Maharashtra is at it again. There has been a spate of caste atrocities in recent months that once again exposes its grisly inner being and fake claim to the legacy of Phule and Ambedkar. Atrocities on dalits as such are not a new phenomenon in this great country. The statistical chant that every day two dalits are murdered and three dalit women are raped has fallen short of depicting the increasing incidence of atrocities. For instance, the incidence of rape has almost doubled since it was composed way back in 2000. The latest statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) pertaining to 2013 indicate the recorded crime rate against dalits to be 1.85 murders and 5.68 rapes per day. The total number of atrocities has reached 39,408, which means 108 caste crimes every day or 4.5 caste crimes every hour. And these are the police figures; the actual crime rate could be anybody's guess.

Maharashtra, representing quintessential India in its characteristic brags and denials, has not been a mean contributor to this trend. Contrary to its image as a progressive state, it has almost been in the forefront in matters related to casteism, communalism, religious obscurantism and bigotry of every conceivable kind. Its ruling elite hid its misdeeds from the masses, masking these illegal acts under the veil of the progressive legacy of Jotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar. But the time has come to tear this veil down and shame this elite as the destroyer of that glorious legacy.

Khairlanji to Kharda

Even the massive state-wide flare-up in protest against the brutal murders of four members of a dalit family at Khairlanji in September 2006 could not improve matters in Maharashtra. Leave aside civil society, neither its state nor its media, barring a few exceptions, showed any sense of remorse over its conduct over caste atrocities. The media had tried to cover up the gruesome caste crime at Khairlanji as an unfortunate incident which happened because the morally outraged villagers could not contain their anger at the defiance of a lady who refused to heed their counsel to stop her extra-marital affair with a man from the neighbouring village. When the truth leaked out and sparked spontaneous protests, the state, represented by its then home minister, termed these demonstrations as Naxalite sponsored, giving thereby the police a free hand to unleash its terror. Both the state and the media, in collusion, used the "love-affair" and "Naxalite" tags skilfully to deny every caste atrocity and denigrate the dalit protests against it. It is to the credit of dalit youth in the state that they braved this state prejudice and media bias to carry on with their struggle against every atrocity that came to their knowledge.

The last year had begun with the infamous Sonai murders in which three dalit youths were brutally done to death because one of them was having an affair with a Maratha girl. The matter was successfully suppressed by the police and the media for over a month until dalit activists forced them to act. The case is dragging in court now without much progress. Just after the Lok Sabha elections this year, the Powars of Kawlewada village in Gondia district, supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in jubilation in the wake of the ascending Modi wave, set fire to 48-year-old Sanjay Khobragade, a leading dalit activist, on the night of 16 May 2014, for resisting their intrigues of grabbing the land allotted for the building of a Buddha Vihara.

Khobragade, with 94% burns, had named six persons, all Powars, twice to officials as well as to newspersons, which after his death should have become his dying declaration for the police to charge the named persons. However, the police inspector Anil Patil suddenly invoked the trick of "love affair" and instead arrested his elderly wife Devakabai and their neighbour Raju Gadpayale with a concocted story that they conspired to eliminate Khobragade as he had spotted them in a compromising position. The Powars, who were charged under the Atrocity Act and Sections 310 and 307 of the Indian Penal Code, were soon set free. The entire village and dalit activists were aghast at this police concoction but that could not save Devakabai and Gadpayale from undergoing police torture and ignominy, leave alone their grief over the death of Sanjay.

A few days before, on 28 April, a 17- year-old school boy, Nitin Aage, the only son of poor dalit labourers, was dragged from his school and brutally tortured for hours in broad daylight before being done to death by some Marathas in Kharda village in Jamkhed taluka of Ahmednagar. His "crime" was just speaking with a girl from their family. The killing sparked spontaneous protests from dalit youth but still they could not ensure that the culprits remained behind bars.

