Laxamanpur Bathe Massacre of 1997 : Justice After 13 years

13 years ago, the brutal cold-blooded massacre of 61 Dalits – including 27 women (8 of them pregnant) and 17 children (the youngest being 1 year old) – at Laxmanpur-Bathe of Jehanabad on the night of 1 December shook the conscience of the nation in the 50th year of Indian independence. The victims were murdered by men of the Ranvir Sena – an upper caste landlord army which enjoys the political backing of the BJP as well as support from a section of the RJD. 13 years after this gruesome massacre, the Additional District and Sessions Court of Patna  came up with a significant verdict on 7 April 2010, sentencing 16 Ranvir Sena men to death and 10 to life imprisonment along with a fine of Rs 50,000 each. Though belated, the verdict is a step in the right direction.

The history of Bihar, for more than two decades, is replete with massacres of the rural poor of dalit castes by various landlord armies. In their desperate bid to suppress the ever growing rural poor uprising and to hold onto their caste-class privileges, the new classes of landlords and kulaks have frequently took recourse to this terror tactics as a means to terrorise the whole mass of people. The massacre at Laxmanpur-Bathe of Jehanabad in 1997 was a stark example of this phenomenon.

Laxmanpur-Bathe situated on the banks of the Sone river in Jehananabad district was targeted by the upper caste private army of Ranvir Sena. In all 61 persons — two thirds of whom were children, women and old persons — were butchered to death in a cold-blooded operation at the dead of night. All the victims belonged to the class of agrarian labourers and were dalits in the social hierarchy. In their struggle for socio-economic emancipation they had taken up the revolutionary banner of the CPI(ML).

Now, 13 years after the massacre, the courts have indicted the murderers. This verdict is a slap in the face of the Nitish Kumar goverment, which has been playing patron to feudal forces and protecting the same elements that unleashed the massacre. It was an indictment of the government that first disbanded the Amir Das Commission, set up in 1998 after the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, when it recommended action against the political patrons of Ranvir Sena,  and then dumped the recommendations of the D Bandyopadhyay Commission  on land reforms in order to appease the Ranvir Sena patrons.

Notably Brahmeshwar Singh, the chief of Ranvir Sena and one of the accused in the case, has escaped the verdict and has not been brought to justice.

All democratic forces must come together to exert pressure on the Nitish goverment to ensure that justice to Bathe victims is finally not denied and to ensure the highest possible punishment to the political patrons of criminal-feudal gangs like Ranvir Sena.