The Supreme Court on Monday (July 12) agreed to hear the Bihar government’s appeal against the acquittal by Patna High Court in May of 14 accused in the Senari massacre of 1999. The incident On March 18, 1999, 34 upper caste men were forced out of their homes in Senari village of Jehanabad district allegedly by cadres of the now defunct Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), and slaughtered near the village temple. The massacre was a sequel in the prolonged caste war between the MCC and private armies of upper caste villagers, especially the Ranbir Sena led by Barmeshwar Mukhiya, who was jailed in 2012. On November 15, 2016, a Jehanabad court sentenced 11 accused to death, and awarded the life sentence to three others. Three of those convicted challenged the verdict in the High Court. High Court order On May 21 this year, Patna High Court acquitted all 14 accused. A Division Bench of Justices Ashwini Kumar Singh and Arvind Srivastava reversed the lower court’s verdict, citing lack of sufficient corroborative evidence. The court said: “…The burden of proof of guilt of an accused is upon the prosecution. It must stand by itself. In the present case, on appreciation of evidence adduced during trial…there is a real and reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the appellants. Accordingly, the impugned judgment… [of the trial court] so far as the appellants in these appeals are concerned is, hereby set aside.” The court said that the “accused persons have been subjected to seven standard and identical questions even though the witnesses against them are disparate. “While some of the accused persons have been identified by some witnesses, the others have been identified by a single witness. No question has been put to them regarding identification by different persons and the places in the village in which they were claimed to be identified.” Newsletter | Click to get the day's best explainers in your inbox State’s appeal The state government is now preparing to present a strong case before the apex court. The prosecution has told the Supreme Court that it has 23 witnesses, including 13 eyewitnesses who lost members of their families in the massacre. Counsel for the Bihar government Abhinav Mukerji told the Supreme Court that no accused had disputed the date, time, place, and manner of occurrence — even then, all 14 had been acquitted by Patna High Court. Mukerji told the apex court that the findings of the High Court were contrary to the evidence placed on record. Bihar’s killing fields Between 1990 and 2005, Bihar saw the killings of over 400 people including several policemen in over two dozen caste massacres as the now disbanded MCC and upper caste private armies fought a bloody war of attrition. There was such a spurt of caste violence in the mid-1990s, that a despairing police force would privately rue that their mandate appeared to be to collect bodies from massacre spots, not to prevent the killings in the first place. The last major caste massacre in Bihar took place in October 2009, when 16 OBC people were killed in Alauli, Khagaria. The trend of caste massacres subsequently gave way to Left Wing Extremism. The Senari massacre saw the killing of the largest number of upper caste victims (34) after the Dalelchak-Bhagora massacre of Aurangabad in 1987, in which 42 upper caste people including 21 of a single family were killed. On the other side, the biggest loss of lives came in the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre of Jehanabad in 1997, in which 58 Dalits and OBCs were killed by the Ranbir Sena.
