Caste carnages have become almost synonymous with Bihar: one takes place every few months. But even by that troubled state's horrific standard of killings, the massacre last fortnight of 42 Rajputs at Baghaura and Dalelchak villages in Aurangabad district marked a new level of brutality. But more than that, it also marked a new stage in a rapidly escalating caste war, mixed now with the deadly influence of a Naxalite organisation that is prepared to kill on caste lines. As class and caste combined in a potentially explosive mixture. Bihar last fortnight seemed to teeter at the edge of a dangerous precipice. A report by Executive Editor T.N. Ninan and Principal Correspondent Farzand Ahmed:





Mass cremation of those killed in Baghaura Mass cremation of those killed in Baghaura

"Wellcome", the hand-painted sign said above the doorway. "Drawing Room", it then announced somewhat quaintly, in the same green paint.Ram Deen Singh, head clerk in the forest department, was once proud of this doorway, the drawing-room it led into, and the house - Baghaura village's only pucca dwelling. But on the night of May 29, a lynching party of Yadavs from nearby villages and activists of a dreaded Naxalite group, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), scooped out the mud floor of the verandah just under the welcome sign, forced the frightened womenfolk in Ram Deen Singh's house to place their necks on the improvised chopping block, and beheaded them with country-made axes. Those who came for the mass funeral the next evening saw the scooped-out hole filled to the brim with the congealed blood of the slaughtered women.The men folk were killed earlier, in the yard outside. A couple of them were shot as they tried to escape into the darkness of the night. Ram Deen Singh escaped as he was not in the village that night. But 20 members of his family - from his 80-year-old father to his one-and-a-half year-old grandson - were butchered mercilessly along with other Rajputs from three other families in the village. A visiting tractor-driver, a Harijan, was tied to his vehicle's steering wheel and burnt alive.

Barely a kilometre away, Dalelchak village was living through its own nightmare. Kamla Devi had just returned from her in-laws' house after her marriage a fortnight earlier, and her father was celebrating. When the dogs barked outside. Kamla's sister Lalita Devi peeped out, to see a horde of armed men marching of the village. The two sisters, their parents and other relatives fled into the fields, but were pulled back by a neighbour who insisted they had nothing to worry about. The family returned home. Two hours later, only Kamla and her sister were alive. Everyone else's throats had been slit.



After the killings, the mob set a torch to all the Rajput houses in both villages. The bodies were thrown into the fire. The flames lit up the night sky for miles around, but not a soul came from any of the surrounding villages to help. Hiding in his haystack. Amresh Singh of Dalelchak heard the killer mob shout "MCC zindabad" and "Chhechani ka badla le liya" (We have taken revenge for Chhechani - where Rajputs had killed Yadavs in April) before disappearing into the night.



For over a month, the police in the district had been expecting just such a carnage, and had been on full alert. Armed pickets were posted in dozens of villages. including two in the neighbourhood of Baghaura and Dalelchak. Mobile patrols swarmed around. But on the night of May 29, a mob described as between 450 and 700 not only assembled unnoticed, but killed entire families in the most organised fashion and made a bonfire of two villages before melting away into the night once again, unseen, untraced.



The police picket at neighbouring Anjan, 3 km away, saw the fire and five men were despatched to the site. They had to walk cross-country and along a canal, because roads are non-existent in backward Aurangabad. Another group on regular patrol also reached Dalelchak. picked up two who were still alive and rushed them to hospital. The district Superintendent of Police. Satish Jha, reached within two hours. But not a soul from the surrounding villages came to help put out the flames, despite Jha personally going round and pleading for assistance. And by the next day, all the surrounding villages too were deserted- and stayed deserted for the next week. Everyone had lied in fear.





Weapons used by the killers Weapons used by the killers

Survivors view the burnt-out remains of their home: organised destruction Survivors view the burnt-out remains of their home: organised destruction

agricultural wages are still as low as Rs 3. when the official minimum wage is five times as high;

the Bodh Gaya mahant continues to control 7,488 acres of land, and can hold off action against him under the land ceiling laws by going to court;

a local Harijan is brutalised for giving his son the same name as a local zamindar;

the seniormost district officials are clueless about progress on basic development programmes in the district, although special programmes with extra funds have been drawn up. Worse, the officials don't seem to care.

