KHAIRLANJI— a caste atrocity
The rape and murder of two women in Khairlanji drew belated attention from the media. This was a crime against the community as a whole and a crime of identity. A Dalit family living on the edge of a village in apartheid was fighting for a piece of land that had been encroached upon by members of the upper castes in the village.
The fight for their rights led to retaliation from the upper castes. Two women were raped and murdered and this was a case that typically should have been decided under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
Yet, when the case was taken to court, the accused were held guilty of murder but not of rape or committing offences under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act. The dispute was personalised instead of looking at the political and social context in which it occurred.
Anand Teltumbde states that the State controlled the narrative. The legal outcome was: “The shattering atrocities were transformed into a simple crime committed in a fit of rage. The prosecution failed its brief on every front, whether in using the available hard evidence or in establishing an order of events that would have confirmed a history of caste abuse preceding the crime, or unearthing the crime that the revenge executed in a ghastly manner for defying the writ of the powerful had a clear caste context.
