Why were Nagpur Dalits so unmoved after Khairlanji murders?
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 anti-Dalit 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 November 1, 2006, the entire Vidarbha region reverberated with condemnation of the killings and the state's anti-Dalit 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.
The Deeksha celebration theory
It remains a mystery how the news of such a major caste atrocity at a place just 125km 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. 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.
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How is it that on October 2, 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 50th 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 October 14, the solar calendar anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion, Mayawati, the supreme leader of the most significant national party of Dalits, Bahujan Samaj Party, addressed a major meeting in Indora, Nagpur's Ambedkarite hub.
The crowds of October 14 are not comparable to those on October 2, 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. The Nagpur Dalits seemed unaware of any cause for agitation.
This was followed by another large convention in Chandrapur on October 16 to commemorate a mass conversion that had taken place there in Ambedkar's presence in 1956.
Again, no one spoke about Khairlanji or showed any discomfort over the issue. Is it believable that the Dalits of Nagpur and Chandrapur were still unaware that the Bhotmanges were Dalit 17 days after their murder? And if they were not, how did they remain unshaken by such an atrocity for so long?
After the euphoria of the Deeksha anniversary began to recede, the Nagpur Dalits slowly started taking note of Khairlanji. Its appalling details began to trickle in through friends and relatives. The visits of local Dalit politicians to Khairlanji confirm this.
People began talking about the lynchings in small groups in Nagpur. However, until an October 28 meeting convened by members of the Bharatiya Republican Party-Bahujan Mahasangh (known as the Bharipa-BMS), an RPI splinter group, no concrete decision on any action materialized.
The meeting resolved to march from Nagpur to Khairlanji on November 12 under the banner of the Khairlanji Dalit Hatyakand Sangharsh Samiti (Committee for Struggle on the Khairlanji Dalit Massacre). It had taken almost a month for the socially conscious Dalits of Nagpur to react to one of the worst atrocities against dalits in post-Independence India.
It is notable in this context that none of the state's established Dalit leaders had decided to go to Khairlanji until it assumed magnitude in the public eye and rendered a visit unavoidable.
Even if they did visit, as Prakash Ambedkar of the Bharipa-BMS did on October 13, they appeared keener to score political points than to take steps to address the public demand for justice.
The last time Maharashtra had seen anti-Dalit violence provoke state-wide agitations - when ten Dalits were killed in police firing in Mumbai in 1997 - Dalits showed their indignation at the apparent indifference of their politicians by manhandling RPI Member of Parliament (MP) Ramdas Athavale, and chasing others away from the scene. This, it seems, the politicians had forgotten by the time the Khairlanji atrocity happened, nine years later.
(Reprinted with publisher's permission.)