[Reader-list] MORE ON DALIT GIRLS AND LAXMANPUR BATHE

Tue Dec 3 04:43:20 CST 2013

*The Times Of India*

*Dalit minor gang-raped in Bihar, critical*

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Dalit-minor-gang-raped-in-Bihar-critical/articleshow/26762717.cms

SHEIKHPURA: A seven-year-old Mahadalit girl from Bihar's Sheikhpura
district was on Monday hospitalized in a critical condition two days after
two people gang-raped her while she was sleeping at home.

SHO Ravikant said the girl and her five-year-old brother live with their
grandmother, an octogenarian who suffers from hearing impairment and other
physical infirmities, while her parents stay in Patna.

The girl told police she was sleeping when the two, covering their heads,
raped her.

The SHO said quacks were treating the girl before she was rushed to
hospital as her condition deteriorated. "Her relatives reported the case to
police late Sunday evening and she was brought to hospital for treatment
and examination on Monday.''

He said the girl's condition was stable and will be produced before a
magistrate on Tuesday to record her statement.

*India Link*

*A Dalit Village Waits Uneasily for Justice*

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/a-dalit-village-waits-uneasily-for-justice/?_r=0

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<http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-10-15/india/43065487_1_trial-court-patna-hc-21-dalits>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’s independence
in 1947 that mandated the surplus land’s distribution among the landless.
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<http://www.tehelka.com/obviously-some-people-from-the-government-were-also-involved/>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<http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/a-final-interview-with-brahmeshwar-nath-singh/>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<http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1998/Castes-Are-Part-of-Indian-Election/id-703557499a90e67a31dc8e7beb20c1e5>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 is Shanker Bigha, where
the Ranvir Sena was also accused of killing 22 Dalits.

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, which is in the district of Khagaria, members of
a lower caste shot dead 16 from a higher caste, including five children, on
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.”

*(Neyaz Farooquee is a journalist based in Delhi. You can follow him on
Twitter @nafsmanzer <https://twitter.com/nafsmanzer>)*

*The New Indian Express*

*Dharmapuri Dalit Parents Attempt Suicide Over Inter-caste Marriage*

http://newindianexpress.com/states/tamil_nadu/Dharmapuri-Dalit-Parents-Attempt-Suicide-Over-Inter-caste-Marriage/2013/12/03/article1924852.ece

Tension prevailed for sometime at the collectorate here on Monday after a
dalit couple attempted to set themselves ablaze alleging police harassment
over their son’s marriage with a caste Hindu Girl.

Sources said that around 12.15 pm, K Aathimooalam and his wife A
Muthulakshmi of Mullipatti village, came to the collectorate and doused
themselves with kerosene. While they were about to set fire to themselves,
revenue officials overpowered and foiled their bid.

On information from officials police came to the spot and held talks with
the couple. RDO P Ramar told the police to look into the grievances of the
couple and provide them protection.

Meanwhile, speaking to Express, the couple said that they belonged to
Arunthathiyar community. Their son Ramesh (20) had married a caste Hindu
girl, Sangeetha (24), in May this year. Fearing retribution from the girl’s
family, Ramesh, along with Sangeetha, escaped from the village.

Subsequently, Sangeetha’s mother lodged a complaint against Ramesh. The
couple claimed that despite their not knowing the whereabouts of their son,
police had been harassing them. “We really don’t know where Ramesh is.
Despite our repeatedly telling the police so, they have been harassing us.
I don’t even know whether he is alive or dead. ,” said Aathimoolam.

Meanwhile, Superintendent of Police Asra Garg told Express that police
would look into the matter and if any official was found guilty of
harassing the dalit couple, stern action would be taken against him/her.