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 neighbours. 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 km 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 dehumanising 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 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 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.
Class war
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 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 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.”)
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.
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.
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 Kumar. “First it was massacre by the upper-caste landlords. Now, it’s a judicial massacre.”