Outcastes

A few people have asked about the caste system here in India: does it still exist? If so, to what extent is it enforced? Are the reports of brutality at all founded? Well, we came across this article a couple of months ago and thought it a good example of what we’d read and heard elsewhere. We were keen to write up a brief summary right away but it was a little too close to the festive season and we didn’t want to depress people with the heavy content. Seeing as we’re well clear of all that, now is as good a time as any.

The publication Tehelka is the hard-hitting, self-proclaimed People’s Paper of India. It aims, as far as I can gather, for a progressive, liberal sort of readership and seems, from its articles, to specialize in muckraking. Other topics included in the issue are: excessive administering of WHO live polio vaccines to rural children; the new defense minister’s agenda for the coming year; and the shortcomings of the juvenile criminal system.

The article stands beneath the banner: India Outraged and has, as its title, DALITS, LIKE FLIES TO FEUDAL LORDS and beneath that, in bold type: A Maharashtra village serves up ‘moral justice’ by gang-raping and lynching a Dalit family. That didn’t merit front page news in 21st-Century-10-percent-growth-rate-India. (A Dalit, by the by, is the substitute term for an Untouchable, or a person of the lowest caste. Maharashtra is a central state of India.)

In essence, the story is as follows…

One day, ‘two acres [of Dalit farmland] had been taken away’ in order ‘to build a road so that neighbouring farmers, who belong to the Powar and Kalar upper castes, could take their tractors across to other villages’. A local police officer, Siddarth Gabjhiye, who was, unusually, also a Dalit, was resisting further attempts made by the village’s upper castes to forcefully appropriate Dalit land for a ‘water pathway’ and applied to appropriate authorities. The villagers spread ‘allegations that he was doing so’ because of his 'sexual relations' with a married Dalit woman Surekha Bhotmange, 45, who tilled a threatened five-acre plot of cotton and rice with her husband, Bhaiyyal.

‘On September 3’ it is written, ‘a mob beat up officer Gajbhiye, the ostensible reason being his alleged illicit relationship with Surekha Bhotmange. Officer Gabjhiye filed a police complaint against 15 of the men, 12 of whom were arrested.’ He identified each of them in a police parade.

A month later, the men were released, ‘taken away in a tractor by their relatives', 'got drunk’ and went looking for the officer and his brother, threatening revenge. Unable to find the man that indicted them, they then went to the Bhotmange’s house.

‘The drunken group…broke down the door’ at 5:40pm as Surekha ‘was preparing the evening meal’. Her husband was not at home but her children were- 17 year-old daughter Priyanka, 23 year-old Roshan and 21 year-old Sudhir. ‘Although Roshan was blind and Sudhir a graduate, they not only helped with the farming’ he writes ‘they also worked as labourers to bring home extra money.’

The mob dragged the four from their hut, not realizing that the husband and his brother were ‘a stone’s throw’ away, watching helplessly. They were taken to the chaupal (village square) to be brought before the village sarpanch (locally elected leader). The details are best left now to the journalist.

‘By now, allegedly 150 men and women [from the upper castes] had collected. Some shouted to the sarpanch to allow them to sexually assault the women. They raped the women and killed all four, even as their women-folk looked on, mute spectators to a form of justice reserved for castes lower than theirs. One woman…reportedly did protest but was slapped into silence. She now says she was never there.

‘Surekha and Priyanka were stripped, paraded naked, beaten black and blue by bicycle chains, axes and bullock cart pokers. They were publicly gang raped until they died. Some raped them even after that, and finally, sticks and rods were shoved into their genitals…’

‘Roshan and Sudhir were beaten up, their genitals mutilated, faces disfigured and their bodies tossed in the air, before they lay dead on the ground.’

‘An hour later, a village meeting was called and a diktat issued: no one was to say a word about the massacre’.

The husband fled to the nearest village to report the incident and see the perpetrators punished but when finally he found a police officer and described the incident, he was not believed. ‘It was only the following day when the police patrol started flashing reports of the discovery of the mutilated dead bodies’ that proper protocol was finally followed.

After many months of corruption in which ‘doctors were managed and the police bribed’, investigations finally found thirty-eight men in jail, as accused. However, ‘some of the main perpetrators are still free due to political pressure’.

This unspeakably brutal act is, you’d imagine, a story from some deeply distant and primitive time. But you’d be wrong. These murders took place in 1996- a mere ten years ago. One can only imagine that incidents such as this continue to take place in rural India, away from the supervising eye of civilization.