Battle for Justice and Democracy

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The acquittal of the 26 people found guilty for the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre of 1997 by the Patna High Court is a grave miscarriage of justice. This article traces the events of that time and the manner
in which the ruling of the sessions court, finding these accused guilty, was overturned. It argues that Bihar does not witness a "caste war", rather it is a situation where mainstream political parties have supported and defended sustained violence against the dalits and lower castes, the landless and the powerless by the likes of the Ranveer Sena.

Kavita Krishnan (kavitakrish73@gmail.com) is a politbureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist – Liberation).

The acquittal of the 26 people found guilty for the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre of 1997 by the Patna High Court is a grave miscarriage of justice. This article traces the events of that time and the manner in which the ruling of the sessions court, finding these accused guilty, was overturned. It argues that Bihar does not witness a “caste war”, rather it is a situation where mainstream political parties have supported and defended sustained violence against the dalits and lower castes, the landless and the powerless by the likes of the Ranveer Sena.
For Batan Bigha, 1 December 1997 was a long night of terror. Fifty-eight people of the “dalit tola” of the twin villages of Laxmanpur-Bathe, on the banks of the Sone river in Bihar, were massacred by a contingent of the Ranveer Sena, an organised landlord army with powerful political links.
That night, two boatfuls of armed Ranveer Sena men crossed the Sone river from the Bhojpur side to Jehanabad. They killed five people near the river itself, including the boatmen who had ferried them across. They were joined by a waiting team of Sena men from nearby villages. In all, they totalled around 150. They entered Batan Bigha, divided themselves into groups of 10, entered houses, and slaughtered 53 sleeping people including 27 women and 10 children, one a baby. Those who were murdered included mostly people from the dalit and extremely backward castes like the Mallah and some from Other Backward Classes like the Koeri.
Planning the Massacre
Details of how the massacre was planned soon emerged. On 30 November, a meeting of the Ranveer Sena was held at the house of one Dharma Sharma in the neighbouring Kamta village. Apart from Ranveer Sena men from Kamta and Laxmanpur-Bathe, the meeting was attended by those from the nearby villages of Belsar, Chanda, Sohasa, Kharsa, Koyal Bhupat, Basantpur and Parshurampur.
Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist – Liberation) – CPI(ML-Liberation) – activists in Bhojpur, who had already experienced the Bathani Tola massacre of July 1996, had got wind of an impending “mega-massacre”. They had intensified their vigilance and preparedness in Bhojpur and had informed and warned the police. Despite these warnings, the banned Ranveer Sena was allowed to hold its meeting by the police.
The scale and brutality of the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre prompted the then President K R Narayanan to term it a “national shame”. But the hearing in the case began in the Patna additional district and sessions court only on 2 January 2009, a full 11 years later, following an order of the Patna High Court. The sessions court, hearing the case on a day-to-day basis, passed its verdict on 7 April 2010, sentencing 16 of the 45 accused to death and 10 to life imprisonment.
The attitude of the prosecution and police in the case can be judged by the fact that one of the main accused, the Ranveer Sena chief Brahmeshwar Singh (who was subsequently killed by unknown persons while out on bail in 2012), could not even be tried in the Bathe massacre case. The police and prosecution had maintained the fiction that investigations into Brahmeshwar could not be completed because he was “absconding”, while in fact, he had for the previous eight years been lodged in Ara jail!
In October 2013, the Patna High Court overturned the sessions court verdict, acquitting all the accused in the Laxmanpur-Bathe case. This acquittal, while outrageous, was anticipated. The trend was set by the Patna High Court in April 2012 when it overturned a trial court conviction and acquitted all the accused in the Bathani Tola massacre case; and in the 18 months since it had gone on to do the same in the Mianpur, Nagari Bazaar, and now Laxmanpur-Bathe cases.
Unjust Acquittal
As in the Bathani Tola case, the Patna High Court’s verdict in the Bathe case deems the eyewitnesses to be “unreliable”. In the Bathani case, the HC had opined that eyewitnesses of a massacre are not likely to have lived to tell the tale. In the Bathe case, there were witnesses who were injured – proof that they were indeed present at the time of the massacre. The verdict’s main basis for deeming the eyewitness testimony unreliable is the fact that the first information report (FIR) filed on 2 December 1997 reached the Jehanabad Civil Court only on 4 December, coupled with the fact that the three eyewitnesses whose statements were recorded by the investigating officer (IO) on 2 December were not examined by the prosecution, while the statements of the eyewitnesses who did testify in court were not recorded by the IO on 2 December. It also observes that the police did not verify the hiding places where the witnesses claimed to have taken refuge. The HC concluded that the eyewitnesses who testified in court did not know the names of the assailants on 2 December.
