THE AFTERMATH of the caste violence in Dharmapuri district of northern Tamil Nadu has rendered thousands of Dalits homeless and living in constant fear of another possible attack. On 7 November, a mob of 2,500 backward-caste Vanniyars had burnt and looted around 500 houses of Dalits, claiming to avenge the death of a Vanniyar who committed suicide after his daughter married a Dalit. Adding to the fear is a statement by Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) MLA Kaduvetti Guru, who heads the Vanniyar Sangam, forbidding inter- caste marriages. Locals and even the police officials posted in the area say the attack was premeditated and done with the connivance of pro-Vanniyar sections of the police and cadres of the PMK. Between 5 pm and 10 pm on 7 November, every single house of the three hamlets of Nathamkottai, Kondampatti and Annanagar was burnt down. “Around 4:30 pm, the police started doing the rounds, asking us to run for our lives as a mob of Vanniyars was on its way to attack us,” says Paulina, 30, a Dalit Christian and mother of three, who ran to the nearby fields to save herself, along with other women, children and the elderly. There were few men in the villages at the time as most of them work as labourers in the construction sector in Bengaluru and Coimbatore, or in the garment-manufacturing sweatshops in Tirupur. Now, Paulina stays in a temporary community shelter set up a stone’s throw away from the charred remains of her oneroom house. “They even took away the cash and jewellery we had left behind,” she adds. Madiwayan, 36, works as a scrap-dealer in Bengaluru and was not in the village at the time of the attack. His parents were hiding in the nearby fields when the irate mob arrived. “It took me over a decade to save Rs 24 lakh, which I spent on building my house. They burnt it to the ground and also looted Rs 2 lakh that I had kept to buy some land nearby,” he says. Usha, wife of Periyaswamy, a cook in the local government hospital, says the police was unable to stop the mob. “The police came back only around 1 am and announced over the loudspeakers that those who had fled the village should come back.” The women returned the same night, followed by the children and the elderly the next morning. The genesis of the recent violence is traced to the marriage of a Dalit man, Ilavarasan, 23, from Nathamkottai, with a Vanniyar woman, Divya, 20. As Divya’s father, 48-year-old R Nagarajan of Sallinkottai village, disapproved of their relationship, the couple had got married in secret a month ago. Nagarajan asked his daughter to return home, but she refused. Then, a meeting of the Vanniyar community was held, where it was decided that Divya must return to her father’s house. When she did not relent despite the community’s pressure, her father allegedly felt humiliated and committed suicide on 6 November. The Dalits of the three hamlets attacked by the Vanniyar mob allege that the father’s suicide was used as a pretext to whip up caste sentiments and fuel anger over inter-caste marriages. “There are more than seven inter-caste couples in our village. My wife Radha is a Vanniyar. We haven’t seen any violence in the 12 years of our marriage. The Vanniyars are just angry that we do not work in their fields for meagre wages,” says NC Armugham, 36, who runs a grocery store in Bengaluru. Agrees Palaaiswamy, 40, who works as a newspaper vendor in Bengaluru. “Even a month after the couple had eloped, Nagarajan did not seem particularly upset,” he says. “We suspect his community must have pressured him to take this extreme step.” The attack has left the Dalits of the three hamlets economically devastated. A fact-finding team of People’s Watch, a Chennai-based NGO, which visited the area on 11-12 November along with the state representative of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights for RTE in Tamil Nadu, estimates the total economic loss caused by the attack to be around Rs 12 crore. According to this report, 215 families were affected in Nathamkottai, 152 in Kondampatti and 36 in Annanagar. The Jayalalitha government has offered Rs 50,000 as compensation to the victims. “Violence of this kind would not have happened without the active support of the police,” says Henri Tiphagne, Executive Director of People’s Watch. “We found that the Vanniyars used more than 150 petrol bombs. It looks like a planned attack, instigated by the PMK, though Vanniyars from other parties also participated in it.” So far, the police has arrested 92 Vanniyars and filed cases against 218 more.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 13:13:11 +0000
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