Khairlanji disturbs me, bothers me, at many levels.
Perhaps more than the killings in Khairlanji, it is the response to the violence, or the lack of it, that bothers me more. More than 24 hours after the incident no FIR was registered. Despite eyewitness accounts that the women were raped till they died and even after their death they were raped, the government dropped rape charges against the accused because of "lack of evidence".
There is no need to use words like "sensational" or "brutal" to describe what happened in Khairlanji. You can see all those adjectives and more in the eyes of Bhaiyalal Bhotmange.
Bhaiyalal's eyes still haunt me. As he talks to you, you can see his eyes replaying the events leading up to the killings. Everytime he rcounts the incident in a court or in front of the media, his wife and daughter get raped again, his sons get killed again.
I can't forget the look of terror on the face of the Dalit eyewitness who has to stand in an open court and testify against some of the most powerful men in his village -- a village where his entire family lives. More than once, he and his family have been threatened. After all the threats, the act of standing in that courtroom requires courage that you and me might find difficult to even imagine.
It is not just those eleven incarcerated men whose presence in the court scares the eyewitness. It is the entire village of uppercaste families, which has just three Dalit Buddhist families. Heavy police presence in the area has prevented any untoward incidents so far. But the police wouldn't be there indefinitely. Once the police leave, fear NGO activists in Bhandara and Nagpur, all those who have dared to depose before the court will have to bear the brunt of uppercaste wrath.
Today, entire Khairlanji suffers from collective amnesia. None of the residents can throw any light on how the entire Bhotmange family perished. No one in the village heard the screams of the Bhotmange boys when their legs were broken, or the cries of Surekha Bhotmange and her daughter Priyanka when they were raped.
It is difficult to calmly report from a place like Khairlanji, it is difficult to maintain objectivity. Having said that, it would be criminal to report calmly from Khairlanji. Your blood should boil by what you see. I think for far too long far too many of us have remained calm. We have calmly reported Khairlanjis, we have calmly debated over Khairlanjis and then we have calmly gone to sleep, to wake up next morning and calmly move on to perhaps other Khairlanjis.
Khairlanji sorely tempts you to take recourse to other means, means that go against the laws of the land. It provokes the latent arsonist in me. I want to jolt some people out of their calmness. I want to ask some people how calmly they would react to agricultural implements being shoved up the private parts of women in their families. I want to torch a few courthouses which go slow on such cases.
The sorriest, most sordid thing about Khairlanji is what happened there is NOT out of the ordinary as far as crimes against Dalit go. Over the past twenty years I have worked with, and known, some of the finest men and women who have produced top quality journalism in the most trying circumstances. I am a very proud member of this much-reviled Fourth Estate. But Indian mainstream journalism will have to collectively bear the cross of not reporting either the frequency or the savagery of anti Dalit violence.
As a journalist, I wouldn't describe myself of being either scoop-hungry or click-happy. But when I look back upon the past couple of decades, I have to confess there were times when I had been a silent spectator to acts of barbarism. While largely it is my fault, it is partly because of our training as a journalist to faithfully recount, to report what has happened and then de-involve oneself. That training is meant to ensure that one retains one's sanity even as one reports on the madness all around.
But Khairlanji, and other such incidents, do raise an important issue -- after seeing all this, what kind of a human being would, or even should, remain sane?
Perhaps more than the killings in Khairlanji, it is the response to the violence, or the lack of it, that bothers me more. More than 24 hours after the incident no FIR was registered. Despite eyewitness accounts that the women were raped till they died and even after their death they were raped, the government dropped rape charges against the accused because of "lack of evidence".
There is no need to use words like "sensational" or "brutal" to describe what happened in Khairlanji. You can see all those adjectives and more in the eyes of Bhaiyalal Bhotmange.
Bhaiyalal's eyes still haunt me. As he talks to you, you can see his eyes replaying the events leading up to the killings. Everytime he rcounts the incident in a court or in front of the media, his wife and daughter get raped again, his sons get killed again.
I can't forget the look of terror on the face of the Dalit eyewitness who has to stand in an open court and testify against some of the most powerful men in his village -- a village where his entire family lives. More than once, he and his family have been threatened. After all the threats, the act of standing in that courtroom requires courage that you and me might find difficult to even imagine.
It is not just those eleven incarcerated men whose presence in the court scares the eyewitness. It is the entire village of uppercaste families, which has just three Dalit Buddhist families. Heavy police presence in the area has prevented any untoward incidents so far. But the police wouldn't be there indefinitely. Once the police leave, fear NGO activists in Bhandara and Nagpur, all those who have dared to depose before the court will have to bear the brunt of uppercaste wrath.
Today, entire Khairlanji suffers from collective amnesia. None of the residents can throw any light on how the entire Bhotmange family perished. No one in the village heard the screams of the Bhotmange boys when their legs were broken, or the cries of Surekha Bhotmange and her daughter Priyanka when they were raped.
It is difficult to calmly report from a place like Khairlanji, it is difficult to maintain objectivity. Having said that, it would be criminal to report calmly from Khairlanji. Your blood should boil by what you see. I think for far too long far too many of us have remained calm. We have calmly reported Khairlanjis, we have calmly debated over Khairlanjis and then we have calmly gone to sleep, to wake up next morning and calmly move on to perhaps other Khairlanjis.
Khairlanji sorely tempts you to take recourse to other means, means that go against the laws of the land. It provokes the latent arsonist in me. I want to jolt some people out of their calmness. I want to ask some people how calmly they would react to agricultural implements being shoved up the private parts of women in their families. I want to torch a few courthouses which go slow on such cases.
The sorriest, most sordid thing about Khairlanji is what happened there is NOT out of the ordinary as far as crimes against Dalit go. Over the past twenty years I have worked with, and known, some of the finest men and women who have produced top quality journalism in the most trying circumstances. I am a very proud member of this much-reviled Fourth Estate. But Indian mainstream journalism will have to collectively bear the cross of not reporting either the frequency or the savagery of anti Dalit violence.
As a journalist, I wouldn't describe myself of being either scoop-hungry or click-happy. But when I look back upon the past couple of decades, I have to confess there were times when I had been a silent spectator to acts of barbarism. While largely it is my fault, it is partly because of our training as a journalist to faithfully recount, to report what has happened and then de-involve oneself. That training is meant to ensure that one retains one's sanity even as one reports on the madness all around.
But Khairlanji, and other such incidents, do raise an important issue -- after seeing all this, what kind of a human being would, or even should, remain sane?
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