This conclusion is flawed because it fails to take into account the actual circumstances following the massacre. Of the many possible explanations for a certain set of facts, the HC chose the one best suited to benefit the accused. The 2 and 3 of December 1997 were chaotic days in Batan Bigha. The survivors were coping with shock and bereavement, while post-mortem of the bodies and treatment of the injured had to be arranged. Moreover, the chief minister’s visit on 3 December was an additional preoccupation for the police.
The HC also fails to consider the fact that the eyewitnesses who testified did so against people who held social, economic and political power over them. They did so withstanding immense intimidation and pressure to turn hostile (several witnesses did, in fact, turn hostile).
The HC picks on the fact that several of the assailants who were from Bhojpur rather than Jehanabad were not apprehended by the police and that most of the 26 convicted are from villages near Bathe. But why assume from this that those convicted have been maliciously and falsely named by the survivors? The assailants came from both Bhojpur and Jehanabad; only 45 out of the 150 or so were named; and of these only 26 convicted. The 26 men whom the trial court held to have been identified beyond any shadow of doubt, were mostly from villages adjoining Bathe – men on whose fields the eyewitnesses worked, and with whom they would be extremely familiar.
Bela Bhatia’s (2013) observation regarding the HC verdict in the Bathani Tola case holds true for the HC verdict in the Bathe case as well.¹
In the wake of the Laxmanpur-Bathe acquittal, several reports and commentaries in the media² have spoken of a “resurgence of caste war” in Bihar. In the 1990s, too, it was common to speak of the massacres in terms of a “caste war”, a “war of attrition” or “battle for supremacy” between “Naxalites” and the Ranveer Sena; or as arising solely as a response to specific battles over agricultural labourers’ wages and land. Such narratives are inaccurate, misleading and sometimes, motivated.
Not a ‘Caste War’
Accommodating the massacres into a narrative of caste war is a way of domesticating them. In such a narrative, even the quest for justice becomes a way of “aggravating caste tension”. One of these recent pieces speaks of the difficulties for the government in “maintaining caste harmony”.³ Another article stated that “CPI-ML national general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya supported Laxmanpur-Bathe caste tensions during his recent visit”.⁴
The innocuous term “caste harmony” is a loaded one. Ranveer Sena chief Brahmeshwar Singh was known to have said that the CPI(ML) had “broken the caste harmony of our social fabric”. In an interview days before his killing, he said, “Violence for the restoration of peace and harmony is not a sin.”⁵ It is no coincidence that the Ranveer Sena’s talk of “social harmony” was identical to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) slogan of samajik samrasta, both implying the subjugation of the oppressed castes. The slightest social, economic, or political assertion by the oppressed was equated with “disharmony”, and the massacres were justified as necessary to “restore harmony”.
What about the “war of attrition” argument, or the claim that “economic blockades” by the Naxalites had provoked the massacres? The Bathe massacre itself did not have its origin in any prior economic or political conflict as such. The village was not a stronghold of either the CPI(ML-Liberation) or the erstwhile CPI(ML-Party Unity). Though there were some members of both these parties, there was no armed presence in the village. While there had been some struggles over wages and land, there had been much sharper battles elsewhere. Bathe was chosen as a “soft target”; caste and class were factors but the purpose was political theatre – the enactment of a deliberately sensational “record-breaking” massacre that would help to consolidate upper caste support for the BJP on the eve of the elections.
The Ranveer Sena itself was substantially different from earlier caste senas. The Ranveer Sena was formed to counter the rise and assertion of the CPI(ML-Liberation) as an electoral and political force in that region. The earlier senas had tended to be more local; the Ranveer Sena’s base was spread over almost the whole of central Bihar. The Ranveer Sena displayed an ideological cohesion and well-defined political role that was also distinct from the earlier senas. The Ranveer Sena’s ideological debt to the RSS was pronounced, and it distributed leaflets for the BJP in elections. However, it received political patronage and funding from a range of politicians across parties, as well as from global financial sources.
