Karnataka’s shame
In two incidents of caste violence in southern Karnataka, young schoolboys are ruthlessly beaten up and their families ostracised by dominant caste families. A Frontline report.
ON SEPTEMBER 29, YASHWANT, a 14-year-old Dalit boy, was tied to a lamp post and beaten up at Kempadenahalli village in Chintamani taluk of Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur district. His tormentors, a group of 10 people, were Reddys, a dominant caste.
The boy, from a Dalit Holeya family, was at home with his parents that night when the men (all 10 have been named in the FIR filed subsequently) came looking for him. They dragged him out and started hitting him, accusing him of having stolen the earrings of the daughter of one of them. When the mother, Ratnamma, tried to intervene, they hit her too. They hurled casteist insults at the family; one of them threw his slippers at the mother.
The group then tied the boy to the pole and beat him, hurling casteist slurs. On the basis of Ratnamma’s complaint filed at the Chintamani Rural Police Station, under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 2015, three of the men were arrested.
A similar incident had taken place three weeks earlier, on September 8, at Ullerahalli village of Malur taluk in neighbouring Kolar district. Chikkaballapur and Kolar, contiguous districts of south Karnataka, have witnessed atrocities against Dalits over many decades. (Chikkaballapur was carved out of Kolar district in 2007.) Frontline visited Ullerahalli to understand the caste dynamics and contextualise the continued acts of Dalit oppression.
Chetan R., 15, of Ullerahalli is
also a Holeya. Around 4:30 p.m. on September 8, he had returned from the government school in the neighbouring town of Tekal. He was excited: an idol of the goddess Bhootamma was to be carried in a procession. When the moment finally arrived, he noticed that one of the poles of the palanquin carrying the deity had fallen. Chetan picked it up and handed it over to Narayanaswamy Gopalappa, one of the palanquin bearers.
Chetan described to Frontline what happened next: “Narayanaswamy turned and slapped me. While hitting me, he said I had polluted the idol and the entire cere
mony had been spoilt because of my touch. How does the goddess become unclean if I touch the pole?”
His mother, Shobha V., who works as a housekeeper in a gated community in eastern Bengaluru, said: “Chetan came home crying and I consoled him, saying these things happen to us [Dalits]. I even asked him why he had to touch the pole.” Shobha is used to the discrimination against Dalits in this village of around 600 residents, about 70 km from Bengaluru, where Vokkaligas are the dominant caste. It is nothing new, she said. The Gowdas (another name for Vokkaligas) do not allow Dalits to even enter their homes.
The Vokkaligas, however, did not let the matter rest. The next day, the panchayat summoned Shobha. The panchayat has eight members, five of whom are Vokkaligas. A Brahmin, a Kuruba (a backward caste), and a Dalit are the other members. When Shobha appeared before them, they pronounced that her son had violated caste strictures and she would have to pay a fine to make it right.
“They said that I had to pay Rs.60,000 before October 1, and that the money would be used for cleaning the deity and to hold the festival again. Until I paid, my family would be boycotted. They also said that I would have to leave the village if I did not pay and they would demolish my house. Even the Dalit member in the panchayat supported this. They warned me not to reveal the decision to any outsiders,” Shobha said.
Shobha and her family live in a hut that abuts fields of corn, ragi, toor dal and groundnuts. Her husband, Ramesh, is incapacitated by an injury. Their hut is the size of a shipping container and is surrounded by the rocky hills and scrubby vegetation typical of Kolar’s dry landscape. Leopards and foxes are frequent visitors at night.
ESTRANGED FROM THE LAND
Alienated from the village’s agricultural economy, which is dominated by the Gowdas who own between five and 20 acres of land per family, Dalits like Shobha have found menial jobs in Bengaluru and established tenuous linkages with the city’s service economy. Regular trains ply through Tekal, connecting Bengaluru to this hinterland.
Mavalli Shankar, State convener of the Ambedkar faction of the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti (DSS), explained the plight of the Dalits: “Land reforms carried out in the 1970s and 1980s in Karnataka were not effectively implemented in the southern part of the State. Even in cases where the tillers became owners, the move did not benefit Dalits because, as “untouchables” through history, they were merely bonded labourers in the guise of agricultural labour.”
Shobha simply did not have the money to pay the fine. Fearing the Vokkaligas, she was scared to reach out to the police. It was at this point that she happened to meet an independent journalist who runs a Youtube channel. Her interview to him attracted the attention of local members of the DSS. They helped Shobha file a police complaint and an FIR was registered on September 20 at Masti Police Station. Members of the DSS also revealed that it was their intervention that led to the filing of cases against the 10 culprits in Kempadenahalli.
In the Ullerahalli incident, according to the FIR, cases were registered against eight people, who were subsequently arrested. Seven were members of the panchayat, and three were part of the procession.
The arrests attracted media attention on Ullerahalli. Local MPS and MLAS and the tahsildar of Malur came visiting, met Shobha’s family, and arranged a public event where Dalits were invited to the temple. The temple walls were freshly painted with a slogan in Kannada that said, “Let everyone live in harmony without caste and religious differences”.
For Shobha, it was too little too late. “I went to the temple because it was such a publicised event, but in my heart I had no faith. My family has been praying to Hindu gods all our lives but where were they [gods] when we were abused and assaulted for being Dalits? Only Ambedkar came to help us,” she said.
Back home, she and her family have removed the pictures of all the Hindu gods that adorned a shelf on one wall of the single-room hut. In their place now sit garlanded pictures of B.R. Ambedkar and Gautama Buddha, along with a copy of the Constitution of India. And on September 27, more than 5,000 people attended a protest march that was organised by the DSS, from Tekal to Ullerahalli.
FEUDAL MENTALITY
A.K. Venkatesh, Kolar district convener of the DSS, said: “We encounter such cases every few weeks because of systematic discrimination in these villages, where a feudal mentality prevails among the dominant castes.” M.C. Halli Venu, Anekal Taluk convener of the DSS, added that this mentality has not changed over the decades. He recalled other incidents: the murder of Sheshagiriappa in 1980 in Hunasikoteand the Kambalapalli massacre in 2000 when seven Dalits were locked in a house and burnt alive.
Venkatesh and Venu had just returned from Kempadenahalli when they spoke to Frontline. They said that Yashwant and Ratnamma were beaten up so brutally they had to be admitted in the government hospital in Chintamani. “Ratnamma was distraught; she said if she did not get justice, she would consume poison and die,” Venu said.
While all the Ullerahalli culprits have been arrested, only three of the 10 involved in the Kempadenahalli incident are in prison. In fact, a counter complaint has been filed against Yashwant and his mother accusing them of theft.
Meanwhile, a long judicial ordeal awaits Shobha. Her immediate concern is to follow up on the multiple promises made by the parachuting politicians. “S. Muniswamy [MP from Kolar] assured me that a house would be built for my family in the village, but while a site has been allotted, no work has started. There is a ready building; a Samudaya Bhavan (community centre), which no one has ever used. I wish that could be given to us,” she said. m