The writer travels
to Kherlanji in Vidarbha to find cynical caste and political games being
played on a horrific massacre
DILIP D’SOUZA
THE MAN
The first time I see Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, he’s one in a crowd
knotted around Bhalchandra Mungekar, once-Vice Chancellor of the University
of Bombay and now Member of the Planning Commission. He is listening
to him — Mungekar — speak, right outside his — Bhotmange’s
— house. He is a slender nondescript sort in a striped shirt and
grey pants, just another face that you might see in a typical day but
hardly register. In this crowd, he might be a media-droid like me, or
a police-droid like others here, or just another hanger-on-droid like
most of the rest in the crowd.
 |
Dilip
D’Souza |
Which, in fact,
now that I think about it, he is: a hanger-on in this great whirligig
that has, starting with the murder of his family, spiralled relentlessly
outward.
I mean, this is
the man’s own house. From this house, his own fellow villagers
dragged his wife Surekha and teenage daughter Priyanka and slightly
older sons Roshan and Sudhir, beat and mutilated and finally killed
them, all while he hid and watched, terrified for his own life. Inside
his house are the remains of lives snuffed out: spit-and-polished steel
plates on a rack, cup hanging from a hook, belt lying on the ground,
12th standard Samaj Shasan Navnit textbook on a cot, bundles of fading
clothes here and there, stickers on the front door of a pretty film
star on a bicycle and Sanjay Dutt holding a gun to his temple.
A month and a half
after it happened, he has returned to his own house in a car carrying
the once-Vice Chancellor, trailed by other cars full of cameramen and
journalists and policemen and even a fellow with a sinister machine-gun
at the ready. Most of these people squeeze into his own house with him,
and the cameramen film every movement Mungekar makes in there, looking
at the plates, leafing through a book, asking gentle questions about
the family that once lived here. And when Mungekar steps back into the
sunlight, ndtv and e-TV and wxyz TV set him up to be one of their talking
heads for the evening news. They ask him many grave questions. What
does this mean for dalits? Why are our laws not applied? Are caste crimes
on the increase? How could this happen in the land of Phule and Ambedkar?
And that’s
when I first see Bhaiyyalal, wedged in the crush somewhere in the land
of Phule and Ambedkar, somewhere between his own front door and Mungekar.
I sidle through
the crowd, behind the cameras, under the sinister gun brushing my neck
on it, under a too-low branch of a tree on which my shirt catches, to
Bhaiyyalal’s side. Too late. lmno TV has him in front of their
camera now. From behind it, a man asks: Will you take the job the chief
minister offered you? Will you take the compensation, will you come
back to live in Kherlanji, what do you want done now? pqrs TV takes
over, asks much the same questions but in a different language. Will
you won’t you why how where who what?
 |
Tell
us Mr bhotmange, how do you feel? Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange,
whose family was lynched in Kherlanji |
| |
Bhaiyyalal can’t
or won’t answer questions as he stands at the spot where
his family was butchered |
Bhaiyyalal is mute.
He cannot or will not answer these questions as he stands at the spot
where his own family was slaughtered. Head down, eyes closed, silent.
Yes, occasionally he says something of no particular consequence. Then
he returns to silence.
Years ago in Orissa’s
Erasama devastated by a cyclone, I watched a similar TV crew try to
get an orphan to talk. (Delhi’s told us to find an orphan, the
reporter told me). Similar results. I try now what I tried then. Look,
I say quietly to Bhaiyyalal when the TV crews have given up and returned
to Mungekar, I have no camera, I’m by myself, I just want to sit
with you and talk. I won’t even write down anything if you’d
like it that way.
He nods his head.
There outside his home, we chat for a while, then arrange to meet again.
Which doesn’t happen. Twenty-four hours later, he begins vomiting
and is admitted to the icu in the Bhandara Government Hospital. Doctor’s
orders: no visitors for a week.
THE MOOD
Approaching Kherlanji earlier that day, a lady cop flags us down. Having
heard reports of the climate here now, I’m worried that she’s
stopping us to say we can go no further. But no, she just wants a lift
the last few kilometres to the village, where she is supposed to join
the “police point” (her words). She is inordinately grateful
for the lift, sits in the back humming to herself. At the police point
— the square in the centre of Kherlanji — she leaps out,
directs me to a line of sitting cops and vanishes into a building.
A cop in a purple
vest strolls over to a desk with a large notebook, to take down my name
and such. My driver says he will take care of this while I go meet some
of the villagers. I’m nearly at the other end of the square with
one villager when there’s a shout from behind and I have to run
back to submit the vital detail all Kherlanji visitors must submit to
the police.
Father’s
name? asks the cop.
Tea with a clump
of Kherlanji’s residents, and they begin to talk. Slow and guarded
at first, but more and more voluble as the minutes pass. They want to
talk, they want someone to listen. There’s a lot of fear in the
village. The “sangathan-waale” (members of organisations)
come every day and shout slogans here, threaten us in front of our homes!
What sangathan, I ask, though I know what they mean. Shrugs.
Who knows? People
with big blue flags, been coming now for a month. Right, we had passed
such a group soon after picking up the lady cop. Then they ease into
their story of Kherlanji, the telling kicked off by Urkuda Khurpe.
This police patil
Siddharth Gajbhiye — you know, Surekha Bhotmange’s relative
— he used to come often to the village. He owed some money to
Sakhru Bhinjewar, so one day Sakhru went to him and “lovingly”
(Khurpe actually says “pyaar se”) asked for it back. Gajbhiye
did not return it. Two or three days later Sakhru tried again. This
time Gajbhiye was drunk, shouted “What money?” and slapped
him twice. Suresh Khandate told Gajbhiye to go back to his village,
Dhusala.
Gajbhiye left,
but not before running into Jagdish Mandlekar in the square and telling
him, you wait, in a couple of days I’ll do an “operation”
on you! Sakhru’s and Jagdish’s sons, enraged by Gajbhiye’s
behaviour, threatened to beat him. Gajbhiye took off on his motorbike
towards Kandre village, but fell off it near a stream on the way. That’s
where the sons caught up with him and, Khandate says guilelessly, “there
must have been some fight there.”
Convoluted? Certainly. But this approximates what happened on September
3, the trigger for the events that culminated in the murders of the
Bhotmange family.
