They’ve been murdered, raped and mistreated for 3 000 years under India’s caste system. But now the untouchable women of rural Bihar are fighting back – with bullets. Jason Burke reports
Two scenes from rural India. The first from the summer of 1996. Bhuli Devi, a 30-year- old peasant woman, stands naked in a field on the edge of her tiny village in Samastipur district, in the central northern state of Bihar. She has been accused of stealing four potatoes from a landowner’s field and so has been stripped and forced to stand at the scene of her alleged crime for several hours.
It is very hot. Her accusers, and her judge and her jury, stand around laughing at her. They are led by the farmer on whom her family’s livelihood depends. When it gets dark they will gang-rape and kill her.
Scene two. April last year in Sasaram, a small town some 128km from where Bhuli Devi was murdered. A 15-year-old girl has been abducted by a group of men hired by a local landowner to intimidate his labourers, who have been demanding higher wages. They hide her in a small house near the main market. Within minutes, after brief and confused fire-fight, her abductors flee. The door to the house opens and in strides her rescuer, Indu Devi – 35 years old, 1,65m tall, 76kg, wife, mother of three – the slightly unlikely-looking commander of a slightly unlikely army of several thousand armed, trained and highly motivated peasant women.
It is winter now in Bihar, and the fields are green with young wheat and yellow with mustard seed. The sun is mild, and a light breeze lifts the red flags that hang limply above the village temples and stirs the slender palms that tower above the mud huts.
The River Ganges, 1,8km wide, though still 800km from the sea, flows lazily through silty plains. Along its banks, bullock carts lurch along dirt roads and the women walk gracefully with their saris tied tight and clay water pots balanced on their heads. But at night Bihar is cold and dark and very quiet. The stars are very clear and the roads very empty. Fear hangs in the air like the early-morning fog over the rivers.
It isn’t surprising. The prevalence and extent of violence in Bihar is amazing. Policemen shoot criminals; criminals shoot policemen. Landlords butcher the landless; the landless butcher back. Politicians die in bomb blasts, left-wing terrorists fight a class war, mafia gangs battle over turf and unidentified agents of unnamed foreign powers shoot it out on the streets of obscure rural towns. In the north of the state, women hurl themselves, allegedly, on to their husbands’ funeral pyres. In the south, there are reports of human sacrifice.
But after a day or so of reading the local papers a pattern in the violence begins to emerge. Almost all the victims are “untouchables”, those condemned by the subcontinent’s 3 000-year-old social hierarchy to lives of poverty, humiliation and suffering. These days in India, untouchables prefer to call themselves dalits, a Hindi word meaning the oppressed. And it is against that ancient prejudice of caste, and the social system that it holds up and the men who exploit it, that Indu Devi is waging her war.
Take the road running south of Patna – Bihar’s teeming state capital – and turn left after a jolting three-hour drive. Follow a dirt track for another kilometre, walk through fields for three more, and you’ll see the clustered huts of the small village of Shankarbigha grouped around a stand of palm trees and surrounded by haystacks.
Try a third slice of everyday life in rural Bihar. It is January 25 1999, eight o’clock in the evening. Nine men are sitting on the dirt floor of the hut that is used as a village common room in Shankarbigha. They are getting musical instruments – small tabla drums and tambourines – ready for a practice session. Like most villages in Bihar, there is no electricity. In fact, the villagers have so few possessions that the huts have no doors, as there is nothing to steal. In the dark, a dog barks and Bikhan Paswan, the village nightwatchman, starts to get up from the fireside to see what is going on.
Outside, 50 men from a private militia raised by local landlords have thrown a cordon across the fields. Another 50, armed with shotguns and rifles are moving up to the huts. The first people they find are the musicians.
Santosh Pusma, a 20-year-old high-school student, is the first to die, hit by a single bullet in the chest. Paswan dies next, trying to shield himself from a shotgun blast with a pair of cymbals.
