The Persistence of Caste by Anand Teltumbde

Author:Anand Teltumbde [Teltumbde, Anand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Post-Khairlanji:A Chronicle of Repression

If the Khairlanji lynchings and their botched investigation exposed the culpability of the state machinery, the brutality with which the police targeted protests across Maharashtra was an equally grave indictment of the antidalit attitude of the state. Large sections of the dalit community were appalled at the murders as information about them began to spread. Led primarily and initially by women and joined by large numbers of youth, dalits took to the streets in protest. After the first such demonstration, in Bhandara on 1 November 2006, the entire Vidarbha region reverberated with condemnation of the killings and the state’s antidalit stance. It is notable that almost everywhere, dalit women took the lead. These were genuine protesters who did not have the usual support system that established political parties have. The police response was as heavy-handed as though they were worse criminals than the perpetrators at Khairlanji.

This chapter dwells upon the delay in reaction to the Khairlanji killings, the roles played by various civil society organizations and political parties, and finally documents the democratic protests that ensued and the police ruthlessness that was unleashed to crush both the protests and the spirit that impelled them.

The Deeksha Celebration Theory

It remains a mystery how the news of such a major caste atrocity at a place just 125 kilometres from Nagpur city, the nerve centre of the Ambedkarite movement, went unnoticed for weeks. That the dalits of Nagpur were in the thick of preparations for the Deeksha celebration is not entirely implausible - at the individual level. 1 But considering Khairlanji’s location and the historical association between the people of Bhandara and Nagpur city, it is not entirely believable that, at the collective level, such an incident could have been unknown for as long as is claimed it was.

How is it that on 2 October, three days after the butchery, when hundreds of thousands of dalits congregated at Nagpur from all over the country and the world to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ambedkar’s Buddhist conversion, no one in this crowd knew of what had happened at Khairlanji? There was not a ripple felt, not a whisper heard anywhere in this sea of dalits, charged that day with Ambedkarite spirit. It could still be argued that the lay crowd would have been immersed in the festivities of the occasion, but what about the leaders? No one, even inadvertently, uttered the word ‘Khairlanji’ among the hundreds of speeches delivered that day.

On 14 October, the solar calendar anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion, Mayawati, the supreme leader of the most significant national party of dalits, Bahujan Samaj Party, 2 addressed a major meeting in Indora, Nagpur’s Ambedkarite hub. The crowds of 14 October are not comparable to those on 2 October, but they certainly run into the thousands. It was a full fortnight after the Khairlanji slaughter, the victims had by this time been clearly identified as dalit, and the murders had been established beyond doubt as a caste atrocity. Yet there was no sign of unease among the gathering or at the many functions and assemblages of the day.

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