The Patna High Court has acquitted all the men accused — and found guilty by the trial court — of the ghastly massacre at lakshmanpur Bathe in 1997
Bihar has a terrible record of punishing those guilty of either caste or communal killings — it would be difficult to put together 10 instances of men guilty of communal or caste violence being brought to justice and being actually punished for their crime. Arguably, this would be no different from Bihar’s abject failure to punish those guilty of corruption: But for the doggedness of public prosecutors in Jharkhand lalu Prasad Yadav would not have been in jail today for his role in the fodder scam. let’s not forget that nothing came of the disproportionate assets case against him —the charges were set aside by the Patna High Court; the CBI did not pursue the charges in the Supreme Court. Nor can we recall what happened to the killers of Bhagalpur; the dead and the maimed have been forgotten too.
So it did not come as a surprise when the Patna High Court on October 9 acquitted each of the 26 men accused of mass murder at lakshmanpur Bathe, an obscure village in what was then Jehanabad district of Bihar, on the night of
December 1, 1997. The main accused was arrested 16 years after the crime was committed. The trial court had sentenced 16 of the killers to death; the rest had been given life-term in jail. All of them, members of Ranvir Sena, the notorious private army of upper caste landlords, can’t be faulted for sniggering at what we boastfully describe as the law of the land.
If the survivors of the massacre that left 58 wretchedly poor people, among them 27 women and 16 children, most of them farm labourers, dead are outraged by the acquittal, we need not worry. The poor can be trampled upon in this wondrous land of ours — poverty, after all, is merely “a state of mind”, as Rahul Gandhi has famously decreed. Public memory being notoriously short, and there being no premium attached to human lives in our country, few would have recalled the December 1997 massacre when the Patna High Court gave its flawed judgement. Indeed, it is doubtful if anybody would have paused over the headline, pondered over the implications of denying justice to the desperately poor.
I had visited lakshmanpur Bathe a few days after the massacre and recorded my impressions which are being reproduced here, just so that people can’t pretend the massacre never happened and hence the question of punishing the killers does not arise.
lakshmanpur Bathe: It has been raining for the past few days and the air is laden with the cold moisture of winter showers. The fields are a soggy brown. The Sone river shimmers in the dull winter daylight, lazily flowing through wide banks of sand.
In normal times, a village like lakshmanpur Bathe would be full of sounds that you do not hear in urban India. But these are not normal times. And you do not hear children shrieking to their hearts’ delight, the gentle mooing of cows or the bleating of goats. There are no snot-nosed children staring at you in wide-eyed amazement or giggling women in dark doorways. There is no whiff of woodfire in the air.
In this emptiness you can feel strains of sorrow; if you hear hard enough, you can hear the silent, grievous sobbing of women, you can smell the staleness of death. The day before was daswi, the 10th day when rituals are performed for the soul of the departed in rural Bihar so that the journey into the other world is unhindered and peaceful. But what peace can you pray for when the soul is that of a young mother who was shot dead with her infant suckling at her breastIJ And how do you bade the infant goodbyeIJ
Fifty-eight people were shot dead in this village on the night of December 1 (1997) by armed criminals who came from across the river. Entire families of three generations wiped out by gunfire. All of them were poor, perhaps the poorest of the poor. They belonged to that vast underclass of Indians who are yet to realise what freedom means. They were born into oppression, they lived in oppression and their brutal slaughter is the ultimate symbol of oppression.
No, all of them were not Dalits. The five boatmen — three of whom ferried the marauders across the Sone — whose throats were slit by the killers so that there would be no witnesses to the crime, were Nishads. Among those who were shot dead, were men and women who in life enjoyed a social status higher than that of Harijans but in death were united by the economic criterion of unrelenting poverty that stalks the landless peasantry of Bihar.
The villagers of lakshmanpur Bathe, caught in the time warp of feudal India, refer to you as ‘sarkar’. The landlords in whose fields they work for a kilo of foodgrains a day, the petty Government officials who make occasional forays, the uniformed policemen and the local politicians are their ‘mai-baap’.
These villagers, like millions of villagers in thousands of other villages all over the country, are yet to see the miraculous healing powers of modern medicine or the magic of switching on an electric light. They are yet to learn how to read and write or to explore the world beyond lakshmanpur Bathe by travelling down pucca roads. Globalisation may have made the world into a small village, but the only village they are aware of is lakshmanpur Bathe.
like giant concrete totems, electricity poles stick out from the blood-soaked soil of lakshmanpur Bathe, inert sentries of modernity that never existed. A politician in Patna, looking for ways and means to make some quick money from sources other than animal fodder, must have ordered the erection of these electricity poles. After paying off the contractor’s enormously inflated bill, there was not enough money to string these poles with cables. Not that it would have made any difference. Bihar’s towns and villages that have both poles and cables do not have electricity.
like everything else in Bihar, the haves and have-nots are also divided along caste lines. The landlords have created brutal private armies like the Ranvir Sena and Sunlight Sena, whose soldiers have a tremendous capacity for brutality. The landless are protected by the Naxal groups whose armed cadre have no less an appetite for bloodletting.
The designated guardian of both the landlords and the landless, the police, is a pathetic caricature of law-keepers. Policemen in Bihar are scared to confront either the extremist groups or the landlords’ armies. They would rather disappear from the scene of a carnage and reappear after the killings are over.
lakshmanpur Bathe is a blot on the collective conscience of the nation. The barbarity of the massacre should have stirred us as never before. The entire nation should have grieved along with the grieving men and women who saw their flesh and blood being butchered but dare not raise their voice in protest, lest their mai-baap, their sarkar forsake them forever. But nobody is perturbed, least of all in New Delhi from where the world of McDonalds and Pizza Hut looks so beautiful.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)