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. Shivam
Vij reports
On September 3,
Siddharth Gajbhiye finally paid the price for helping dalits in a clutch
of villages in Bhandara district near Nagpur in Maharashtra. A dalit
himself, Gajbhiye is a police patil, an associate of the police hired
on an honorarium, and has political connections in the Congress. This
gave him some leverage to be of help to the sprinkling of dalit households
who lived in constant fear of the upper castes. One such family was
that of Surekha Bhotmange, 45, who tilled her five-acre plot in Kherlanji
village, along with her husband Bhaiyyalal, growing cotton and rice.
In 1996, two acres had been taken away as ‘easement area’
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.
Now they wanted more of their land for a water pathway, and Gajbhiye
was helping Surekha resist that, despite allegations that he was doing
so because he had sexual relations with her. Gajbhiye and Bhotmange
were in fact cousins, belonging to the Mahar caste, the same as Ambedkar’s,
and were practising Buddhists in the Ambedkerite tradition.
On September 3,
a mob beat up Gajbhiye, the ostensible reason being his alleged illicit
relationship with Surekha Bhotmange. Gajbhiye filed a police complaint
against 15 men from Kherlanji village, 12 of whom were arrested. Surekha
signed on the FIR as one of the witnesses and identified the 12 in a
police parade.
The Price of Do Bigha
Zameen |
Surekha Bhotmange, 45:
raped, murdered
Priyanka Bhotmange, 17: raped, murdered
Roshan Bhotmange, 23: murdered
Sudhir Bhotmange, 21: murdered |
|
| |
Surekha
and Priyanka were stripped, paraded naked, beaten with bicycle
chains, axes and bullock-cart pokers. They were gang-raped
until they died. Some raped them even after that |
|
Twenty-six days
later, on September 29, as soon as the 12 men were released on bail,
they were taken away in a tractor by their relatives. They got drunk
and went to the Bhotmanges’ hut threatening to finish off the
entire family. Then they went looking for Gajbhiye and his brother Rajan,
an engineering student. On not being able to find them, the drunken
group returned to the Bhotmanges’ hut and broke down the door.
It was 5.40pm, Surekha was preparing the evening meal and the head of
the family, Bhaiyyalal, was not at home. They dragged out Surekha, their
17-year-old daughter Priyanka, and two sons, 23-year-old Roshan and
21-year-old Sudhir. Although Roshan was blind and Sudhir a graduate,
they not only helped with the farming but also brought home extra money
by working as labourers. Priyanka was more ambitious — a Class
xii topper and an ncc cadet, she wanted to join the Army. Her mother
had recently bought her a bicycle. But all dreams came to an end in
a few harrowing hours.
The mob didn’t
realise that Bhaiyyalal Bhotmagne and Siddharth’s brother Rajan
were just a stone’s throw from their hut and had seen the four
victims being dragged away to the village chaupal, Priyanka strapped
to a bullock cart. By now, men allegedly from the entire village of
about 150 Powar and Kalar families 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 womenfolk looked on, mute spectators
to a form of justice reserved for castes lower than theirs. One woman,
Sudha Dhenge, 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 with 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. In the meantime, Sudhir managed to
contact the police from his mobile phone, but his phone had been smashed.
Its pieces are now circumstantial evidence. 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. Hiding behind a hut,
Bhaiyyalal helplessly watched his family’s gruesome end. There
was no one to call for help. Kherlanji had only two Mahar families;
the rest were either perpetrators or spectators. An hour later, a village
meeting was called and a diktat issued: no one was to say a word about
the massacre.
Siddharth Gajbhiye
called the Andhalgaon police station, some six kms away, at 6.15pm,
asking for help. As a frightened Bhaiyyalal escaped to another village
to save his life, the four bodies were thrown at different places in
the periphery of the village. Head Constable Baban Mesharam reached
Kherlanji at 8:30pm and got wind of the incident, but did not follow
official police protocol to register the report. The next day, when
Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange went to the police station and filed an FIR, SHO
Siddheshwar Bharne did not believe him. It was only when the police
patrol started flashing reports of the discovery of mutilated dead bodies
on the wireless the next day that he filed an FIR. Constable Meshram
and SHO Bharne both stand suspended.
Photographs of the
bodies of Surekha and Priyanka taken by the police showed sticks and
rods in their genitals. By the time they reached the post-mortem table,
the sticks had disappeared. A gruesome photograph of Priyanka Bhotmange’s
body, with just a piece of cloth covering her genitals, is not being
printed by Tehelka.
The post-mortem
report by Dr AJ Shende on September 30 said that there had been no rape.
“Doctors were managed and the police bribed,” Rashtrapal
Narnaware, Surekha’s nephew, alleged in a statement to the fact-finding
committee of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS), a regional farmers’
organisation. The bodies were later exhumed and the report of a second
post-mortem is awaited. Bhandara’s police superintendent Suresh
Sagar says that only if the post-mortem establishes rape can he include
the charge in his investigation. The VJAS is pushing for a third post-mortem
as the due procedure specified by the NHRC has not been followed, and
medical evidence of rape may never be established.
Thirty-eight Kherlanji
men are in jail as accused, but Kishore Tiwari, president of the VJAS,
says that some of the main perpetrators are still free due to political
pressure. Apart from various sections of the IPC, the SC/ST Prevention
of Atrocities Act, 1989, has also been applied by the police. “In
cases where a mob is involved, the Atrocities Act has it that the entire
village could be fined to the tune of Rs 10-20 lakh,” says civil
rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves. The VJAS claims that there is an attempt
to cover up the incident, and has filed a case in the Bombay High Court
against the state police. “For years, Surekha had been trying
to file a case against the grabbing of the two acres of land,”
says VJAS lawyer Vinod Tiwari, “but the police never filed the
FIR.”
VJAS president Kishore Tiwari first read about the incident
in the rural Vidarbha supplements of the Marathi press, which blamed
it on Surekha’s ‘illicit relationship’ with Siddharth.
Tiwari e-mailed journalists all over India and managed to get some Mumbai
newspapers to report the massacre, but his e-mails to Delhi-based journalists
were ignored.
On October 2, when
lakhs of Buddhists from all over the world had converged in Nagpur to
celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Dhammakranti — Ambedkar’s
conversion to Buddhism — the organisers kept quiet about the massacre
lest the issue go out of hand in such a large gathering. The Maharashtra
government has paid Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange a compensation of Rs 4.5 lakhs,
although according to the Atrocities Act the compensation should be
Rs 2 lakh for every member of the family killed. All Bhaiyyalal wants
is for the perpetrators to be hanged.
