National Highway

[An edited, pruned version of my article has appeared in Tehelka. Photographs by ADITYA KAPOOR]

To,
Pardeep s/o Gopi Ram (Balmiki),
VPO Salwan,
Distt Karnal (Haryana) 130246.

That letter for Pardeep from the Board of School Education, Haryana, has been delivered to his neighbours because Pardeep and his family fled on the afternoon of 1 March, five days before the letter arrived, along with at least another 150 families. The envelope contains his admit card for the Class X board examinations Textbooks and mock question papers are lying on the ground of his abandoned house. There’s also a notebook that has English grammar lessons, beginning with “Present Indifinit,” explanations duly provided in Hindi. Tenses are explained with the act of duty as an example. “Is he doing his duty?” “Has he done his duty?” “He has not done his duty.”

The long road from Karnal city that leads to Pardeep’s village, Salwan, showcases some of rural India’s prosperous best. Spring is in the air and after every other wheat and mustard field there is a river body. Farmers proudly walk around fields with their women whose veils hide even their eyes. There are pucca houses and modern tractors and mobile phone towers. But there is a high-voltage line of caste not visible to the naked eye. If anyone steps on it, it can electrocute an entire village. Like Salwan, where on 26 February teenage brothers Pradeep and Leelu were taking their cattle to graze, which entered the field of Mahipal. Mahipal was Rajput and the two brothers Balimiki, a dalit community. Mahipal allegedly used casteist language that angered the Balmiki brothers, who beat up Mahipal, went back home to get a few more people, and again beat up Mahipal until he lay dead.

Silence loomed over the three dalit settlements of Salwan that day. Mahipal was cremated the next morning, after which the Rajputs met at the village’s Badi Chaupal and took a decision. Balmikis not only have a separate basti but also a separate chaupal, and didn’t know what was coming. “Run! Run!” some Rajputs came shouting. “Your houses will be set on fire!” Whether they did so to save the Balmikis’ lives or to make it easier for the houses to be looted is not known, but it certainly was the chronicle of a mob foretold. Men, women and children ran for their lives, finding shelter with relatives in other villages.

Many grandparents stayed back, because they couldn’t run, and their lives mattered the least. Like Vedo, who doesn’t know her age, and whose daughter-in-law had to run on two feet with a five days-old baby. Her son had just begun eating lunch. She hid herself and didn’t see the mob ransack her house, break suitcases and fans and mirrors and the TV sets and steal jewellery. She has three sons, two daughters-in-law and six grandchildren living in a three-room two-storey house which now bears an empty look.

The mob was armed with swords, pickaxes, lathis, pharses, barchis and gandesis and, some allege, even revolvers. They broke doors and attacked, in every house, selective markers of the relative prosperity of Balmiki homes – homes that had nothing to do with Mahipal’s killings. In house after house, utensils, bicycles and fans are misshaped, the suitcases, trunks and cupboards opened and ransacked, jewellery and cash allegedly stolen, sometimes along with stored wheat and grains. Smashed clocks tell the hour of
the attack. And then, the houses were set on fire, though the Balmikis who were following were putting it off. Where the arson was successful, the police allegedly cleared all evidence of fire, but burnt clothes along the alley, charred walls and the smell of burnt wood still speak the truth. 25 dalit youth were injured, one of them critically so.

Come see my house too, and mine too, and please note my name, voices from all side beseech journalists, activists and visiting Balmikis from other villages. Amidst the ruin is one room with a poster of a picturesque home with the words, “You will always find the time to do the things you want to do.” Living in that house now are Rishal Singh and his wife, both above eighty. “Where would I go? In the end I am destined to die at Rajput hands.” Her name is Bhagwanti, literally, Lucky Woman. She remembers not only a similar flare-up with Rajputs fifteen years ago but also the everyday conflicts that erupt when Balmiki men and women work on Rajput fields and are not paid; taking away some grass can also be cause for caste abuses and violence.

But that day, first of March, the mob had planned well in advance. They cut off phone lines and the police could not be informed, though the police claims that two police personnel were present and one was hurt preventing the mob. District Collector BS Malik says that had the attack been pre-planned the police would have reached in full-force. “How do you know it was pre-planned? Did you see it?” he asks.

Policemen lie around the village lazily chatting and playing cards, and the Balmikis say they don’t trust the administration but at least its presence prevents them from summary violence from the Rajputs. But there are more police than residents in the three dalit bastis where Balmiki houses and even some of other dalit communities were torched. Malik says a total of 40-50 houses but a casual walk through the village lanes reveals his administration’s incompetence with statistics. Compensation cheques began to be distributed starting from Rs 200 and as pressure has built up the amount has gone up to Rs. 5,000. But 80 years old Kasturi says that the jewellery for her granddaughter’s forthcoming marriage is missing, even as she shows you the wedding invitation card. Rajkali’s husband is invalid and the jewellery she had was the only hope for her to marry her three daughters off. Sheela’s jewellery is missing too. So is Ramdari’s, who breaks down, asking what was her fault? Wasn’t it somebody else’s dispute? Prakashi has the same question; they even took away her telephone; now her son in the army, posted in Sikkim, can’t get in touch with her.

Officials from the District Collector’s office went about noting names of those who had suffered losses, conveniently missing names of those whose houses had no one. As for the rest clamouring for adequate compensation, the officials told Tehelka, “Sab dramay baazi kar rahein hain. They are all acting.” Most Balmikis have refused to take the current cheques.

