Killing fields revisited

The nauseating regularity with which large groups of voiceless, faceless people in rural Bihar are exterminated, mocks India's claims to be...

The nauseating regularity with which large groups of voiceless, faceless people in rural Bihar are exterminated, mocks India8217;s claims to being a modern democratic state. News has just come in of the state8217;s worst-ever mass killings in which over 70 people of Lakshmanpur-Bathe village have been butchered. That an estimated 300-strong mob of Ranbir Sena activists could have systematically poured bullets into sleeping villagers in a span of two-and-a-half-hours without any resistance, indicates that either the local administration does not exist or, worse, that it has little interest in ending such terror.

The Ranbir Sena, the private goon squad of landed interests, has ostensibly been outlawed. But the recent incident reveals that it has the tacit support of the local police and administrators, otherwise it would have been difficult for such a large number of fully-armed people to strike in the manner they did. In the past, the authorities have been selectively passive and equally selectively active when it came to dealing with such incidents, revealing how close the nexus between the more prosperous landed villagers and the local guardians of law-and-order often is. There have been instances, as in the Ekwari massacre of April 10 this year, when the police have ordered that the doors of homes be opened and actually stood by as the Ranbir Sena8217;s men slaughtered people.

Poverty and crime are the two forces that shape life in these regions, each feeding on the other. With agriculture being the only economic activity worth the name, all social conflict here centres around land, with landless labourers and sharecroppers pitted against the landed elite. The social and caste background of this elite became more diffused over the years. Apart from the Bhumihars and Rajputs, who constitute the traditional land-owning base, the upper echelons of the backward castes like the Yadavas, Kurmis and Koeris have become landowners in their own right.

The Ranbir Sena, although dominated by the Bhumihars, was the response of the land-owning sections of local society towards the threat to their dominance represented by the emergence of CPI M-L groups seeking to organise the peasantry. Although this organisation was formally banned in November 1995, it has grown in influence and muscle power over these last two years. Many of its members openly strut about fully armed, secure in the knowledge that they have powerful political godfathers in Patna. The CPI M-L groups too have also become criminalised and factionalised, and have not hesitated to launch pogroms of their own. In fact, it was Left extremists who were responsible for the massacre at Dalelchak-Baghaura in Aurangabad district in 1988, in which 42 lost their lives.

It8217;s the poorest of the poor who are the victims of this endless cycle of retribution and a supremely apathetic State. The Rabari Devi government8217;s impotent response to such incidents lends credence to the view that it has no real desire to crack down on these rampaging murderers and rapists, or address the crying needs of Bihar8217;s most marginalised communities.