Laloo Prasad had no compunctions in sharing the stage with Ranveer Sena supporters and, as he put it, in “joining hands with the forces of hell to counter the CPI(ML)”. This would perhaps explain the frequency with which the banned Sena committed atrocities with impunity during the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) rule. The answer to the appeasement of the BJP-backed Ranveer Sena by the RJD and the Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) – can perhaps be found in the “unmistakable coalescence of class interests on the ground between the decaying feudal forces and the emerging kulak sections from both upper caste-led camps as well as dominant backward castes”.⁶
It was the widespread outrage which followed the Bathani Tola and Bathe massacres which forced the RJD Government of Bihar to constitute a commission headed by retired Justice Amir Das, to enquire into the political backing enjoyed by the Ranveer Sena. Justice Amir Das is on record stating how basic infrastructure was denied to this commission and efforts were made to subvert its working.⁷ The commission enquired into 34 massacres committed by the Ranveer Sena. The politicians it interrogated about their financial patronage of the banned Sena and the political services they in turn received from the Sena, included many senior leaders of the BJP, JD(U), as well as of the RJD and Congress.
One of the first acts of the Nitish Kumar government when it came to power in 2006 was to scrap the Amir Das Commission, which was in the final stages of preparing its report, as many prominent BJP and JD(U) politicians were likely to be exposed by the commission for Ranveer Sena links.
The claim that Nitish Kumar has somehow “changed the narrative” in Bihar away from “caste war” to “development” is entirely mischievous as this government has allowed the Ranvir Sena and other upper caste groups to wreak violence on dalits and has scuttled even modest proposals for land reforms by the government’s own Bandopadhyay Land Reforms Commission. Even today, Ranveer Sena leader Sunil Pandey is the JD(U) MLA from Tarari in Bhojpur.
Justice Not Revenge
Many well-meaning commentators like to warn that if the judiciary fails to provide justice in the massacre cases, it could push the poor to seek revenge. The fact, however, is that the question of justice is not one of settling scores or getting revenge for events of the past. It is a question of fighting for democracy in the present. The quest of the people of Bathe and Bathani for justice is an integral part of their broader struggle for social dignity and real democracy, and of their resistance to the forces of feudal and communal fascism.
In an interview to a TV channel not long before his killing, Brahmeshwar Singh said he had been an RSS cadre since childhood, and that he wished to see Narendra Modi as prime minister. In 1994, he had declared the agenda of killing dalits in the womb, even before they were born, “...the viper in the egg will one day hatch and come to bite you. There is no sin in crushing the egg.”⁸ At Bathani Tola, poor and backward Muslims alongside dalits constituted the bulk of the victims.
In the wake of the Bathe massacre, then CPI(ML-Liberation) general secretary Vinod Mishra wrote “the interests of the revolutionary peasant movement as well as the national responsibility of halting the onslaught of saffron army has merged into one and the same task – wiping out Ranvir Sena.”⁹ The task of seeking justice for the massacres of the landless poor today remains integral to the task of halting the onslaught of the saffron army nationally.
Notes
1 Bela Bhatia 2013, “Justice Not Vengeance: The Bathani Tola Massacre and the Ranbeer Sena in Bihar”, EPW, 21 September, pp 49, 52.
2 Santosh Singh 2013, “Spectre of Caste War Haunts Bihar”, The Indian Express, 21 October; Rohit Singh, 2013, “Ghost of 90s Set to Re-visit Bihar? Threat of Caste War Resurgence Is Real, Says Politicians”, Headlines Today, 21 October; Manoj Kumar 2013, “Dangerous Signs: Is Bihar Moving Back to Era of Bloody Caste Wars?”, Firstpost, 22 October.
3 Santosh Singh, Op cit.
4 Anonymous 2013, “Caste War Angers Bihar”, New Delhi Post, available at http://thenewdelhipost.com/caste-war-angers-bihar-211910.html, accessed on 3 November 2013.
5 Dan Morrison 2012, “A Final Interview with Brahmeshwar Nath Singh”, International New York Time: India Ink, 4 June, http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/a-final-interview-with- brahmeshwar-nath-singh/?_r=0, accessed on 3 November 2013.
6 Dipankar Bhattacharya 2012, “Ranvir Sena Revisited: Feudal-Kulak Power and Lalu-Nitish Continuum”, EPW, 28 July, pp 15-19.
7 Dipak Mishra 2006, “Cloud over Justice Amir Das Panel”, The Times of India, 9 April.
8 Dan Morrison, op cit.
9 Vinod Mishra 1998, “This Battle Must Be Won”, Liberation, January.

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