from the other side of the river, negotiating dense bushes
that had grown on the banks of the shrinking river in winter. Mr Paswan
explained the route they took, waving his walking stick in the air.
“They even killed the boatmen,”said
Mr. Paswan. After a long pause, he added that the gunmen used a flashlight to
find people to kill.
After the killings, the villagers
recalled, the attackers shouted, “Long live Ranvir Sena!” before fleeing the
hamlet around midnight .
Most of the villagers had mud houses,
which made it easier for the attackers to break into the homes. Now, many of
the survivors have built brick houses, using the compensation of 200,000 rupees (equivalent to
$5,000 in 1997), each household received from the state government. There are
still many half-built structures in their hamlet – these are owned by survivors
who had fewer family members who were killed.
In Lakshmanpur Bathe, villagers often
say, “Laal salam,” (“Red salute”), accompanied with raised fists — a
clear sign of support for left-leaning organizations. On the opposite side of
the river Sone, in the district of Bhojpur, villages are dominated by the
members of Ranvir Sena. The survivors of the Dalit massacre said upper-caste
men attacked with the help of the Ranvir Sena members who had come from across
the river. There were about 150 assailants in all, according to witness
accounts.
Surrounded by these upper-caste villages
in Bhojpur is the site of another massacre that happened in 1996, this one also
blamed on the Ranvir Sena. In broad daylight, with police pickets around the
village, Ranvir Sena members allegedly killed 21 low-caste villagers in Bathani
Tola. And merely two kilometers from the village of Lakshmanpur Bathe
In all the cases in which the
higher-caste defendants have been acquitted, the court didn’t consider the
lower-caste witness accounts reliable. But Kunal, a Communist Party of India
(Marxist-Leninist) Liberation member who uses only one name, noted that in
contrast to the judgments in Dalit killings, the verdict in the Amausi case
relied on the witnesses’ account.
In the village of Amausi Oct.
1, 2009 . A lower court in Khagaria imposed the death sentence on 10 of
the defendants and acquitted 14 on Feb.
14, 2012 .
In the Lakshmanpur Bathe killings,
the Patna High Court contended that it was not possible to identify someone in
the darkness of night. “Do you need infrared lenses to identify your own
villagers in nights?” asked Mr. Kunal.
The villagers of Lakshmanpur Bathe
say that they could identify the attackers even from their voices, as the
Dalits there have worked in their landlords’ fields for generations. “We see
them on a daily basis. So how can we not identify who the killers were?” said
Mrituanjay Kumar, a villager.
The endless delay in receiving
justice, and subsequent acquittal of the accused, has frustrated the residents
of Lakshmanpur Bathe. “Did we kill our own children?” said Mr. Kumar. “First it
was massacre by the upper-caste landlords. Now, it’s a judicial massacre.”
