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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Justice for marginalised a neccessity to keep radicals away

Justice for marginalised a neccessity to keep radicals away

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published Published on Apr 23, 2012   modified Modified on Apr 23, 2012
-The Economic Times

Last week's acquittal by the Patna High Court of all the accused in the Bathani Tola massacre of 1996 - in which 21 Dalits, including women and infants, were killed by members of an upper-caste/landlord militia called the Ranvir Sena, in this area of central Bihar - is shocking testimony to the ineptness, and worse, of the police and the administration in prosecuting the guilty.

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 the landlord's fields.

Left-wing ultras started targeting the upper castes, who had formed their own 'army', the Ranvir Sena. The latter had links with many political parties, and this acquittal, as last year's release from jail of the Ranvir 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.

The Economic Times, 23 April, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/editorial/justice-for-marginalised-a-neccessity-to-keep-radicals-away/articleshow/12831676.cms


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