Bihar's experiments with progressive politics have created new kinds of caste tensions.
On Independence Day, as a group of Dalits gathered in a village in Bihar's Rohtas district to hoist the national flag outside a temple of their icon, Sant Ravidas, violence broke out. A group of upper caste Rajputs from the same village, Baddi, enraged that they were not allowed to fly the flag at the same location, attacked them. One Dalit has been killed and more than 30 injured.
The incident came as a shock to the village, as it did to the rest of Bihar, which thought it had moved past its horrific legacy of caste atrocities. And while this episode may not mark a return to that terrible past, it brings out how Bihar's experiments with progressive politics have created new kinds of caste tensions that simmer beneath the surface and occasionally, like on August 15, come to the boil.
It is grimly appropriate that the violence had the Ravidas temple as its epicentre, since it is the gradual expansion of this shrine, which increased friction between the Dalits and their Rajput neighbours, not just as a piece of land, but as a symbol of growing lower caste assertion. The tensions began the moment the Dalits built the Ravidas temple at the village entrance in 1983. The Collector told us that it was government land, and built without permission. Matters appeared to have come to a head after the Dalits asked the government for permission for formal ownership of the land.
It is worth noting that the Dalits of this village are Mahadalits, the most backward amongst an already depressed caste, but given special recognition by Nitish Kumar, and an important political constituency for his party which explains to some extent their confidence in getting the land. In fact, Nitish has made it a point to hoist the flag from Mahadalit settlements, as he did this Independence Day at a basti in Patna.
But the Rajputs of the village claim that the land outside the temple was the site of an older shrine to a local freedom fighter, Nishant Singh, and where they would hoist the flag every Independence Day, a claim denied by the Dalits. As tension rose, the police intervened on the night of August 14, asking both parties to agree that neither would hoist the flag. But on the morning of August 15, a group of young Rajputs attempted to hoist the flag outside the temple and were beaten up. But then the Rajputs, who outnumber the Dalits by five times, came back in bigger numbers, and heavily armed with iron rods, lathis, and even guns.
We met the wounded from Baddi at the Sasaram Hospital: the victims were the elderly, women and even the very young. Five seriously wounded with head injuries and fractures are in hospital in Patna. The most horrific was the death of 70-year-old impoverished Ram Vilas, who supported his widowed daughter-in-law by begging. His son insists he was killed by a bullet wound, but the police claim otherwise, that he died of a stick injury.
The police, after initially being blamed for inaction, has come down hard on the Rajputs, arresting 11 people, and naming 40 others in the FIR as absconders. The SHO has been transferred, and a new man is in place.
The state has thrown the book at the Rajputs. They have been charged under almost a dozen sections of the law, including murder, rioting, Arms Act and the SC/ST Act, demonstrating once again Nitish Kumar's attempts to ensure that his government's slogan of social justice is not tarnished by this episode.
The police crackdown has led to an eerie silence in the Rajput settlement. We found mostly women, and a few men, seething with anger, claiming that the cases are false. But the Dalits say they clearly saw the attackers, especially the main instigators, Shambhu Singh, and his cousin Lakhan Pal Singh, both government doctors. They claim that ever since Shambhu retired as a health official in UP and returned to the village, there's been a breakdown in the social equilibrium.
Their families deny this, but one of the Rajputs reveals the centrality of Shambhu's role in the attack, saying that the retaliation only began when Shambhu Singh, who was away in a nearby village, returned to Baddi. Shambhu is on the run. But Lakhan Pal Singh who's being held in the prisoners' ward of Sasaram Hospital denied the charges saying he is innocent, and that he has helped the villagers.
The claims of Rajputs as benefactors of lower castes may be hard to digest after the violence, but it is true that caste assertion in Sasaram is different from neighbouring districts, which saw caste tension manifest itself in escalating cycles of violence. The first impression of Rohtas, the district in which Sasaram falls are lush paddy fields, the result of an extensive canal network on the river Son built in the 60s making it one of the highest rice yielding districts in not just Bihar but the country.
Sasaram elected one of India's first Dalit icons, Babu Jagjivan Ram, the Lok Sabha seat now represented by his daughter, Lok Sabha Speaker, Meira Kumar. This legacy of prosperity and social mobility set Rohtas aside from impoverished neighbouring districts of Ara, Jehanabad and Gaya which witnessed bloody clashes between the Maoists and the private armies of landlords like the Ranvir Sena in the eighties and nineties.
But as a local CPI-ML activist points out, Sasaram region wasn't totally insulated from caste violence either. Baddi village itself was home to a notorious zamindar, Chanardhan Singh, killed in the early nineties. The legacy of that violent past continues. 23 Rajput families in the village have gun licenses, almost all have been sent showcause notices. One of the men, whose father was also killed along with Chanardhan Singh, says that would be disaster, since they would have no protection from the Naxals.
The Maoist menace is overstated, not just in Sasaram, but even elsewhere - the result of greater political empowerment of the lower castes, whom the Maoists fought for. But for the Dalits, a greater political voice has not altered the gross inequalities of land holding, which ensures the feudal patterns remain. 99% of them are landless labourers, working on the fields of the Rajputs.
In the end, economic interdependence, however unequal, might lead to reconciliation.
But the violence on Independence Day has angered a new generation of Dalits, who are already impatient with the feudal hierarchies of the village, and less dependent on the farm. As a young Dalit boy, Hridayanand, told us, "If there are more people on one side and less on the other doesn't mean that the majority will dominate. They are entering our houses and raising flags. Tomorrow they can also enter our house and pick up our mothers or sisters. This doesn't mean that we keep watching everything quietly. As a young generation, even we won't let such things happen till the time we are alive."