The Dregs Of War

THIS time around there were very few to defend the Rabri Devi government in Bihar. The series of ghastly caste killings in the state led to much outrage. From the Congress to the dmk, there was a chorus for action against the state government. While the Centre's claim of a  constitutional breakdown was negated by the President last time, the slaughter of 11 more Dalits in last week's bloodbath at Narayanpur village in Jehanabad district finally led to the inevitable. It remains to be seen whether President's rule can alter Bihar's sorry record of caste killings. Since 1977, close to 500 people have lost their lives. The death toll this year is 34. Though much has been said about Dalit resurgence, the killings in central Bihar continue unabated. Poverty alleviation programmes have failed to touch the grassroots. Empowerment has largely come through cpi(ml) groups operating in the region since the last two decades. At the core of the caste violence is the mobilisation by these armed extreme Left groups against the landlords. In response to the new threat, the latter formed the militant Ranvir Sena in the early '90s. The result has been a ruthless chain of retaliatory killings in which both landlords and the newly empowered Dalits have become casualties. In the crossfire of Bihar's caste war many innocents have lost their lives. Wives have lost their husbands. Parents their children. And those who survive in central Bihar have been left brutalised.

SHE never really got to know her husband well. Barely in her teens, Kunti Devi was married a year ago to Santosh Paswan, a farmworker living in Shankarbigha, Jehanabad. After a week, she left for her parents' home in neighbouring Thakuri, planning to return a year later to set up house. Last fortnight, Kunti was back in Shankarbigha. To attend Paswan's funeral. On January 25, the dreaded Ranvir Sena slaughtered her husband and 21 other Shankarbigha villagers as they were retiring for the night. Paswan's father, brother and three-year-old niece were among the casualties. For Kunti, the sheer enormity of the tragedy hasn't quite sunk in.  Will I have to stay here all my life? she whispers, cowering near the mud hut that was to be her new home.  When will all this end?

A lot of women are asking the same questions in the badlands of central Bihar. Their scared, shrunken faces are etched with despair and deprivation; their tears dry up fast in a communal sharing of grief. They are the caste widows: the uncounted casualties of war in the flaming fields where landlords fight what Patna-based political scientist Nil Ratan describes as  their last-ditch battle to maintain their hegemony over the Dalits.

Every seventh Bihari is a Harijan or Dalit, the generic name for the 24-odd scheduled castes who comprise 14.53 per cent of the population of India's poorest and second-most populous state, and languish on the lowest rung of the agrarian hierarchy.  But the end to caste wars is nowhere in sight, says Ratan.  The conflicts have a long way to get resolved.

The newest chapter in this cycle of retribution and hatred was again written in blood last Wednesday night when an armed 100-member Ranvir Sena mob invaded Narayanpur village in Jehanabad, shot dead 11 Dalits and grievously injured seven others in their sleep. The provocation? Three residents of this Harijan-dominated village witnessed the massacre in Savanbigha village, some 6 km away, where the Sena had slaughtered nine Harijans seven years ago. On that moonless night, the three saved themselves by hiding in the mustard fields; but one witness, Krishna Das, lost his sister-in-law, Janki Devi, who was shot in her sleep. Now they will be coming for me, says Das.

He could be right.  Killing is not our profession but it will continue as long as the rowdyism of Naxalites continues, roared Ranvir Sena 'spokesman' Shamsher Bahadur Singh in the wake of the Narayanpur massacre.

About six years ago, the private fief senas (armies) of the upper castes began coalescing into the Ranvir Sena. The Sena is led by land-owning Bhumihars who enjoy broad-based upper and intermediate caste support across 16 districts of central Bihar. They kill and terrorise the rural poor, loot their huts and rape their women. One example: the Sena has killed 179 Dalits in 18 operations in Bhojpur, Patna and Jehanabad districts since April 1995, when it carried out its first killings. Unlike the Naxalites, they also kill women and children.

But the resilience of the Dalits has rattled the upper castes. The flashpoint, of course, is Jehanabad, where the sway of the Naxalite groups is absolute: internecine caste wars have claimed 250 lives in this district in the past 12 years.  The land-holding classes simply refuse to recognise the rights of the landless, says economist Jagdish Prasad of the Patna-based A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Sciences.  That is the genesis of the problem.

