[Reader-list] The scales are so tilted

[Asit Das]

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 [image: iconimg] Monday, July 21, 2014

   *Harsh Mander
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/search.aspx?q=Harsh%20Mander&op=Story>*
July 20, 2014
     First Published: 23:42 IST(20/7/2014)
Last Updated: 23:52 IST(20/7/2014)
    The scales are so tilted
   Indian democracy is dishonoured from time to time by brutal massacres of
the country’s historically oppressed communities — mostly Dalits and
Muslims. But its even greater disgrace is that mass killers who
periodically target people only because of their religion or caste are
rarely punished. This legal impunity of mass murderers indulging in hate
crimes derives from deep institutional prejudice, which scars India’s
otherwise independent judicial system.

It is for this reason that the April judgment of the Andhra Pradesh high
court — ignored in the heat and dust of the elections — which acquitted all
21 men who were serving life sentences for the massacre of Dalits in
Tsundur, should have shocked and grieved observers much more than it did.

In 1991, a minor altercation in a cinema hall had spiralled into a
terrifying massacre. A high-caste Reddy man was enraged when a Dalit
college student Ravi rested his feet on his seat. In reprisal for his
impudence, Ravi was first attacked in his village Tsundur, then charged
with theft and arrested. Following this, the upper-caste community fell
back on old weapons commonly deployed by higher castes through the ages to
subdue disadvantaged communities: An economic boycott was imposed to break
their back, as upper-caste farmers refused to employ the landless Dalits as
farm labour or tenants.

Emotions were then further ignited by widely circulating a false charge
against a Dalit youth, that he was sexually harassing local Reddy girls.
(This allegation is chillingly similar to the one made 22 years later in
Muzaffarnagar, which again was later proved false, but which similarly led
to a violent reprisal against local Muslims.) A fever of mass rage gripped
the surrounding countryside, and this led to the well-planned attack on the
Dalits. As they desperately tried to flee the village they found it
surrounded on every side by Reddy men in tractors armed with daggers and
iron rods. They were brutally assaulted, and many mutilated bodies were
flung into the Tungabhadra canal. This caste slaughter left eight men dead
and three badly injured.

What followed was a rare judicial victory heroically won after many years
of struggle by the Dalit survivors of Tsundur village, who braved boycott,
violence, and social and state intimidation in an epic battle for justice.
Determined that the perpetrators of these atrocities should not go
unpunished, as they always had in the past, as Subash Gatade recalls in an
article in ‘Kafila’, the survivors refused to accept court summons or to
appear in court until the government agreed to appoint a special court to
hear the case and, for the first time, to conduct the special court in
their village. They also demanded and ultimately secured both a public
prosecutor and judge with reputations for fairness.

Typically these cases drag on for years, and witnesses and survivors are
wearied and coerced into rescinding on their statements. But not in
Tsundur, where they did not allow their poverty and centuries of social
oppression to break their resolve, resisting powerful attempts to buy their
submission with threats, money and jobs, and raising the slogan ‘justice
not welfare’. Young Dalit men abandoned their education and refused to
marry until justice was won for the survivors of the butchery. Gatade
recalls many people who stood tall for justice. Merukonda Subbarao, a daily
wage worker became a local hero after he identified and named 40 of the
accused in the court room from among the 183 accused. It took great courage
for him to resolutely identify powerful men in court who earlier he could
never even walk alongside or look in the eye.

But their epic resistance and success in securing justice from a criminal
justice system infamous for its anti-Dalit bias has been today reduced to
nothing. More than two decades after the crime, the Andhra Pradesh High
Court ordered that 21 men serving life sentences for the massacre walk free
(and one of them even joined Jagan Reddy’s election campaign).

The high court ruled that “the prosecution failed to prove the exact time
of the death of the deceased and place of occurrence and the identity of
the persons who attacked them”. It found further fault with the
prosecution, because no complaint had been filed about the attacks, and the
judges rejected the witness statements because of “contradictions”.

In so doing, the high court ignored the formidable challenges of fear and
loss faced by survivors of caste and communal mass crimes when confronting
an openly partisan police system. The Tsundur Special Court, which severely
indicted the police for its anti-Dalit bias, rightly acknowledged that a
defective investigation could “naturally” lead to “contradictions and
omissions” from prosecution witnesses. Therefore it accepted a certain
amount of omissions in witness statements, rightly noting, “Every omission
is not a contradiction.” Indeed the Supreme Court in many rulings has held
that it is unreasonable and unjust to expect the same standards of evidence
in mass crimes as in regular individual crimes, because of embedded
institutional bias.

The rejection of the veracity of the statements which the Dalit survivors
courageously made in open courts, battling violence, intimidation and
boycott, is therefore a grave setback to the greater idea of justice. It
was unjust for the judges of the Andhra Pradesh High Court to close their
eyes to the larger context of economic and social violence and power
imposed by caste superiority and ownership of large land holdings in rural
India, and the close nexus of rich upper-caste landed communities with the
police and ruling establishment.

The survivors of the Tsundur massacre chose to fight the injustice and
bloodbath to which they were subject not by picking up arms and joining the
Maoist rebellion, which already has struck deep root in the surrounding
countryside. Instead they rightly placed their faith in the ponderous
processes of a democratic state and its criminal justice system. But by
letting them down so profoundly, India’s superior courts have fuelled
further the despair that is gripping segments of young Dalit, tribal and
Muslim men and women, confirming to them once again that justice and
security is hard to secure for historically oppressed people in India’s
republic.

This is the agonising reality of oppressed communities that we collectively
must reverse.

*Harsh Mander is Director, Centre for Equity Studies*

*The views expressed by the author are personal*
    * http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1242729.aspx *
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