Ram Deen Singh showing Chandra Shekhar and Ajit Singh a memorial slab listing those killed in his family Ram Deen Singh showing Chandra Shekhar and Ajit Singh a memorial slab listing those killed in his family

Forty-two Rajputs were slaughtered that night. Bihar had never seen carnage on such a scale before. In terms of plain brutality, the attack was unparalleled: the killing of women and children was taking place for only the third time. In the audacity and scale of the attack - getting hundreds of people together, ringing and attacking two neighbouring villages simultaneously - this latest outrage raised the state's escalating caste war to a new pitch. And finally, the self-proclaimed involvement of Naxalite extremists in caste massacre added a new and dangerous element to a crisis situation, even as it focused a horrified nation's attention on the dreaded MCC (see box).Aurangabad district is not anyone's idea of god's own acre. The majority don't have a shirt on their backs, the land allows barely one crop with a yield that is one-third that in Punjab or Haryana, there are next to no jobs. Even primary schools are scarce, hospitals non-existent, and there are no more than a couple of roads. What money is provided goes into corrupt pockets.A handful of big farmers (including the Bodh Gaya mahant and a minister in the state cabinet) own thousands of acres, and feudalism of the worst kind prevails. It is the kind of place where caste feuds can run through generations. where Naxalism will strike root in ravaged minds, and where the administration is so inept that the national flag above the district magistrate's residence will be unrecognisably faded.But even though trouble had been brewing in this ravaged land, the state Government was stupefied by the scale of the outrage after six months of a special police operation aimed at taming the Naxalites in central Bihar. The district magistrate and superintendent of police - both of whom had been posted at Aurangabad after their predecessors were summarily transferred in the wake of last October's Darmia massacre - were now summarily transferred themselves.And as evidence surfaced that an attack on Baghaura had been predicted, a cabinet committee was set up to investigate the failure of the district administration to act on this intelligence information. Home Minister Buta Singh paid a visit, and eventually Chief Minister Bindeshwari Dubey was summoned to New Delhi for what seemed like a dressing down from the prime minister. A change of chief minister seemed very much on the cards.But all this concerned only New Delhi and Patna. On the ground in Aurangabad, everyone feared for the next round of reprisals, and tension crackled through the district like a sparking electric wire. For Rajputs had been slaughtered, and Rajputs must inevitably take revenge. In Patna, intelligence officials warned of a potential caste conflagration the like of which the country has not seen.For those looking for causes, the answers lay at several levels. At the most immediate level, a Rajput and a Yadav - both middle-level farmers - had been squabbling over control of some government land in Baghaura. The Yadav had links with the MCC, and the extremist organisation (already identified with the Yadavs in the state-wide feud with the Rajputs) was probably called in to kill or drive the Rajputs out.Said Ram Deen Singh: "The Yadavs want us to be finished, so that they can take our land cheaply." With the Koel canal coming up right alongside Baghaura, land in the village would soon have been precious beyond words.In Dalelchak, similarly, two families had been involved in a petty dispute. One of them had links with the MCC, and on the night of the carnage he was seen pointing out the homes to be attacked. If that seemed to suggest that the MCC was playing the role of hired killers settling local disputes, there was another level of causality as well. And here the chain of events went back a couple of years.The MCC had been involved in an acrimonious dispute with the Bodh Gaya mahant over the rights of sharecroppers on the mahant's land in the area. In stepped a local Janata Party stalwart and the man at whose home party President Chandra Shekhar stopped on his way back from Baghaura: Ram Naresh Singh. Singh bought 46 acres of the disputed land from the mahant and forcibly dispossessed the sharecroppers.Singh's worker, Krishna Kahar, was murdered, then his ally's son was waylaid by MCC activists from Parasdih village last September and killed. Ten days later, the landlords struck back at Parasdih and killed some MCC activists, who in turn struck back by killing 11 Rajputs in Darmia village three