It’s been five days but Sheela, Prakashi, Kasturi, Bhagwanti and everyone else – they haven’t cleaned up their houses. The smallest shard of glass lies where it fell. “If we clear this up who will believe us our houses were ransacked?” asks Amar Singh, who lost Rs. 18,000 amongst other things to the mob.

He is perhaps right, because already the district administration is questioning the integrity of the Balmiki victims. “Jewellery? 2 lakhs?!” exclaims collector Malik as Karnal’s Superintendent of Police, Sibash Kabiraj laughs in the Principal’s office of the government school in Salwan which has not been holidling classes. “Honesty is the best policy,” are words written in block capitals on the wall. There is a portrait of Gandhi, father of the nation, apostle of non-violence, advocate of panchayats as an instrument of self-government, and believer of the idea that upper castes should accept dalits as the children of god, or ‘harijans’. In this room Malik asks, “If Rajputs had to steal do you think they would steal from Balmiki homes? Have they fallen on such bad days? If Balmikis had so much money I’d like to know where it came from!” According to Malik and Kabiraj’s version of events, there was only one house that was burnt, and it was done by a Balmiki widow herself.

The next day, 2 March, despite heavy police presence, a Balimiki youth, Sonu, 20, died under suspicious circumstances. Murder, says the Balmikis, because he was a cousin of those who killed the Rajput farmer. Suicide, say the Rajputs. The post-mortem confirms suicuide, says Superintendent of Police, Karnal, Sibash Kabiraj. The post-mortem report has been ‘managed’, say Balmiki residents.

Kabiraj won’t give you a copy of the post-mortem report or that of any of the three FIRs. “Even if you file an RTI application I cannot give you a copy of the FIR because it will affect the investigation,” he told Tehelka, soon changing track and asking us to go to the Asandh tehsil police station ten kilometres away, where the Station Head Officer said the FIRs were not present in the police station as the accused were being presented in the Karnal court. His promise to fax the FIRs to Tehelka later in the day did not materialise.

According to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules, 1995, “The investigating officer shall be appointed by the State Government / Director General of Police/Superintendent of Police after taking into account his past experience, sense of ability and justice to perceive the implications of the case and investigate it along with right lines within the shortest possible time.” Suggesting connivance of the police, a statement by the National Council for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) has demanded in a statement: “Police officials who are the primary cause for the attack on the dalit people must be arrested under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989, and put in jail.” On 2 March the police had tried to threaten and prevent an NCDHR fact-finding team from going to Salwan, says Arun Khote of NCDHR.

Kabiraj said that two had been arrested for Mahipal’s muder, another two detained; five had been arrested for the ransacking of Balmiki homes and charged under provisions of the SC/ST Act. Addressing the Rajput panchayat in a large gathering to attend the late Mahipal’s memorial ceremonies on 5 March, Malik and Kabiraj seemed apologetic when faced with the demand that the five accused not be charged under the SC/ST Act. They said that truth and justice will prevail and only the guilty will be punished, even as Balmiki victims pointed out that it was ridiculous to arrest only five when hundreds had attacked in three different directions. The SC/ST POA Act, 1989, has the provision of a collective fine in such cases but the reason why such provisions of the Act may not be invoked was clear at the chautha (fourth-day memorial ceremony), with local Congress leaders in attendance. Ramesh Rana of the Indian National Lok Dal, former MLA, was of the opinion that the circumstances under which the Rajputs were provoked should be sympathised with by the police. According to the NCDHR report, the mob was led by no less than the Congress-affiliated Block Samiti Chairman, Surjit Pradhan. Which is perhaps why Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda dispatched Dr Ram Prakash, Working President of Haryana Congress, to ‘defuse’ the tense situation.

The district administration and the police engineered a ‘compromise’ whereby dalit and Rajput leaders went together to bring the body of Sonu from the Karnal hospital on 4 March after the post-mortem and to attend his cremation and leaders of both communities declared that they would not celebrate the festival of Holi on 4 March. The administration also claims that dalits who have fled are being brought back to the village. “Balmikis may not have any choice but to accept such a compromise,” says Karamveer, president of the Haryana SC/ST Employees’ Association.

Going by official records, Haryana has one of the lowest crimes against dalits in the country, which may be indicative of how many FIRs the police actually registers or how much faith dalits have in the police. In 2002, five dalit youth whose occupation was to skin animals were murdered. In 2005, a 1,000-strong mob of Jats had looted and torched 54 dalit houses in Gohana – of which 17 families were never given compensation. All the accused are out on bail as the case is being pursued by the courts. The events in Salwan last week are reminiscent of Gohana.

NCDHR and other groups have approached the National Commission for SC/STs as well as the ministry of Social Justice and Welfare and are planning to meet CM Hooda. “When Gohana happened, Hooda was not initially taking action,” says NCDHR co-convenor Vimal Thorat, “But as soon as we met Sonia Gandhi he got up from the hospital bed in Delhi and suspended the guilty officials. Seems he is waiting for the same this time.” The Chief Minister’s office did not respond to Tehelka’s request for a response.

Pardeep, meanwhile, may not be able to take his high school examinations if his family, and peace, don’t return to Salwan. His textbooks are waiting to be picked up from the ground. The last page in the grammar notebook reads in his handwriting, “He has not done his duty. I have not done my duty. They have not done their duty.