It was murder most foul. On October 22, a 13-year-old Dalit schoolgirl was killed at Thalavaipatti village near Attur in Salem district in Tamil Nadu after she reportedly spurned her neighbour’s advances.

What shocked civil society was the savagery displayed by the murderer in carrying out the heinous crime. It is alleged that K. Dhineshkumar (27) barged into the one-room house of the victim in a fit of rage after dusk, slit her neck with a sickle and dragged the profusely bleeding girl out before chopping off her head. He left the torso at the entrance of the house and threw the head on the road near the house before surrendering to the Attur Town police.

Eyewitnesses said the ghastly crime was committed right before the eyes of the girl’s hapless mother Chinnaponnu (45) and relatives living in the vicinity. The mother is said to have made frantic attempts to save her diminutive daughter, the last of her three children. On the basis of Chinnaponnu’s complaint, the police registered a case against the accused under Sections 3(1)(r), 3(1)(s) and 3(2)(va) of the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act, 2015, and 294 (b) and 302 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The police also invoked the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act against him. “We are collecting relevant material for detaining him under the Goondas’ Act, too,” said N. Kesavan, Inspector, Attur Town police station. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes asked the Tamil Nadu Police to detain the youth under the Goondas’ Act so that he would not be able to come out on bail. The State government has released the first instalment of compensation to the victim’s family.

Until that fateful day, the families of the victim, belonging to the Parayar caste, and the accused, a Mudaliar (an intermediate Backward Class caste), lived as neighbours without any problems. The girl’s family had built a small house on its 80-cent piece of land. The family of the accused, which migrated from the neighbouring Namakkal district half a century ago, lived on its two-acre plot. Dhineshkumar, a harvesting machine driver, used to visit his house during weekends. He is married, and the couple has a child.

The girl’s father, Palanisami Samivel (47), ekes out a living by making thappu, a percussion instrument, and supplements his income by doing farm and sanitary labour. Her brother Sargurunathan (22) owns a minivan used for transporting goods. The girl’s sister had been married off. The family has been living for three generations in the village. The father and the son would leave the house in the morning and return late in the night. Chinnaponnu and her daughter were alone in the house for most of the day. The victim was studying in the 8th standard at the Thalavaipatti Union Middle School in the area.

Since the families had known each other, Chinnaponnu and her daughter were employed to pluck flowers from Dhineshkumar’s flower farm. On the day of the murder, the girl went to his house to get a roll of cotton thread to string the flowers. He was alone at that time and allegedly tried to molest her. The frightened girl rushed out towards her house and narrated the incident to her mother, who asked her not to tell anyone fearing social stigma and reprisals. “Our family will be ridiculed. That was why I asked my daughter to keep quiet. We did not inform my husband and son either,” she said. The mother said she had never imagined that the youth, who grew up with them “like their own son”, would resort to such an odious act.

Samivel told Frontline that his wife and daughter had not told him about the incident fearing that it would lead to some unpleasantness. “He [the accused] had misbehaved with my daughter on October 19, too. Had we known earlier, we could have broached the issue with his family. At least my daughter would have lived today to realise her dream of becoming a collector,” he said. He said since the two families had never had any serious issues before, they never ever thought such a thing would happen. “We trusted him and his family,” he said.

A. Kadir of the Madurai-based Dalit rights organisation Evidence maintained that though the families were neighbours, Dhineshkumar had been harbouring caste hatred against the family. To substantiate his point, he said that during the fact-finding mission it had come to light that Dhineshkumar had even chided his wife for allowing the girl to play with their child. His wife denied the charge that her husband had made sexual advances towards the girl, but she admitted that “he did not like her coming to our house since she is from a lower caste”.

Kadir saw a conspiracy in the claims of some people who attempted to project the accused as “mentally unstable”. The police, however, did not buy these claims. A senior officer told Frontline that the accused behaved normally after his surrender. “Nothing weird could be found in his behaviour. He almost confessed to the crime. We registered a first information report invoking stringent provisions of the law,” he said. Kadir suspected that the girl could have been murdered for sinister reasons, too. “Besides and beyond caste and sexual violence, the girl must have been privy to some uncomfortable truths and occurrences about the accused and his family. I urge the police to investigate the case in detail. The accused’s wife and his brother Sasikumar should be made co-accused in the case,” he demanded. The family of the victim, he urged, should be given a solatium of Rs.50 lakh and a member of her family should be given government employment. The government released the first instalment of Rs.4.12 lakh to the victim’s family.

Wave of assaults

The Attur incident is the latest act of crime in what seems to be a wave of assaults on girls, especially children and Dalit girls, in Tamil Nadu. The murder of a 16-year old girl, who was abducted, gang-raped and murdered in 2016, evoked strong protests from the oppressed group. Her half-burnt body was found dumped in a well at Sirikadumbur village in Ariyalur district on December 29, 2016. A district functionary of the Hindu Munnani organisation, who belonged to a dominant caste group, was suspected to have been involved in the crime.

But the silence of civil society on such murders, activists feel, “is appallingly deafening and disturbing”. The #MeToo movement, Kadir pointed out, gained traction among urban women victims, while there was total silence on violence against hapless Dalit girls in rural areas.

Prof. C. Lakshmanan of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) and activists organised a protest, “Violence of Silence”, in Chennai on October 31 to urge civil society to break its silence on these issues. The Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) staged a protest in Salem on the same day. The victim’s family took part in the protest. The protesters in these two events insisted that the voices from the margins be heard in society.

Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami, who hails from the district, has not visited the victim’s family. The Attur (Reserve) Assembly constituency’s ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MLA, R.M. Chinnathambi, who is a Dalit, is yet to visit them. No mainstream political party, barring the CPI(M) and the Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katchi, has condemned the crime. Samivel is a heart-broken man today. “We continue to suffer in silence,” he said.