Then the gunmen move through the village. Rajkanar Paswan (25), concealed behind a pile of grain, sees his brother, mother, daughter and son shot down outside their hut. His neighbour, Sonjhari Devi (35), hiding herself in a cupboard watches her three children, aged six, four and two, lined up against a wall and executed. Prakash Rajbanshi (40), locked in a storeroom, hears his wife pleading for her life, then shots, then silence.
The killings, in which 23 dalits died, was just one of a series of tit-for-tat massacres that have claimed hundreds of lives in Bihar since 1992. Estimates vary as to how many die in caste-related violence in the state each year. The police say around 2 000. Local reporters say you can treble that.
The worst atrocities have been committed by illegal private militias raised by local landowners. The landowners say the militias are there to fend off the Marxist terrorists who claim, with wonderfully anachronistic rhetoric, to be waging “a revolutionary struggle against the pro-imperialist feudal classes”. But most of the victims of the militias have been lower-caste labourers, and few appear to have had any connection with the extremists.
A senior member of the Ranvir Sena, the militia believed to be responsible for most of the killings in Bihar, agreed to take a telephone call at an undisclosed location. Police surveillance stopped him meeting me, he said. Shouting over the crackle of static, the man admitted that the Ranvir Sena had carried out the Shankarbigha massacre, and said that it was intended to teach the lower castes a lesson.
“These people were getting uppity,” he said. “They need to be shown who is boss from time to time.” Two weeks after we spoke, the Ranvir Sena murdered another 11 dalits in another village close to Shankarbigha.
In Bihar, caste is still fulfilling its original function of social control. The system dates back to the conquest of the dark-skinned tribes of the subcontinent by fair-skinned central Asians 3 000 years ago. The invaders imposed a strict stratification of society based on colour and occupation. At the top of the ladder were the ruling lite and their priests. The untouchables – seen as so unclean that any physical contact would be physically and spiritually polluting for the upper castes – were given the dirtiest, nastiest, lowest-paid jobs.
In the past five decades, despite stiff opposition, the condition of dalits has improved throughout most of India. The country’s president is a dalit and massive affirmative action programmes have had a significant effect. But in Bihar, where for centuries the dalits have provided a cheap, quiescent workforce for higher-caste landowners, the pace of reform has been slow. And though change now seems inevitable, it is clear that the passing of the caste system here – and the feudal system it bolsters – will be bloody.
Two days after the massacre in Shankarbigha, while the women stood listlessly at the entrances to their huts, the men squatted in the dirt. There was little talk of defiance. “What can we do?” asked Rajbanshi. “We can do nothing because we are nothing.”
It was late afternoon when we arrived at a small terraced house in a back alley full of yellow marigolds, half-naked children and warm sunlight in the town of Sasaram. After days of phone calls and relayed scribbled notes, Indu Devi had agreed to see us. When she finally appeared, with a .350 hunting rifle in her hands, the anger came off her like heat.
“For years my friends have been attacked, kidnapped, raped by the landlords,” she said, spitting the words at our translator. “They go to bed not knowing if they will be massacred in the night. No one does anything … Our menfolk are useless, the police are bandits and these Naxalites [the Marxist guerrillas] are the worst of the lot.”
She took us, with three other women, two shotguns and another rifle, across flat fields and down to the sandy banks of the River Sone where the women often train.
She told us that she has led the Sasaram cell of the Mahila Morcha Dalit Sena for three years. The name roughly translates as the Dalit Women’s’ Armed Front, and was formed when Indu Devi, helped by a friendly (male) politician, organised training in her village to teach the women how to defend themselves. The curriculum, taught by a former soldier, was concise: how to shoot people. Since then, several thousand dalit women have been trained in similar camps held all over central Bihar, and have been involved in dozens of clashes with the higher-caste militias.
Kurmila Devi (25), squatting in the sand by the river washing the gun grease from her hands, happily listed incidents in which the appearance of the armed dalit women had been crucial. In one clash, a girl who had been assaulted and stripped when going to fetch water was rescued, in another the women forced the local police officer to arrest an upper-caste man who had beaten a village woman to death.
