No one killed the Dalits.
On 11 July 1996, 21 landless poor, mostly women and children from the Dalit and extremely backward Muslim communities were massacred by the Ranveer Sena, a private army of upper caste landlords in Baithani Tola, Bihar. The youngest dead being a one-year-old, and also pregnant women.
Following the massacre, there were further attacks on Dalits and Labourers organized by the Ranvir Sena in Laxmanpur Bathe (1 December 1997) and Sankarbigha (January 199) in which 81 Dalits were killed.
Though 23 of the accused were convicted for the massacre by an Ara sessions court in 2010, the Bihar High Court in April 2012 acquitted all the accused.
High Court judge before acquitting the accused of the massacre rationalized his refusal to accept the statement of the survivors, saying they would have died had they witnessed the massacre. (Yes, read that again.)
An unimportant detail is that the division bench of judges Navneeti Prasad Singh and Ashwani Kumar Singh are from the same caste as accused.
Bathani Tola was not the first, and would not be the last, in a series of atrocities committed through the 1980s and 1990s by the Sena, a powerful caste army of Bhumihars and Rajputs. Its victims were always landless labourers (Dalits in most cases), who, though poor and impoverished, had begun to get radicalised in the backdrop of the Naxal movement taking root in the State.
Naimuddin a bangle-seller at the time of the carnage, lost his three-month-old daughter to the aggressors. She had not even been named, he told the Hindu reporter Shoumojit Bannerjee, when she was killed, adding, “Baby,” as she was called, “was tossed in the air and thrust down the blade of a sword and my seven-year-old son Saddam saw it. They all saw it,” said Naimuddin. One half of Saddam's face had been mutilated by sword lacerations when Naimuddin finally reached the spot after the Sena men had dispersed. “As I picked him up, he [Saddam] said, ‘Abba save my life!' It was then that I realised they had cut his spinal cord.” The child died within a week at the Patna Medical College and Hospital.
A Sena sympathiser, who spoke to Hindu after the verdict in 2012, justified the “reactionary mobilisation” of the upper castes against “those Naxals.” “The land is ours. The crops belong to us. They [the labourers] did not want to work, and moreover, hampered our efforts by burning our machines and imposing economic blockades. So, they had it coming.”
Ref: Smita Narula; Human Rights Watch (Organization) (1999). Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's "untouchables".
and The Hindu April 19, 2012
On 11 July 1996, 21 landless poor, mostly women and children from the Dalit and extremely backward Muslim communities were massacred by the Ranveer Sena, a private army of upper caste landlords in Baithani Tola, Bihar. The youngest dead being a one-year-old, and also pregnant women.
Following the massacre, there were further attacks on Dalits and Labourers organized by the Ranvir Sena in Laxmanpur Bathe (1 December 1997) and Sankarbigha (January 199) in which 81 Dalits were killed.
Though 23 of the accused were convicted for the massacre by an Ara sessions court in 2010, the Bihar High Court in April 2012 acquitted all the accused.
High Court judge before acquitting the accused of the massacre rationalized his refusal to accept the statement of the survivors, saying they would have died had they witnessed the massacre. (Yes, read that again.)
An unimportant detail is that the division bench of judges Navneeti Prasad Singh and Ashwani Kumar Singh are from the same caste as accused.
Bathani Tola was not the first, and would not be the last, in a series of atrocities committed through the 1980s and 1990s by the Sena, a powerful caste army of Bhumihars and Rajputs. Its victims were always landless labourers (Dalits in most cases), who, though poor and impoverished, had begun to get radicalised in the backdrop of the Naxal movement taking root in the State.
Naimuddin a bangle-seller at the time of the carnage, lost his three-month-old daughter to the aggressors. She had not even been named, he told the Hindu reporter Shoumojit Bannerjee, when she was killed, adding, “Baby,” as she was called, “was tossed in the air and thrust down the blade of a sword and my seven-year-old son Saddam saw it. They all saw it,” said Naimuddin. One half of Saddam's face had been mutilated by sword lacerations when Naimuddin finally reached the spot after the Sena men had dispersed. “As I picked him up, he [Saddam] said, ‘Abba save my life!' It was then that I realised they had cut his spinal cord.” The child died within a week at the Patna Medical College and Hospital.
A Sena sympathiser, who spoke to Hindu after the verdict in 2012, justified the “reactionary mobilisation” of the upper castes against “those Naxals.” “The land is ours. The crops belong to us. They [the labourers] did not want to work, and moreover, hampered our efforts by burning our machines and imposing economic blockades. So, they had it coming.”
Ref: Smita Narula; Human Rights Watch (Organization) (1999). Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's "untouchables".
and The Hindu April 19, 2012
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