http://timesofindia
Mirchpur: Attackers targeted dalit wealth
Nandita Sengupta, TNN, Apr 28, 2010, 04.31am IST
NEW DELHI: The Mirchpur arson was as much about caste as class. A
fact-finding team on a visit last Saturday to Haryana's Mirchpur
village, where two dalits were burned to death and 18 houses gutted,
reports that the arson wasn't arbitrary.
The attackers, allegedly from the Jat community, identified houses of
the more well-off among the Balmiki community and set them on fire. A
beauty parlour, kirana stores and a barber-shop were totally gutted,
an obvious attempt to cower dalit prosperity, however limited.
"Any semblance of status symbol was attacked," said journalist Bhasha
Singh, houses with motorbikes, televisions, fridges. And shops that
dalits ran. "The mood in the village was that dalits 'need to be
taught a lesson'." The first thing the mob did, a woman reported, "was
to break the Sintex water tanks provided by the government, so we had
no way of dousing the fire."
The traumatized villagers also complained of flashers among the attackers.
Located in Hissar district, Mirchpur has a handful of dalits: about
100 Balmiki families, 350 'Jatav' families and 50 Doms to the 1700-odd
Jat families. The team found that growing economic prosperity among a
section of the minority dalits seemed to be the root cause this time
around.
The Jats' hate campaign got sharpened two years ago when a dalit won a
bid to manage the region's biggest temple festival, the Phoolan Devi
fest, and repeated the feat last year as well.
The enterprising Balmiki community youth, Dharamvir, deposited Rs
50,000 this year too with the village panchayat for the same. "We
heard comments such as 'how can he get so much money'? 'He has so much
money, why call him a dalit'?" says Umakant, an activist in the team.
The vitriol was obvious, the lack of remorse stark.
Three days after the attack, the team of activists from NGOs National
Campaign on dalit Human Rights and Anhad along with journalists,
reached the village to find a mahakhap Jat panchayat meeting on in
government premises and scared dalits wanting out. Both police and
administration, said Shabnam Hashmi of Anhad, feigned ignorance about
the meeting. Most dalit households have packed off women and younger
family members to other villages.
Those who remain told chairperson of National Commission for Scheduled
Castes, Buta Singh, also present in the village, they wanted to
resettle elsewhere "far from the Jats". They called it "a pre-planned
attack", the fight and barking-dog story only a pretext, what with a
mob of 300 to 400 surrounding the locality on the morning of April 21,
while the community's men had been talked into attending a 'compromise
meeting' to cool tensions.
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