Thanks to an ineffectual state, land reforms are virtually non-existent. The government fixes the ceiling on land at between 18 to 45 acres for each landowner. Reality works a little differently 706 landlords occupy over 200 acres of land each, a total of a staggering 3.72 lakh acres collectively. The minimum wages act is flouted with impunity - the state government-fixed daily minimum wage is Rs 37.75, while the landlords pay between Rs 20 to Rs 25, or 3 to 4 kg of paddy. The panchayats are a mockery of a decentralised rural order - the last elections were held in 1978, and the panchayat members are all nominated. Naturally, power in this withered state flows from the barrel of the gun.

For caste widows, numbed by grief and hopelessness, only fatalism rules. In a land where violence is the language of social intercourse, they remain mute and helpless spectators even as entire generations are slaughtered in these wars. Shyam Sundar Devi, recently widowed at Shankarbigha, squats in slush composed of mud, dung and straw, covered with flies that attack an untreated, festering wound on her foot. Ask her how the mob got her husband, Sohrai Paswan, and she doesn't even look up at you.  She's deaf, you see, says villager Mathura Paswan.

Piyariya Devi, another new widow, says she locked her door, grabbed her two-year-old daughter, Marchi, and prayed for life even as her husband Umesh Thakur lay in the blood-splashed mud lane outside. And even when Rajmahali Devi realised that her husband Bishnupat Paswan had been shot outside, she stayed inside the house with her daughter.  We have to save our children even when everything is lost, she says.

In brutalised central Bihar, the survival of Dalit children will also mean that the war of the lower castes will continue to its logical end. The troops are mostly the splintered, but spirited, Naxalite groups there are about a dozen ultra-left outfits, ranging from moderate to hardcore guerrilla groups, operating in the area, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (cpi-ml) groups, some of them now overground, and the banned Maoist Communist Centre (mcc).

In the blooming yellow mustard fields of Shankarbigha, 12 Naxalite groups united under the banner of 'Jan Abhiyan' (People's Movement) to wage a  sustained struggle against the Ranvir Sena, while the more hardline mcc again advocated a bullet-for-bullet policy in the aftermath of the January massacre. The state, as represented by Laloo Prasad Yadav's venal government, can only dole out the regulation compensations.

With violence feeding on retribution in a divided society, there are casualties on both sides. In Bara, a predominantly Bhumihar village in the dusty outbacks of Gaya, Naxalites landed up seven years ago, lined up 34 villagers in the dead of the night, and massacred them with hatchets. Says Birender Sharma, who survived after being given up for dead:  They took us to the fields saying that they wanted to ask us a few questions. Then they made us squat on the ground and slashed our throats.

Bindu Kumari, a twenty-something girl who went home 10 days after her marriage, returned to Bara for her husband Sunil Sharma's cremation.  They killed him only because he was a Bhumihar, says Bindu, who received Rs 1.2 lakh compensation from the government and a job in a primary school. The truth is more tangled: Bhumihar men in Bara had raped the wife of a Dalit from a nearby village, the fuse for the carnage.

Now Bindu lives with her brother-in-law Anil Sharma and his wife.  I am ready to die facing them if they come killing again. The recent wave of Ranvir Sena killings in the area has sparked off new fears of the inevitable Naxalite reprisals. The compensation money was used to build a fortress-like wall around their home; the door is shut and bolted at five in the evening.  Every night for the past seven years, she says,  one of us has stayed awake to warn the rest of any attack.

The cycle of violence has eliminated entire families. In the Bhumihar-dominated Ekwari village of Bhojpur, where repression of the Dalits was an indisputable given, Anil Singh is the only male member in his family who has survived Naxalite attacks. His father Jwala Singh was murdered eight years ago, his great-grandfather Nathuni was killed last year, his cousin Ashok was gunned down six years ago, and his nephew Santo was shot dead in a police encounter at the Arrah railway station last fortnight.  Living with death has become a part of my life, he says.  I don't cry any longer. Who knows how long I will live?

