The girl later told this correspondent that during the criminal act, the men asked her to plead in the name of Allah. She did but the men did not spare her anyway.

On the day of the crime, the Dalit community staged an agitation against police for allegedly favouring ‘upper-caste’ Muslims — the community that the perpetrators belong to.

This correspondent found that the lower caste Pasis of Ghosiya and surrounding areas see Muslims as oppressive upper castes. Muslims are rich, dominant, and own property and agricultural land.

A senior policeman at Sarai Akil police station, on condition of anonymity, said that Muslims in that area are mostly Syeds, Khans and Pathans — which are considered superior groups.

Dalits of Ghosiya said that as children, they would be asked to carry their own mats to sit on by Muslim students and teachers at the local government school.

They said their Muslim pradhan doesn’t extend the benefits of various government schemes to them for fear that they would rise in status and stop toiling in their fields.

Conversations revealed that Dalits did not see religious conversion as a way out of their poverty, discrimination and marginalisation as they were not ‘oppressed’ within their religious fold.

A Pasi family of Ghosiya told this correspondent that despite Buddhist temples in their close vicinity (Kaushambi is an important Buddhist site), they never considered conversion to Buddhism.

The family said that education or migration to cities were their only escape.

Neither do all Dalits feel a pressing need to move out of the Hindu fold nor does this work as a solution for all.

Even in Rakheda village, opinions on conversion are divided. Many said they won’t change their religion.

“I’ll fight, I’ll die but I will not change my religion. Why should I? I love my gods,” a woman said.

Switching religions does not guarantee an escape from birth-based discrimination, however.

Ajay Prakash Saroj, an activist in Allahabad who runs a monthly Dalit publication named Shripasi Satta, says that conversion doesn’t change things much for the community. “You come here and I will make you meet hundreds of chamaar families who became Muslims. They continue to be discriminated against even in their new community. They struggle for employment and face great challenges in getting their children married. Actually, they are worse than even before,” he said.

“Na idhar ke na udhar ke [they are neither here nor there],” said Saroj, who propagates economic independence of Dalits to escape caste-based oppression.

This correspondent reported a case from UP’s Baghpat district last year where a Dalit woman married a Muslim man after eloping with him. She left his house within seven months of marriage and filed a police case against him and his family for pushing her into prostitution.

She said that at her in-laws’, she was routinely subjected to casteist slurs and was often told, “chamaari, hum to tujhe laye hi isliye hain” [“this is why we brought you here in the first place”].

One also finds that threats by Dalits of leaving the Hindu fold may be triggered by reasons not related to oppression within the fold at all.

The Incholi dispute, for instance, was not between upper and lower castes but between two groups within the same Jaatav clan.

The sparring groups lived in adjoining mohallas. One group had wanted to install an idol of goddess Kali in a temple located in the other mohalla. The latter objected saying the idol would eat into their community space and should be installed elsewhere. The first group, who claimed that the latter’s objection was primarily due to political differences (he said the first group supported Narendra Modi while another supported Mayawati), threatened conversion to Islam along with his entire mohalla of 50 families if the administration didn’t help him install the idol in the temple of their choice within the nine-day period of Navratra.