Last week’s acquittal by the Patna High Court (on April 17)
of all the accused in the Bathani Tola massacre of 1996 in which 21 Dalits,
including women and infants, were butchered by members of an upper caste/ land
lord military called the Ranbir Sena, in that area of Central Bihar, and
the Gujarat High Court (April 20) acquittal of the 12
persons convicted for murder, rioting and unlawful assembly by a trial court in
connection with post-Godhra riot case in Ghodasar village Kheda district, where
14 muslims were killed by Hindutva brigades
are shocking testimonies to the ineptness, and worse, of the
police and the administration in prosecuting the guilty.
Visiting the village Bathani Tola in Bhojpur district, Bihar
after the verdict, a correspondent Shoumojit Banerjee wrote:
“It was a July afternoon in 1996, and it took the marauding
mobs less than a couple of hours to execute the massacre that took 21 lives.
Among the dead were 11 women, six children and three infants.
With that, Bathani Tola, an unsung hamlet in central Bihar,
shot to fame as one of the many sites where the fearsome Ranbir Sena had left
its bloody mark. Last week, the village was once more in the news, with the
Patna High Court acquitting 23 men convicted for the gruesome murders.
Bathani Tola was not the first, and would not be the last,
in a series of atrocities committed through the 1980s and 1990s by the Sena, a
powerful caste army of Bhumihars and Rajputs. Its victims were always landless
labourers (Dalits in most cases), who, though poor and impoverished, had begun
to get radicalised in the backdrop of the Naxal movement taking root in the
State.
“We heard their howls of agony, but simply could not find
the courage to come out,” recounts Naimuddin Ansari, one of the prime witnesses
who lost six family members in the carnage. “The Sena men encircled our hovels,
drew out the victims and slaughtered them,” recounts Sri Kishun Chaudhary, who
lodged an FIR against 33 persons the day after the massacre.
Among those named was Brahmeshwar Singh — the infamous
Mukhiya and founder of the Ranbir Sena — who is said to have overseen the
Bathani killings as well as the caste massacres that followed in Laxmanpur
Bathe and Shankarbigha (81 Dalits were killed in the two villages). Fourteen
years after the bloodbath in Bathani, the Ara sessions court sentenced three
persons to death and awarded life sentence to another 20.
The acquittal of the same men by the High Court has come as
a shock to Bathani's residents. The court might have had its reasons — it cited
“deflective evidence” — for overturning the convictions, but the villagers are
inconsolable and recollect every detail of the horror that visited them,
including the fact that the Sena men killed women and children by design, not
because they came in their way.
“This government [the Nitish Kumar-led NDA] has sold out to
the rich and influential. It is now up to the Party [the Communist Party of
India (Marxist -Leninist)] to decide the next course of action,” says
Chaudhary, fatigued and bitter from years of fighting the case.
Naimuddin too looks dejected and defeated. A bangle-seller
at the time of the carnage, he lost his three-month-old daughter to the
aggressors. She had not even been named, when she was killed, he reminisces,
adding, “Baby,” as she was called, “was tossed in the air and thrust down the
blade of a sword.”
“My seven-year-old son Saddam saw it. They all saw it,”
cries Naimuddin. One half of Saddam's face had been mutilated by sword
lacerations when Naimuddin finally reached the spot after the Sena men had
dispersed.
“As I picked him up, he [Saddam] said, ‘Abba save my life!'
It was then that I realised they had cut his spinal cord.” The child died
within a week at the Patna Medical College Hospital.
A Sena sympathiser, who spoke to this correspondent,
justified the “reactionary mobilisation” of the upper castes against “those
Naxals.” “The land is ours. The crops belong to us. They [the labourers] did
not want to work, and moreover, hampered our efforts by burning our machines
and imposing economic blockades. So, they had it coming.”
Not surprisingly, there is panic in Bathani over the release
of the Sena men. Their fear is compounded by the fact that their source of
security, the CPI(ML), today lacks the necessary leadership at the ground
level. In the 2010 Assembly elections, the CPI(ML) failed to bag even one of
seven seats in Bhojpur district, which were split between the Bharatiya Janata
Party and the Janata Dal (United).
Naimuddin and others have one question for visitors: if
those named in the FIR are not the killers, who killed the 21 residents of
Bathani Tola?”
The Bathani carnage is so similar to the extermination of
the residents of Bithur village by the British after the 1857 rising. More
shocking is the justification of the Sena sympathizer that the Dalits ‘had it coming’. Is it not the state’s duty
to render justice to the victims of the massacres? As it is, it failed in its
duty to prevent such a ghastly incident. Now comes the acquittal, which rubs
the incident in. Justice delivery has become a ping pong game, with the trial
court convicting the accused and the High Court acquitting them. When the lower
court awarded capital punishment and life sentence to the accused on the basis
of evidence put forward by the prosecution, how could the prosecution fail at
the appellate stage? No wonder there is so much unrest in the country as
justice continues to elude the oppressed.
If the Ranbir Sena did not kill the 21 Dalits and Hindutva
forces did not butcher 14 Muslims, who did it? Had the long arm of justice not
taken so many years, crucial evidence would not have become defunct and
deflective? A time-limit should be set for delivering verdicts in cases
involving caste and communal violence. Inordinate delays weaken even the
strongest cases. Twenty three men facing murder charges in Bathani Tola carnage
and 12 persons facing murder charges in Ghodasar massacre got ‘the benefit of
doubt’ because justice was delayed and Rights organizations, including the
media, did not keep the issues alive and apply pressure to seek justice.
