COMMUNAL VIOLENCE

CPI(ML) Leader Vinod Mishra on Bathani Tola Massacre, July 1996

July 11, 1996 proved to be the darkest day in the history of over 25 years of peasant struggle in Bhojpur. At Bathani Tola, a small hamlet, 19 persons were literally butchered in broad daylight by the outlawed Ranvir Sena. A dozen others were grievously injured (including) two children (who) died at the hands of a callous and cruel hospital administration.

All the dead belonged to agrarian labor families coming from the Dalits and Muslim communities. The killers, on the other hand, belonged to the landowning classes of savarna, the Rajputs and Bhumihars.

Secondly, though the marauders were well-armed with modern weapons, they preferred to use choppers and swords to hack the women and children to pieces enacting an orgy of medieval barbarism. The very next day, the Rajput and Bhumihar villages celebrated this grand 'heroism' of their Sena by distributing sweets and adorning the foreheads of their young with red tilaks.

Thirdly, the victims were all women and children including infants.

And finally comes the role of the state. This Sena, after it shot dead 13 Musahars at point-blank range at the dead of night one-and-a-half years back at Sarthna village of the same district, was banned by the administration. And because of the mounting tension in and around Bathani Tola primarily over Kabristan and Karbala lands which were occupied by armed savarnas three police camps were stationed there ostensibly to protect the people from the depredations of the Ranvir Sena. And yet on this doomsday, despite frantic pleas of the poor people, not a single policeman cared even to raise his finger against the attackers. The district administration too was duly informed in a written memorandum just a few days ago by the local party unit about their apprehension of a massacre.

It is a well-known fact that in the recently concluded parliamentary elections, these savarna castes aggressively mobilized in favor of the BJP. The half- hearted measures of the district administration in tackling the Sena in a State ruled by the so-called proponents of secularism and social justice is quite baffling. Chandradeo Prasad Verma, the local MP and a Union Minister of State, has gone on record questioning the very rationale behind the banning of the Ranvir Sena and, instead, has been advocating ban on the CPI-ML. The only plausible explanation can be the eagerness of the JD to court the favor of sections of the Savarnas.

In the war of attrition between the Ranvir Sena and the CPI-ML so far over 250 people have been killed. Newspapers that draw their ideological inspiration from the Sangh Parivar, in their editorials, cried hoarse over      the general state of lawlessness in Bihar and then went on to narrate the story of "parallel" governments being run by Left extremists in 23 districts of Bihar and clamored for special para-military operations to cub them. An ex-Director of the CBI wrote on the same lines in Asian Age. Several newspapers wrote about the vicious circle of violence and counter-violence where the basic difference between the massacres as a weapon of mass terror employed by... feudal and the main resistance of the rural poor for self-defense and just rights were blurred. In a strange travesty of logic, the victims themselves stood condemned.

The CPI-ML (Liberation) different from some of the anarchist groups, is a mass political party. The party does not believe in senseless violence and takes recourse to any retaliatory actions only when they become absolutely indispensable.

Kanshi Ram as well as Ram Vilas Paswan, the two self-appointed spokesmen of the Dalits, didn't feel it necessary to even condemn the incident. V.P. Singh, the foremost votary of Dalit empowerment, who found enough time and energy to visit Ramesh Kini's family in Mumbai, maintained mysterious silence over the entire episode. No Muslim leader worth the name cared to visit the spot despite the fact that the Ranvir Sena is a frontal organization of the BJP, that a considerable section of the victims belong to the Muslim community, that the immediate issue was the liberation of the Kabristan and Karbala lands and that the massacre had a strong communal overtone.

Indrajit Gupta, the Communist Union Home Minister parroted the hackneyed phrase of lack of land reforms as the root cause of the problem. In Parliament the union Home minister announced the formation of a task force comprising retired senior police officials to probe into the causes of the rise of extremism in Bihar. There were was no word or action against the district administration for their criminal neglect of duty and even the earlier norm of setting up a judicial enquiry to probe such grave incidents was given a go-by under the cover of generalizations.

Gupta in his misplaced zeal of scholarly adventure failed to grasp that Bathani Tola was the reverse case of growing feudal backlash.

In Bhojpur in general people have already snatched reforms over wages and land. The feudal backlash, emboldened by the ascendancy of the BJP in the last parliamentary elections in Bihar, was precisely meant to snatch these gains and re-establish the Savarna hegemony. Incidentally, Ranvir was a Bhumihar hero of

yesteryear who fought against Rajput domination and, therefore, Rajputs were generally wary of joining the Ranvir Sena. At Barki Kharaon, the unity between the two castes was affected by the BJP elements using the convenient communal pretext as the current struggle there was over Kabristan and Karbala land. The confrontation has its genesis in 1978 itself when Yunus Mian defeated Kesho Singh in the Panchayat elections for the post of mukhiya, and then the subsequent razing to the ground of the Imambara.

which, though rising at the grassroots, is defined by the Bathani Tola is a typical case of open class war parameters of political struggles at the top, a typical case where caste as well as communal antagonisms - the two major social parameters of contemporary Indian society- With the outbreak of open class war the Centrist and are blended within the framework of class struggle social-democratic forces have turned impotent often adopting a neutral position that only goes to benefit the predators.

This class war subsumes within itself the issues of caste and communal discriminations.

If the 25 years of the history of Bhojpur is any guide, the struggle has never stopped half-way here. The rural poor, compared to their position 25 years ago, have snatched socio-economic gains and have advanced politically to a considerable extent. No Bathani Tola is going to make them surrender even a small bit of their gains. The battle, therefore, goes on and shall continue till the last vestige of feudalism is ultimately razed to the ground.

(Source: The Mainstream, 7 September, 1996)