weeks later. Landlords from Darmia had been involved in the attack on Parasdih.Darmia shook the state administration, which launched a special Operation Task Force to put an end to the Naxalite menace. Chief Minister Dubey promised there would be no more caste killings. Both the district magistrate and the superintendent at Aurangabad - a miserable, one-street town after which the district is named - were changed. Under the new, active police chief, Satish Jha, some successes were indeed notched up. The MCC was engaged in at least one pitched battle, and a tense truce prevailed in the caste war.But this was not to last. The Central Reserve Police Force company was withdrawn for more urgent duties in Punjab, and several deputy superintendents of the special task force went back to Patna. In April, the MCC killed a Rajput of Anjan village, whose landlords promptly struck at the culprits in the nearby Chotki Chhechani village, killing seven Yadavs. Of them, six were known MCC activists.Police supremo Jha was now fully on the alert. "I knew there would be a reprisal, it just had to come," he said last fortnight, shortly before he too was transferred out of the district. In fact, the local block development officer knew of the land dispute in Baghaura, and of the connections the MCC had in the village. and warned District Magistrate Jogendra Prasad that there could be trouble. Prasad told Jha. whose forces were fully stretched but who had police pickets all around Baghaura. That, however, was not good enough - as the carnage of May 29 eventually proved.If this provided a second level of causality, there was a third level too. As Jha asked angrily last fortnight, "Why do people turn to Naxalites in this area?" The answer lies in the fact that:As Ashok Singh, collector of the neighbouring Gaya district admitted. "If the administration does not solve the people's problems, they are bound to go to the extremists to get justice, and this is what has been happening in this belt."But the problem has also been getting more complex. C.P. Thakur, Congress(I) MP from Patna, points out that newly powerful castes like the Yadavs have been flexing their muscles. and the Rajputs and Bhumihars have not given up their superiority, leading to a new type of caste rivalry in a state where casteism is endemic.More important, Pradhan H. Prasad of the A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Sciences in Patna points out that Bihar's agricultural sector has been growing by no more than 0.5 per cent annually since 1969-70, whereas the population has been growing at over 2 per cent annually. Said Pradhan: "Per capita income in the agricultural sector has been falling for some 15 years. Naturally, the farmer will try to squeeze his labourer and not pay him proper wages. This class conflict is a direct result of non-development."Caste is added on because the upper castes traditionally own most of the land. Said Pradhan: "Half the land is owned by the upper caste 16 per cent of the population. So caste identifies with class." When these problems become manifest in extreme form - as they have in Aurangabad and in some neighbouring districts - a castecum-class war is inevitable.But the most instructive lesson in Bihar last fortnight was in the reactions of leading Congress(I) politicians, including ministers in Dubey's Cabinet. One chuckled in good humoured resignation at the situation and said about Baghaura and Dalelchak: "What had to happen has happened." Former chief minister Jagannath Mishra criticised Bindeshwari Dubey for attending a conference organised along caste lines by the Yadavs, While a couple of backward caste leaders criticised Dubey for going to the scenes of only those outrages where Rajputs were killed. Last April, they said, when a Rajput was killed in Anjan village and seven Yadavs killed in neighbouring Chhechani on the same day, Dubey went first to Anjan. A minister from central Bihar also virtually admitted that the special funds that Dubey had been allocating for the Naxalite-infested districts were disappearing without a trace.Through it all, Dubey talks bravely of his development programmes, of doubling the police force, and of launching an all-out offensive against the Naxalites and the caste war. But with caste feelings running high, with large tracts of land in 49 blocks spread over 14 districts under the influence of various Naxalite groups. including the MCC, no one can rule out a continuation of the chain of killings that led last month to the massacre at Baghaura and Dalelchak. Aurangabad remains the devil's acre, neglected, but with the potential to thrust itself into the national headlines yet again.