Benchmark in Brutality

On 20 October, at Javkhede (Khalsa) village in Ahmednagar district, a near repeat of Sonai was enacted. This village had received the Maharashtra government's Tanta Mukta Gaon (dispute-free village) award, quite like Khairlanji, which serves as salt over the wounds of dalits by ignoring simmering caste tensions, to insinuate that they better accept the caste order. Three members of a dalit family, Sanjay Jagannath Jadhav, 42, his wife Jayshree, 38, and their only son Sunil, 19, were killed in their farmhouse where they had temporarily put up for harvesting the crop. The bodies of the men were chopped into pieces and dumped in a nearby abandoned well and a bore-well ditch. Jayshree's body was recovered in one piece with a deep head injury. Sunil, a second year student at the Dairy Science Institute in Goregaon, Mumbai had come home for the Diwali vacation. According to the Dalit Atyachar Kruti Samiti, which published its fact-finding report, Sanjay's brother had immediately named some persons from the Maratha Wagh families to the police but despite the ongoing agitation by dalits to arrest the culprits, the police have been harassing the villagers and Sunil's friends under the alibi of interrogation. In protest against such police behaviour, the villagers had to unusually resort to observing a bandh. The Waghs are relatives of the recently elected BJP MLA, Monica Rajale, and other powerful politicians, and so the police are feigning confusion. Here too there is a tendency to colour the incident as having resulted from an affair of Sunil with a woman from the Wagh family, and protests are being claimed to be sponsored by Naxalites. Whatever be the trigger, at the root of the atrocity was the confident demeanour of Sunil which was construed as defiance of the caste code by the Marathas of the village.

The "love-affair" tag serves the police well in painting dalits as an audacious lot chasing upper-caste women and helps to evoke sympathy towards the culprits. But what is ignored is the fact that having an affair is not a crime. Interestingly, the police have registered the crime against unknown people under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention ofAtrocities) Act, 1989 (in brief, the Atrocities Act), displaying their ignorance, for the Atrocities Act cannot be applied to unknown persons simply because they cannot be assumed to be non-SC/ST persons.

The day the bodies of the Jadhavs of Javkhede were being located in the well, i  e, on 21 October, four persons belonging to a Pardhi tribe were severely beaten with stones by the villagers in front of the gram panchayat office in Alkoti village in Parner taluka of the same Ahmednagar district on the suspicion of theft. Two brothers, Rahul Punjya Chavan and Pikesh Punjya Chavan succumbed to their injuries and two are in hospital in a serious condition. Last year, 113 such incidents were registered in this district. This year, until October, 74 atrocities have been recorded. Only a few came into the limelight, such as the beating of Aba Kale, a dalit youth belonging to a deaf-and-dumb landless family by the relatives of Babanrao Pacpute, an ex-minister and now a BJP leader, on the charge of a love affair; the burning alive of Baban Misal and Janabai Borge, both dalits; the severe beating of Deepak Kamble in Karjat taluka; the brutal rape and murder of Suman Kale, a young woman belonging to a nomadic tribe; and the cutting of a dalit youth into pieces at Paithan in Shevgaon taluka. In none of these cases, the culprits have been apprehended, leave alone punished. All this has only emboldened the casteist elements to avenge the cultural assertion of dalits with brute force.

Bane of Brahmanism

Every time an atrocity occurs, the elites of Maharashtra shamelessly lament over the legacy of Phule-Ambedkar. Actually, as the atrocity statistics of recent years on murders and rapes show (see the accompanying table), the state has consistently ranked among the top five or six among the 29 states of India. Its contribution to crimes against dalits has been substantial and rising over the recent years.

Maharashtra had the unique distinction of having the reactionary brahmin rule of the Peshwas in modern times. After the Maratha empire was defeated in 1818 by the British army, the latter preponderant in the number of Mahar soldiers, the brahmins of Pune took up arms against the British, showing up as anti-colonial patriots, but actually to regain their lost kingdom. While the Hindutvavadi movement originated elsewhere, it was in Maharashtra that it found its leadership. It was here that the ideology of Hindutva and its fascist flag bearer Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were born. Even other movements, including the communist and socialist ones, could not escape this brahmanical hegemony – their leading lights discovering communism in the Vedas. Maharashtra was the land of Nathuram Godse, the rank reactionary Bal Thackeray, the clandestine terrorists of the Abhinav Bharat, and the murderers of Shahid Azmi and Narendra Dabholkar. The baton of brahmanism is now in the hands of neo-rich but uncultured shudras. A resurgent Hindutva clearly portends bad days for dalits in the state.

The least one can do is to spare Phule and Ambedkar from this caste cauldron.

Table: Crimes against Dalits in Maharashtra

Year Murders Rapes

No of % Rank No of % Rank Inci- Contri- among Inci- Contri- among dents bution States dents bution States

2013 40 5.92 5 179 8.63 4

2012 36 5.53 6 97 6.15 6

2011 26 3.86 7 95 6.10 6

2010 24 4.21 5 89 6.59 5

2009 27 4.33 6 105 7.80 4

Source: NCRB, Crime in India.