FROM KILVENMANI TO BETHANI AND BEYOND By P.N.BENJAMIN The catalogue of crimes against the wretched of India’s good earth and the chamber of horrors has been lengthening as almost an unending one So, this writer is not shocked by the Patna High Court’s decision (April 2012) to set free 23 people convicted earlier by a Sessions Court for the gruesome slaughtering of 23 Dalits including even a one year old child by ripping apart their bodies with swords by the Ranbir Sena in Bathani village in Bihar in 1996. The country has been hearing of such crimes and punishments for so long and with such monotonous regularity that the public has come to shrug its collective shoulders and cynically say: “What’s new?” A sense of helplessness has already set in among the people who are too tired even to protest. Could there be a more eloquent warning about the collapse of the entire system – administrative, judicial, political and social? Rightly, the Bathani massacre was one of the most shameful and blood-curdling incidents that happened in independent India. Press clippings with me bring back memories of hundreds of such shocking and gruesome orgies in barbarity during the past 40 years. The oldest among them I remember is the gruesome incident at Kilvenmani in Tamil Nadu where 42 Dalit women, children and men were burnt alive in a hut by the upper caste landlords on the Christmas Day in 1968. This was not merely a case of social prejudice, but it was to wreak vengeance upon the Dalit labourers for demanding higher wages for their labour on the farms of those landlords. What was more maddening was the fact that not a single person was punished for that mass murder. The Madras High Court, probably to remind us all that India is a free country, set free the accused. The inference can only be that the guardians of law had not been able to bring home the guilt to the presiding judges. Kilvenmani was not the end of the sad story, far from it. In a similar incident, the Andhra Pradesh High Court acquitted all the accused in what had come to be known as ‘Karamchendu carnage’ in which six Dalits were massacred and 20 injured in an attack by upper caste people. The attack took place on July 17, 1985. As many as 94 persons were charged with murder and after much procedural wranglings the joint trial commence in 1992 before the session’s judge in Guntur. On October 31, 1994, the district court sentenced five accused to life imprisonment, 53 persons to three years of rigorous imprisonment and four were fined Rs.10, 000. Thirty-two were acquitted. But, the High Court in its wisdom set free all the accused in 1997! A woman and her five children, belonging to the Extremely Backward Castes, were burnt alive at around 1 a.m. on January, 2006 in Raghopur village in Bihar by a member of the dominant Yadav community and his henchmen, for apparently refusing to withdraw a complaint of theft. These beasts in human form locked all the seven members of the family inside their thatched house and set it on fire. While the six perished in the fire, the father received serious burn injuries and hospitalised. The roasting alive of the extremely backward castes did not begin at this Bihar village nor will it end there. The bloody trail is from Kilvenmani to Belchi, Deoli to Karamchedu, Chintamani to Raghopur and goodness knows where else. For years the rural rich have been gunning for the poor belonging to the so-called EBCs and the administration all over the country, especially the police, has almost always been on the side of the rich. About one hundred kilometers away from Bangalore, at Kamapalli village, in Chintamani Taluk, on March 11, 2000, in one of the worst caste clashes in Karnataka seven Dalits were burnt alive after a caste Hindu was fatally stabbed over an old enmity. An irate mob of a particular caste attacked the house of the Dalit, bolted the door from outside, stuffed the chimney with dry hay, poured kerosene and petrol into it and set it afire. While the house began burning inside, the group set the house ablaze from outside too, charring the six inmates to death! As far as this writer knows nobody has so far been punished for the gruesome killings. All this is bad enough. Worse is that the very authorities who are supposed to protect these communities against exploitation turn into willing accomplices to, and even participants, in brazenly illegal acts. Some times the very victims of atrocities find themselves accused of several offences, all foisted by the police at the instance of the vested interests who almost invariably enjoy the support of the right people in the corridors of power. The oppressed sections are extremely hesitant to prefer complaints with the police. The police are reluctant to register even grave charges. Charge-sheets are delayed and those filed are often defective. Thus the accused are usually acquitted by courts. P.N.BENJAMIN . .
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 05:00:10 +0000