A Clever Modus Operandi

The Maharashtra police have hit upon an ingenious way of containing the fallout of horrific atrocities against dalits. After each such incident they announce that the Naxalites are attempting to inflame dalit anger against the authorities and thus hijacking the public protests. This time too, following the brutal murder of a three-member dalit family in village Javkhed Khalsa in Pathardi taluka of Ahmednagar district, the police have warned that the Naxalites are using dalit anger to spread their base, especially in urban areas and among youth. The police first did this following the Khairlanji massacre in Bhandara district in 2006. Surprisingly enough, the mainstream media publishes these police statements verbatim without any questioning. Perhaps, that is why it feels justified in not publicising much the anger and aftermath of the Javkhed murders, busily devoting pages to “little-known” facts about the state’s new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister and his family.

On that 21st of October, the badly mutilated and hacked bodies of 42-year-old Sanjay Jadhav, his wife, 38-year-old Jayshree, and their son, 19-year-old Sunil, were found in a disused well and abandoned bore well near their home. These murders follow barely six months after 17-year-old Nitin Aage was murdered and strung up on a tree in Kharda village for having the gumption to be friends with a Maratha female classmate. In 2013, three young dalit men were murdered and their bodies hacked to pieces in Sonia, in the same district. These are by no means the only cases – they happen to have got more media attention than the others but not enough to force a change in police and official attitudes.