The widows of the household, Nithilesh Kumari and Suchitra Devi, barricade themselves and their children in a crumbling village mansion. Anil Singh, who claims the family owns some 110 acres of land, says Naxalites are  anti-nationals because they kill farmers like us. He also insists that the Ranvir Sena is really a  peasant organisation defending the rights of the farmers.

The brunt of the slaughter falls on the widows. Take Kunti Devi, for example. Her two brothers went to school and are matriculates who slave in Bhumihar fields in the absence of job alternatives. She stayed home to help with the chores, married to a boy her parents chose, and was promptly widowed.  The in-laws will either throw the widow out of her home or usurp a chunk of the compensation, comments Shankarbigha villager Joginder Paswan. Bindu Kumari, widowed after staying with her husband for 10 days, now lives at the mercy of her brother-in-law. Though she had fallen in love with him, he married her sister instead, and with their father's approval, secured his hold on their property.

These seething social tensions still simmer a full year after a massacre in Laxmanpur-Bathe, a remote village on the banks of the Sone in Jehanabad. In December 1997, a Ranvir Sena mob set sail in two boats from Bhojpur, some 2 km across the Sone. Under cover of the night, they landed in the village and gunned down 68 Dalits, in what is still the worst caste bloodbath in Bihar. Dukhia Devi shut herself at home when the mob came; her husband Chenari Chowdury had gone fishing. I kept shaking through the night, thinking what might have happened to him, she says. The next morning, she spotted his body on the banks of the Sone: the mob had slit his throat before entering the village. Rumours swirl around the village of older men marrying young widows in order to usurp compensation monies; but these are stories no one wants to tell.

Other widows languish in penury. Urmila Devi, shrunken and forty-something, lives in Bhairawan, Gaya, trying to bury the memories of her husband Girija Prasad Varma, a Dalit matriculate who took up arms to fight the landlords and went underground with the mcc. The police killed him three years ago. Urmila heard the news two months after his death. Now she works in the fields and raises her sons, Munna and Pankaj.

 This doesn't make sense to me. I don't feel anything. I don't even know whether I am proud of my husband. He went underground and left me to fend with my two children, she says bitterly. Her attempts to dissuade her husband from going underground resulted in beatings. Prasad was the area commander of the mcc when the police got him. His family received no compensation.

Or take Anija Khatun of Bathani Tola, an outback in Bhojpur district, where Ranvir Sena men killed 22 Dalits and looted 58 homes three years ago. The Dalits' crime: telling the landlords to pay them the minimum wages fixed by the government. Her husband, Mohammed Sultan, a tailor and Naxalite supporter, was buying soap at the village grocer's when the Sena gunned him down. Today, Khatun has fled her home out of fear. She lives with a relative, brings up her three children and now works in the fields, sometimes earning up to Rs 20 a day.  My life is completely at the mercy of others, she says.

Kamleshwari Devi is luckier. She's the widow of the legendary Jagadish Mahto, a school teacher at Ekwari who kickstarted the incipient Naxalite movement in Bihar by revolting against the landlords in 1969. Married in 1967, she lived with her husband for four years before Jagadish Mahto, subject of a Mahasweta Devi novel, went underground to fight the landlords.  I tried to stop him, she says,  I said that he had a responsibility towards our three children. He told me, 'As long as I live, I have to do something more meaningful than bringing up a family.' That was it.

In December 1972, she was told that her husband had been killed by Bhumihar landlords six days after the murder. The seeds of rebellion have sprouted in the family: her second son, Anil Kumar, is a Naxalite activist who has been in jail for the last two years.  I feel proud that they fought for the poor, says this gritty woman.  But will this ever end? Kamleshwari Devi now divides her time between Bhojpur and Patna, where her daughter is married to Bhawan Singh, a former cpi(ml) legislator who is now an evidently unhappy general secretary with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (rjd).

Says political scientist Ratan about the spurt in Ranvir Sena attacks:  It only proves that the landlords are panicking. The end of round one may be in sight, but if the Dalits eventually win the battle against Bhumihars, there is a second round of caste wars coming up.  The last battle, says Ratan,  will be fought between the Dalits and the intermediate castes like Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris who comprise the ruling elite.
All that will change, it seems, is the faces of the widows.