Victories elsewhere had been smaller yet no less significant. In one village, a landlord has been forced to allow dalits to use the same well as the upper castes – something previously forbidden. In another, the threat of action ensured a dalit village got its share of a government handout of grain. In a third, women retook 60ha of communal land that they say landlords had grabbed in collusion with local authorities.
“Before, because of the atrocities, I was unable to go out of my home at night,” Kurmila says. “Now I am not scared. The men here are cowards: they only attack the weak, and we are too strong for them now. Our menfolk don’t like what we do – but if they can’t defend us, they have no right to make a fuss.”
She supervised the training of 16 women in the village of Belchi where, 20 years ago, two dozen dalits were burned alive by upper- caste men.
“The murderers have just been released from prison, and the villagers were concerned about revenge attacks. They did not trust their men to protect them, so they came to us and we gave them some guns and taught them how to use them.
“If we gave the men guns, they would just use them for thieving and fighting, so we have banned them from the training camps and hide the guns when we store them in the villages. Only the women know where they are. There has been no trouble in Belchi yet.”
There are precedents in India for the dalit women’s militancy. In 1981, a gang of bandits murdered 22 upper-caste men in a village in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh. They were led by a dalit woman called Phoolan Devi. She had been gang-raped a year previously – an act that forced her into a life of robbery largely directed against the upper castes – and the massacre was her revenge.
After evading police for several years, she did a deal and surrendered. Her story, dramatised in Shekhar Kapur’s hit film Bandit Queen, received massive publicity.
The women of the Mahila Morcha know of Phoolan Devi, but deny that she is a role model. “Yes, she is a strong woman,” says Indu Devi. “But she was a bandit. I’m not. I am fighting to protect things, not take them.”
Ironically, the chief minister of Bihar – supposedly the head of the provincial government – is a lower-caste woman. Babri Devi, an illiterate mother of nine, was appointed to the post by the state assembly when the previous incumbent, her husband, was sent to prison on corruption charges. No one pretends she is anything other than his puppet. In Bihar, no one cares.
Her husband, Laloo Prasad Yadav, was elected to the post on a wave of support from the lower castes and the poor in 1995. Instead of doing anything to help those who voted for him, his administration has degenerated into a welter of corruption and criminality.
Laloo himself is charged with multimillion- rupee fraud involving the distribution of subsidised grain – the so-called “Fodder Scam”. There is also a Bitumen Scam, a Uniform Scam, an Exam Scam as well as a multitude of allegations, ranging from extortion to murder, against other senior politicians.
Meanwhile, the administration of the state has all but collapsed. Development funds made available by central government cannot be spent because the bureaucracy in Bihar has decayed to the point at which it is impossible to disburse the money. Criminal cases take 15 years to work their way through the courts. Health provision is a farce. The dalits are as badly off as ever.
Laloo is accused of having fostered the interests of his own caste of the Yadavs – small-holding dairy farmers – to the detriment of all others. Around 50 of the 70 state Cabinet ministers are his “castemen”, and most state contracts go to Yadavs. Though they are only a few rungs above the dalits on the social ladder, the Yadavs seem as intent as anyone else in keeping the untouchables in their place.
Most serious of all is the accusation that the state government is fostering caste- related violence to whip up massive lower- caste support for Laloo. Bihar’s police certainly believe that someone powerful is ensuring a steady flow of arms to the dalits, the Naxalites and the landlords’ militias.
Their director general, Bihar’s top cop, admits that there is “covert support for all elements from certain political figures”. The director general laughs when I ask him about Indu Devi and her dalit women soldiers. “They should abide by the rule of law and hand in their guns,” he says.
“They haven’t the facilities to store them safely, and they don’t have the training to use them properly. Anyway, I think these stories of rape by the upper castes are much exaggerated, and there are no untouchables in India now.”
The problem goes beyond the complacency of senior policemen or a politician’s exploitation of millennia-old prejudice and enmity. Indu Devi and her Mahila Morcha are players in a crucial battle to determine the nature of modern India.
The country is poised between a future of emancipation, economic growth and democracy on one hand, and violence, resurgent fundamentalism and institutional breakdown on the other. Bihar, with a 10th of India’s population and all its problems, could drag it either way.