Two days after senior minister Jeetan Ram Manjhi in the
Nitish Kumar Cabinet asserted that Bihar
would move the Supreme Court against the order of the Patna High Court which
acquitted 23 convicts in the Bathani Tola massacre case, another minister
Giriraj Singh has questioned the move.
“I would say that Bathani Tola massacre case should be
nipped in the bud. The issue should not be discussed any more as it could
vitiate the atmosphere,” said the minister who belongs to the same upper caste,
whose private militant outfit — Ranbir Sena — had allegedly butchered 21
Dalits, including women and children, around 16 years ago.
Giriraj’s stand is diametrically opposite to that of Manjhi,
the Minister for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes’ Welfare. “We have
decided to challenge the Patna High Court order in the Supreme Court soon. We
have also apprised Union Social Welfare Minister Mukul Wasnik on the Bihar
Government’s stand,” Manjhi said.
His remarks came after the Patna High Court acquitted 23
convicts, including three who were awarded death sentence by the trial court.
The two main accused Bhima Lakha and Mera Rama were
absconding for almost eight years. They were tried for murder and rioting after
their arrests, but all witnesses turned hostile and the court acquitted them.
Advocate Sameer Khan, who represented a witness in the high court, alleged that
a compromise had been struck between the witnesses and the accused and requested
the judges to look into the issue. Khan said this was a case of evidence being
tampered with to influence witnesses. The judges, however, said they could not
deal with the issue as it was not part of the appeal strange!
In Bihar, given the fact that no one, including the court,
disputes that this gruesome massacre took place, and the fact that there were
eyewitnesses and survivors, and yet no one, apparently, is to be held
responsible for committing it, is what makes the acquittal so damning. Fourteen
long years after the killings, some measure of justice seemed to have been
delivered when a sessions court convicted 23 people in 2010. Even that delayed
justice has now been reversed. What this constitutes, therefore, for some of
the most marginalised and dispossessed sections of our population, is the
feeling that crimes against them will go unpunished. This is a recipe for
potential vigilantism, and buffers the argument of those cynically claiming to
fight on behalf of these sections, like the Maoists, that the state is not only
apathetic but actively inimical to their lives and rights.
The context of these killings, common in the region in the
mid-1990s, makes that facet clear: continuing oppression and subjugation by the
upper castes had enabled Naxalism to attain a foothold and, with it, an
incipient assertion from the ‘lower’ castes and farm labourers — sometimes
manifesting itself in demands for more money than the pittance they were paid
for working in the landlord’s fields. Left-wing ultras started targeting the
upper castes, who had formed their own ‘army’, the Ranbir Sena. The latter had
links with many political parties, and this acquittal, as last year’s release
from jail of the Ranbir Sena chief, Brahmeshwar Singh (nicknamed the ‘Butcher
of Bathani Tola’), will be seen as an indication of that political patronage.
To reverse that, and to pursue justice, the Nitish Kumar regime should rebuild
the case with renewed vigour and punish the guilty.
Some of the comments of readers of dailies are:
“After long years of delay and dithering, the Hon'ble Judges
of Division Bench of the High Court has finally acquitted all the accused of
the tragic massacre. This verdict, I am constrained with humility to say, is
perverse, arbitrary and irrational. So many innocent lives, including women,
children and old people, were lost. But at the end, the accused are set free.
The Ranbir Sena which is solely the Bhumihar Vahini will celebrate it as a
victory. They have powerful influence and have exerted the same all around to
see this day. The Prime Minister and Home Minister of India have been telling
the nation that the naxalites are the greatest internal security threat for the
nation. Today they will be telling the States to sternly deal with atrocities
against dalit and tribal communities. What about the verdict of the Patna High
Court? The sufferers of the massacres will greatly be aggrieved by this
perverse verdict on Bathani Tola. But the local Government and the High Court
will remain apathetic to the development. What a sad day! The nation should
mourn the verdict, which is biased and influenced by extraneous factors. One of
the Cabinet Ministers in present government was formerly Advocate General of
Bihar and his sole objective was to ensure relief for his caste men, who are
Ranbir Sena foot soldiers involved in court cases. His performances have earned
him cabinet berth in Nitish Kumar Government. Everyone in Bihar knows where does
his loyalty lies. We are shocked and dismayed beyond doubts. The next round of
naxalite activities, we apprehend, may be more stormy in Bihar. And for that
they would be citing this verdict as injustice to the victims of massacres.
In the case of Gujarat, there are some more post-Godhra
massacres tried by trial courts and conviction awarded, appeals against which
too are pending in Gujarat High Court. With Narendra Modi regime still there,
whether victims will get justice is a million dollar question.
In all, 15 persons had been convicted by a trial court in
Nadiad in December 2003 in the Ghodasar carnage case. Out of them, 12 persons
were sentenced to life imprisonment, while three others were awarded two years
of rigorous imprisonment.
The Gujarat High Court division bench of Justice AL Dave and
Justice NV Anjaria acquitted 12 persons, who were awarded life term for the
lack of evidence. This was among the first post-Godhra riots cases, in which,
the accused had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The prison
term of three others got over, while their appeals were pending in the high
court. The 12 persons with life imprisonment were in jail.
According to case details, 14 Muslims were hacked to death
in an open field on March 3, 2002 in Ghodasar village of Kheda district while
fleeing an armed mob that was chasing them following rumours that members of
the minority community had killed three persons of the majority community.
Police officers were able to recover bodies of 13 victims.
They also found the burnt remains of one body. After being convicted, all the
15 accused had appealed against the verdict of the trial court.
The two verdicts prove the saying ‘Justice delayed is
justice denied.’
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